FarmSquares

FarmSquares is a framework for coding spatial games using .csv files. FarmSquares games allow players to choose actions to undertake on land cells that may be private, semi-private, or public; to take actions that develop their households (such as taking loans, or buying equipment); and for the landscape to be shaped by any kinds of shocks or spatial environmental functions (such as storms, floods, erosion, ecosystem services, etc.). We share an example game here, ‘SharedCropping,’ a turn-based game in which players share equal access to a grid of arable land cells and are able to farm and graze animals, as well as develop their own resources, over a sequence of agricultural seasons. As all land is equal access, cropping is a risky activity (as other players may harvest crops others have invested in). We applied SharedCropping as an experiential learning tool with farmers who were facing the challenge of operating aggregate farms together. By varying the way players earned points (according to their score, or to the lowest score in the game), SharedCropping makes different challenging aspects of farming salient.