When death approaches: reverting or exploiting emergent inequity in a complex land-use table-board game

Abstract

The lives of poor landowners in tropical mountains depend upon their collective capacity to create and coordinate social preferences derived from their interacting communalistic, hierarchical, and reciprocal exchanges. External actors currently contend for these territories under market rules that are modifying such preferences. We present the design, experimental implementation, and analysis of results of a four-player, land-use board game with stark resource and livelihood limits and coordination/cooperation challenges, as played (separately) by 116 farmers and 108 academics, mainly in the tropical mountains of Chiapas, Mexico.