Using games to support invasive species management

Lantana camera is a prolific and damaging invader in India. According to some estimates, 40% of Indian forests are invaded by lantana. It forms dense thickets in forest edges – blocking access to community grazing land and non-timber forest products, reducing biodiversity, making cultivation in some areas impossible, providing hiding spaces to predator animals and exacerbating human wildlife conflicts. Ecologically, they compete with native plants, reduce forage for herbivores and interfere with the water cycle. These are great reasons to manage it, and many communities do.  But some don’t.

As an additional complication, some lantana invasions play out on land that lies between communities, and it’s not clear who should do what.

When something seems like a good idea, and yet people don’t do it, there can be many reasons.  Maybe they don’t know about it, or don’t know it’s a good idea, or can’t do it – or maybe it’s simply not a good idea for them.  We have lots of tools to help diagnose which among those reasons matter. When an additional goal is to help those communities learn along with us, experiential games are a good fit.

The Foundation for Ecological Security has been working on the issue of lantana in the central Indian region of Mandla for the past one decade. The forest-dependent communities here identified lantana removal as a key restoration intervention to reclaim degraded forest and grazing land as well for community use. After removing lantana from their common lands and barra land, they promoted the growth of native species through collection and dispersal of palatable grass seeds, plantation of native species, etc. But lantana keeps coming back and requires annual clean-up drives to keep their growth at bay. The key challenge is how to ensure the sustainability of community-driven lantana removal process. After all, lantana-removal requires the coordination of farmers and community members whose lands and forests are at stake. The key question is why collective action to sustainably manage lantana emerged in some communities but not others and how we can motivate and support communities in this effort. 

The roles for games as tools have expanded over the decades since the emergence of game theory in the 1950s. Games – strategic decisions in the face of uncertainty (from markets, the environment, or other people, as examples) – are devices to learn about people, as well as for people to learn about and develop themselves.  Growing through game theory, games bloomed into experimental economics in the 1980s, before cross-fertilizing into a host of different ‘serious games’ fields from the early 2000s, including the area of experiential learning.

Designed well, experiential learning games offer the opportunity to experience and think through real world problems and stimulate discussions about potential solutions, without the risks of real-world consequences.  Coupled with debrief as learning, they can make the different parts of many different real-world dilemmas more salient, and shift the way people look at things and experience them in future.

A critical condition for this is the development of a valid construct for the problem of interest. That is to say, developing a game whose mechanisms relate meaningfully to real-world processes, and whose outcomes relate meaningfully to real-world outcomes of interest.  This only happens through careful and iterative design that engages experts and people who live those processes and outcomes.  It is strengthened over time by observation and feedback from new players who didn’t build the game with you, but who can reveal how it relates to their own lives.  The game doesn’t need to relate perfectly to the lives of players – rather, it has to engage enough of the real-world context, the focal dilemmas, and the underlying preferences of players to provoke them and get them thinking.  For the purposes of experiential learning, it needs to expose players to a meaningful problem, and make dimensions of that problem salient.

Under the CGIAR Multifunctional Landscapes Science Program, the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and the Environment & Livelihoods Modeling (ELM) Lab at the Cornell University are at the start of a process of working with experts deeply familiar with the problem, as it exists in and around Mandla, Madhya Pradesh, India.  The team has recently conducted a scoping visit and stakeholder workshop in Mandla to understand what the building blocks of the problem are and has put them together in a draft game that puts the different goals of people and communities appropriately in tension – cutting back lantana is good for the shared forest landscape, but it takes time away from other opportunities, and people can still benefit from what others contribute.  This leads to freeriding behavior, and when too many people think they’ll be better off by sitting back, lantana wins.  It can overrun the forest landscape and limit how the community can benefit from it.

The problem is compounded by the fact that lantana is better able to take over in places where the native vegetation has been overexploited or degraded.  Harvesting non-timber forest products too heavily, for example, makes it harder for that productive vegetation to compete with lantana.

