6. No trade-offs allowed: Games for Indigenous research and cross-cultural collaboration
This is part 6 of a series of 6 essays looking at how games and interactive models can be used to grapple with some of the challenges facing different sectors.
This series is particularly intended for practitioners in these sectors interested in new tools to address complex problems and to bring together people for rich conversations.
It’s also for any artists or game designers interested in applying their skills to real-world scenarios.
You can read the other essays here.
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In 2021, Boho was approached by the Lowitja Insitute to create a suite of new games.
The Lowitja Institute funds Indigenous health research. The Institute commissioned Boho to create a series of games to help train early career researchers working in Indigenous health research.
These games would help researchers to develop health research projects, and to navigate the ethical and practical challenges of carrying them out.
The Institute was interested in a game-based approach to this subject as a way to open up dialogue around these complex topics. Games would allow participants to experiment with alternative approaches and provide a platform for discussion and debate.
For Boho, this project quickly became a unique challenge. We realised that our standard game models wouldn’t work to address the brief. Instead, we were forced to experiment with brand new game formats, eventually pushing our practice into a new space entirely.
Researching communities
Our communities are a critical part of our wellbeing — but they’re also very difficult to research and understand. They’re so close to us that describing them is like ‘trying to see the lenses of one’s own eyes, trying to bite one’s own teeth,’ as Donella Meadows put it.
A community is an example of what Anna Birney calls a ‘living system’. We can’t look at living systems as separate from us. When we research them, we influence them. When we interact with them, we become a part of them.
This means that there’s no way for researchers to study communities without getting involved with them. And getting involved with a community changes your relationship to it in many important ways.
Closing the Gap
In Australia, there’s a long history of outsiders coming in to Indigenous communities to do research on them. Whatever the intentions of those researchers, the consequences for those communities have rarely been beneficial.
After more than two centuries of health research being conducted with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, Australia’s primary policy goal in the 21st century is still to ‘close the gap’. Putting it mildly, this suggests that this research has not benefited the communities it’s focused on.
Established in 2010, the Lowitja Institute is an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisation working for the health and wellbeing of Australia’s First Peoples through high impact quality research, knowledge translation, and by supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health researchers.
The Institute commissioned Boho to create games illustrating some key ideas for early career researchers. Led by Nathan Harrison, Boho dove into conversations with expert consultants and two training guides published by the National Health and Medical Research Council — Researching Indigenous Health and Keeping Research on Track.
The result was a suite of new games under the title A Week in the Bush.
Core values
We began digging through the history of Indigenous health research, reading reports, examining case studies and interviewing practitioners.
As we delved deeper into the topic, we kept coming back to a list of values for ethical research laid out by the National Health and Medical Research Council. These principles are important for all Indigenous communities, and should be present in all research projects.
These values are:
- Spirit and integrity
- Cultural continuity
- Equity
- Reciprocity
- Respect
- Responsibility
Crucially, each individual community has the right to express how these values are addressed in research.
Our consultants pointed out that if you carry out research on a community, you become a part of it. And if you’re part of a community, you have obligations to it.
At the very least, you have an obligation to make sure that the the results of your research are shared back to the community in a form that is meaningful to them. Where possible, you are obliged to use your research to benefit the community — perhaps by using your findings to lobbying the government for better healthcare facilities.
Ethical research also means contributing to the community during the research phase itself. As one researcher in the NHMRC’s guide puts it, ‘Don’t just document the problem and walk away. Make sure you have some time and money allocated to meeting people’s immediate needs. If you are doing a survey of old people’s needs, be prepared to collect firewood. If you are conducting a survey of toilets, take a plumber with you to fix the broken ones…’ (Miller and Rainow, in Keeping Research on Track II).
This hands-on approach runs counter to traditional notions of research, where the researcher observes from outside the community to avoid influencing their subjects. In some cases, the Insitute’s approaches means researchers unlearning things they’ve been taught in traditional academic setting.
Games without trade-offs
The framing is simple: If the research isn’t a collaboration between the researcher and their community, if it’s not undertaken with the community’s active consent, and if the community doesn’t benefit from the research, then the project should not take place. No exceptions.
The simplicity of this approach provided Boho with an interesting game design challenge. In a lot of our games, players are trying to find some kind of compromise. There’s a trade-off between different elements, and they are seeking to strike a balance.
But for these research projects, there should be no trade-offs. Either the project happens ethically and sustainably, or it shouldn’t happen at all.
This immediately breaks many of the game models that Boho typically use. There’s not much fun in a game where you either get everything right or you lose completely.
After trying and failing to make any of our existing formats work this brief, we were forced us to create something new. And as often happens, that’s there the interesting stuff lies.
New in Town
Our first breakthrough was to shift our focus from creating a game where players managed a research project, to a game where players investigated an existing project.
