ISB Hyderabad

In this collaboration, we are working with Ashwini Chattre and Abhijeet Parmar of the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad to expand what we can learn about collective action and resource dilemmas through a platform-independent, Chrome-based implementation of tapSquares.

One of our limitations with NetLogo-based games is that they require all participants to have a tablet PC to play from - a relatively expensive and increasingly hard-to-source device, compared with Android handsets that are ever more ubiquitous. Abhijeet has led the development of a robust game server back-end that can allow 40-player games across much larger landscapes than we can typically represent with tapSquares in NetLogo, and we will soon be piloting this novel implementation to nested collective action dilemmas in India, such as the Lantana Camera land restoration problem bundled with the tapSquares release. This pilot will examine how communities of forest users manage inter-community shared space across a large landscape of separated forest resources.

This Chrome-based implementation will produce the same kind of data output as historical NetLogo-based games, and be compatible with the game-to-ABM pipeline we have developed elsewhere. In this way, it expands the role for this toolkit as a policy lab for observing how interventions will play out as they meet real communities of resource users.