Taken together, these processes couple two classic natural resources dilemmas – a public goods problem (a forest landscape needs lantana management to avoid degradation) and a common pool resource problem (productive forest is degraded by overharvesting, leading to lantana takeover).  This pairing has been examined extensively using games, most famously in the irrigation context in decades of work led by Marco Janssen and Marty Anderies of Arizona State University. FES, IFPRI and partners have adapted this game to illustrate the risk of freeriding in collective community dam maintenance and the challenge to fairly distribute water from the dam. The implementation of the game has demonstrated its potential change behavior – almost two years after playing the game we observed that communities increased dam maintenance efforts. This experience has motivated the partners to expand the approach into new areas such as invasive species management.

Across hundreds of game sessions with students and farmers alike, these games have demonstrated how social ties, communication, incentives, and the power to choose their own rules shape how well communities of resources users are able to maintain and benefit from a resource.

After rounds of revision, expert consultation, and pre-testing, our lantana game might allow us to do something similar.  As one outcome of the workshop, a simple board game was drafted. It is a 10‑round, five‑player game that simulates managing restored land by allocating limited labour across competing uses. Each round, players receive three labour stones, which they can spend to remove new lantana saplings, plant fruit trees, or keep as labour for alternative work that pays INR 500 per unused stone at the end of the round. Trees generate a shared income of INR 400 per tree for every player as long as the number of lantana saplings on the board does not exceed 20; however, remaining saplings double and at least five new saplings remain each round If saplings exceed 20, tree income ceases, while reaching more than 50 saplings ends the game. 

Our final game, to be piloted in 2026, will likely be played several times by participants under different conditions – such as applying rules like ‘players may only take products from the forest if they contributed to lantana maintenance in the previous round,’ or other rules the players themselves suggest – and we’ll talk through the impact those different conditions made on players’ thinking and decisions in a debrief session after the games are played.  A design like this allows learning all around – we learn about resource decision-making through observing game play, and participants learn how their choices as a community sharing these resources can lead to patterns of solution or failure. 

These related goals of behavioral research and experiential learning are just two of the many purposes underlying the use of what might be broadly called ‘serious games.’  Another purpose is as a boundary object – something that sits among two or more groups who understand a problem differently, allowing them a common language to discuss the problem and reach a more shared understanding.  The growing practice of ‘policy labs’ uses games, simulation models, and other technical tools in exactly this way.

The game-triggered experiential learning will complement other interventions aimed at providing technical support (e.g., scientific approach to lantana removal and selecting native species for landscape restoration after removal), mobilizing policy support, and addressing institutional challenges such as insecure community forest rights. Technical and social solutions must go hand in hand to support the development of vibrant, diverse and healthy landscapes that are managed holistically to support sustainable and diverse eco-agrifood systems, resilient livelihoods and healthy diets while remaining within planetary boundaries.

The ELM Lab has a focus on simulation models, games, and other inputs to such policy lab work.  Over the last decade, ELM developed games to explore coordination and collective action challenges across many domains – integrated pest management, human-wildlife conflict, pastoralism, agroforestry, and others.  Current projects include tools for learning about participation in village savings and loans associations, water sharing across basins, and the challenges of open grazing practices in big cat predator habitats. In a project with colleagues at the Indian School of Business, led by Dr. Ashwini Chattre, we are taking our library of game approaches and tools to a scalable Android platform. With this, our small-group games can transform to multi-village games in large landscapes playing out over longer time periods, building lessons for the landscape alongside the community.

Do you have an idea for a game?  A dilemma you think a game could help to work through? It has never been easier to build dynamic, visual digital games.  Roblox Studio brings game building tools to kids young enough to never know what a blog is, as one example.  ELM Lab tools solve a particular problem – making reliable multi-player games, that work anywhere, and that anyone with a bit of coding knowledge can make.  If that’s a fit for your problem, we encourage you to visit our training materials and be in touch.

Authors

Andrew R. Bell¹, Richu Sanil² Pradyumna Acharya², Thomas Falk³, Wei Zhang³

¹Cornell University, USA

²Foundation for Ecological Security, India

³International Food Policy Research Institute, USA