In New in Town, a research project in an Indigenous community has gone wrong. In the fictional narrative, researchers from a regional university set out to study diabetes in this small town, but after a period of little results, the researchers abruptly wrapped up their efforts and cancelled the project.
The players take on the role of representatives from the project funder, sent to the town to find out what went wrong — and if there’s any part of the research that can be salvaged.
Instead of being a management simulation, the game is more akin to a detective story, with players conducting interviews and following clues to unravel what went wrong — and hopefully, to be able to propose a new project that avoids the mistakes of the old.
The format of the game owes inspiration to the 1989 game Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Baker Street Irregulars, in which players attempt to solve a series of pre-written mysteries. Sherlock is nightmarishly difficult but utterly addictive, and it’s become a recent staple of Boho working retreats.
In our take on the format, players find their inquiries about the failed diabetes research project keep leading them back to discussions about the town’s recently closed swimming pool. To understand what went wrong with the researchers, players must unpack some of the unexpected connections within the community, many of which centre around the recently closed swimming pool.
This was a nod to a real-life example where researchers had wanted to do a project on child nutrition in an Indigenous community, but the community wanted the project to be about the local swimming pool. The researchers couldn’t understand why the swimming pool was so important.
When they dug deeper, they realised that:
- In order to attend the swimming pool, kids needed to show a token they received by attending school.
- If they attended school, they also received a proper breakfast.
The swimming pool was therefore central to the question of child nutrition. But these connections are hard for outsiders to see.
Asking better questions
This change in approach from more traditional systems games to a storytelling format, opened up other possibilities for us.
In our game Grant Rush, we presented players with an array of fictional project proposals from health researchers. Playing as a funding body, the players task was to create questions of these researchers about their plans.
- Liang is planning a project that aims to improve the treatment received by Indigenous patients travelling for cardiac surgery.
- Alex is planning to document stories about child growth in Indigenous communities to lobby for better child health policies.
- Jessica is seeking to do a project about traditional healers in the healthcare system.
Players were given details about each funding proposal — but before they decided which ones to fund, they were given the chance to ask questions about the researchers’ plans.
The key takeaway here was to build the skill of asking better questions. As often happens, we found that people know more than they think they know. Researchers who were unable to see the flaws in their own projects could easily identify similar flaws in other projects — and could then apply that awareness back to their own work.
Research Journey
The final game in the series is the most simple of all. Players collaborate to tell the story of a hypothetical research project, from beginning to end.
Prompts invite players to imagine their hypothetical project at different stages. For example:
- In your first visit to the community, people share a challenge that the community is facing. What is that challenge? It might have to do with nutrition, access to health services, chronic illness. childhood development, or something else.
- You discover that one method of collecting data is inappropriate for the community. It could be surveys, focus groups, questionnaires or something else. What is that method and what is the problem?
- You fumble a cultural protocol — what was it and how do you make things right?
- One specific group in the community feels left out of how your research results have been shared. Who are they and how do you include them?
For each prompt, players add a picture to the map of their journey, chronicling their research journey visually and creating a shared document. With minimal rules, the focus is squarely on conversation and the art of telling a good story.
This kind of collaborative storytelling game has a long history, but I’d never really engaged with it until the pandemic. All of a sudden, working remotely and connected by video chat, storytelling games such as The Quiet Year, Long Time Listener Last Time Caller or For The Queen came into their own.
Now this style of gameplay has become firmly embedded in Boho’s toolkit of formats.
Who these games are for
The suite of games we created for the Lowitja Institute were intended for a very specific group of players — early career researchers seeking to work with Indigenous communities.
Following this project, Boho (represented by Nathan) was commissioned to make another game exploring these same issues from the opposite perspective. This time, working with James Cook University’s Indigenous Education and Research Centre, a game for Indigenous communities considering whether to work with researchers.
Grow Your Own used the collective storytelling model to depict the stages of a research project from the perspective of the Indigenous collaborators. The emphasis here was on the community’s capacity to shape the project and determine their own parameters for involvement.
Grow Your Own was launched in late 2021 on Waibene (Thursday Island) in Queensland, facilitated by Torres Strait Islanders for members of the Kaurareg community.
Learnings
Within Boho, these projects point to a new set of tools and strategies for game design. ‘Community engagement’ and ‘collaboration’ are naturally hard to quantify in game terms. The games we developed for Lowitja pushed us to engage with new formats and styles that can embrace that fluidity.
The next step for us will be to combine these two approaches — to bring together the storytelling game format with more familiar systems games, in a new hybrid style of gameplay.
Learning about a community is a lifelong task. There are no shortcuts to understanding the complexities of a group of people. But at their best, these kinds of games and tools can help us approach the task of listening more carefully, asking better questions and — hopefully — making better decisions about how we care for each other.
