Playing to Grow: Augmenting Agriculture with Social Impact Games

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The proposed research explores the use of computer games as a method of storytelling and learning to engage urban users in the complexities of rural development, agricultural practices and issues facing farmers in India. The primary business of the project's partner, Digital Green, is to generate and disseminate videos co-created with farmers for farmers about sustainable farming practices. These videos provide a window into the world of small and marginal farmers in India. Within the UnBox Fellowship, the original Fellows worked with DG to re-conceptualise and improve upon their existing online Facebook game Wonder Village aimed at attracting and engaging a wider audience to their work to promote an understanding of small farmer's lives. Together with DG and in consultation with farmers the team came up with the concept for a game platform where the DG videos take centre stage. The proposed project will take this concept further to develop a digital prototype of a game platform that integrates DG's videos directly into game play with game mechanisms designed and tested to be most effective at influencing social change. While the small farmer is the symbol of the Indian countryside, their livelihood and existence is threatened by inequalities in the bargaining power of growers, financiers and distributors of food. Market-led economic reform in India threatens to intensify these inequalities directly linked to hierarchies of power that prevail across rural Indian society, related to caste, gender, religion and politics. Representation of farming takes a variety of forms in Indian media (e.g., rising food prices, GM versus organic debates), but perceptions persist of an urban-rural divide and of farmers as poor and plagued by suicide (Padney and Kaur 2009). The realities of farmers' lives in India remain relatively unknown and misunderstood by most web-connected urban users. Interviews with farmers during the first phase of this project, as part of the UnBox Fellowship, emphasised the need for the game to promote the message that urban users' own survival is interconnected with that of the small farmer. India has the third most socially active web-connected citizens in the world with fifth most Facebook users and 18 million twitter accounts. Recently published statistics indicate that 75% of web users in India are under 35 and 45% of these are mostly from urban areas and connect on social media to discuss politics (Shrinivasan and Anwer 2012). Recent research has shown that younger generations are increasingly using new social media tools for entertainment and self-gratification, but in moments of crisis, they are also using them to mobilise significant human and infrastructural resources to make immediate interventions (Shah 2011). While these users may remain ambivalent about identifying with particular political causes, this project aims to leverage that knowledge through a social impact game. By increasing their awareness and understanding of their implication in the crisis that is facing small Indian farmers, the game will be designed to motivate urban users to take action that can promote farmers', urban inhabitants' and India's socio-economic sustainability.