The flow of peasant lives: A board game to simulate livelihood strategies and trajectories resulting from complex rural household decisions

Abstract

Since the 1990s, many of neoliberalism’s policies for growth and development have contributed to the deterioration of living conditions for rural peasants who are marginalized and unwilling or unable to abandon their lands. In every nation in which this phenomenon is prevalent, the resulting impoverishment of rural peasants has motivated numerous academic studies and poverty-alleviation programs. Concurrently, peasants have been developing and modifying their strategies for social reproduction, under conditions that are usually uncertain and restrictive. Here, we describe the design and implementation of a serious board game called The Flow of Peasant Lives (TFPL). TFPL is a complex but player-friendly game that was developed and parameterized using information and first-hand knowledge that the authors gained through 15 years of interaction and discussion with peasant residents of La Sepultura Man in the Biosphere-United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Biosphere Reserve in Chiapas, Mexico. The game was implemented in November 2017 in workshops held in six rural communities in the Sierra Madre of Chiapas, Mexico. During the workshops, 126 participants made 21,600 recorded decisions about capacity allocations during 393 simulated years of rural life. Strategies followed by members of rural households (as a team) led the game along ascendant, descendant, and oscillatory trajectories in the reproduction of capabilities, as is actually the case in rural life contexts. The great majority of academic approaches seeks to influence the transformation of rural life starting from preconceived notions about peasants’ needs. In contrast, TFPL is a social-immanent learning tool that provides a safe, fun venue where rural households can make their realities explicit, exchange ideas, explore possibilities for action, and discuss what needs to be changed. It has great potential for transfer to other rural contexts because it balances research components that are nomothetic (general) with ones that are ideographic (particular).