From Independence Day Celebrations to Independence Day Actions: A game based approach
“Good morning,” I whispered tentatively into the mic.
Independence Day 2008. I was standing on the stage and the entire school was before me, waiting. This was the first time I was speaking extempore in this school, since I had joined a year ago. I was eager to prove myself, terrified of being shot down and motivated by my own curiosity and ideas of what Independence Day meant to me.
When I look back at that day, I remember a scared pre-teen, sharing that as free Indians, what matters the most is our ability to take initiative without being oppressed by a foreign regime.
There are so many things demanding the attention of students that age, especially today, when we find ourselves living in a world that is seemingly always at the cusp of an apocalyptic narrative versus a utopian dream. But there is more often than not, a sense of urgency, the question of “what can I do?”, the motivation to find their place in the world — that when addressed..
Twelve years later, as we approached Independence Day 2020, we asked ourselves at Reap Benefit how do we give young students this experience; how do we test if we can address that motivation, need for expression and get students to think about Independence in a student-citizen centric way?
Game-based approach to make civic problem solving fun
In 2019, we developed 18 games in 4 theme-kits of citizenship, waste, water and sanitation, for use in our bootcamp programmes in schools in Bangalore and Chennai. These games were effective in helping mentors take readymade artifacts and customise their play with their own styles of story-telling, reflection, and call for civic action. While reducing the burden on the mentors to reinvent their own tools, these games also helped students in understanding their role as active citizens by creating a simulated environment where they could take as many chances as the game allowed them to, and begin to explore reality through their own curiosity. These games hence, helped the mentors lay the foundation of Reap Benefit-defined 21st century skills of applied empathy, entrepreneurial skills, community collaboration, communication and problem solving skills, which were then further activated through hands-on problem solving that constituted the bootcamp programme.
Since the Covid-19 lockdown began in March 2020, and our online bootcamp programme began with select schools in Chennai around June, we tried and tested several tools to engage with students who were already enrolled in various online sessions.
A select number of games from our kit had been converted to an online format using some free digital tools. Though some of them could be integrated into online sessions, a few needed their own independent context because the digitised experience was more time-consuming. We were plagued by the question:
Can we use games outside of the online school session context to drive civic change and citizen participation?
Incorporating appropriate nudges to drive action
The highlight of the Independence Day celebration was going to be a set of 3 multiplayer games played on video call:
Hydronomy: A near-apocalyptic scenario involving players as elected representatives to take 3 calculated decisions that will impact their town’s water reserves. They learn to identify good and bad civic actions regarding water consumption and learn to describe water-related problems using data.
Citizens Pictionary: A pictionary format game where players learn to visualise what it means to be a good citizen. A tool to help change the meaning of abstract citizenship to specific actions that players can take as citizens.
Citizenship Jeopardy: A quiz where players choose their stakes and answer questions. A tool to get players familiar with civic knowledge.
Our main limitation was the number of players we could accommodate, given the game-play and the capacity of the game facilitators to engage with.
We needed a way to stagger and filter sign-ups for the highlight games. We decided to have a player complete 3 successive levels of increasing difficulty to get access to the final level of online multiplayer games. The risk we foresaw was that only players committed to the idea of civic participation and environmental responsibility would follow through all the levels.
Level 1 — free, online tool to engage
Level 2 — challenge to investigate problems
Level 3 — challenge to create solutions to the problem
Level 4 — online, multiplayer game on a video call to engage, discuss and curate conversations.
We planned to share the event and game instructions through Instagram and our WhatsApp chatbot.
Identifying the right platform to support gamified approach
As a medium, the WhatsApp chatbot trumped Instagram in terms of numbers of students engaged and the quality of conversations that emerged. We had more than twice as many users engage with the game levels on the chatbot compared to Instagram.
This could be attributed to the fact that it was easier to have all communication on one platform, on WhatsApp, and users prefer not to navigate to multiple places while using Instagram.
Also, we were able to share information about the levels in a staggered manner on the chatbot, when the player asks for it, as opposed to how we had to share all the information at once, making it overwhelming for an Instagram user.
Additionally, there was a personal feel to messaging on WhatsApp, that Instagram did not afford, and we capitalised on that by having a few mentors respond to the queries and nudge the players to proceed to the next levels.
As predicted, there was about 40–50% reduction in the number of players as the levels progressed
Through the entire event, there were a total of 45 civic actions recorded the day before Independence Day, where the students reported and shared pictures of the waste items they had upcycled at home — which is higher than most low-touch engagements we have conducted in the past.
Reflection
The reflection led by our skilled mentors at the end of each game were highly insightful and resulted in some discussions where students shared their ideas of what the game led them to think and do.
Question: “Think of 1 thing that the citizen can’t do today but you hope they can do in 2030” Response: “No one should be voting for any political parties and be dependent on them…we should take care of things ourselves and mind our business.”
“I realised that most of my time in quarantine was squandered away, without doing anything impacting the society. Now I feel it’s time to do some real work.”
“What campaign can we lead, to get citizens to hold their local representatives more accountable, especially in a city like Chennai where municipal elections haven’t taken place in 3 years?”
I wish the pre-teen in me had had this privilege too.
When I see how our mentors and facilitators at Reap Benefit engage with students, when I see how our alumni base has had some highly innovative civic and social entrepreneurs, and when I see how middle and high-school students have an outlet, a direction to express their urgency in solving civic problems, I wish the pre-teen in me had had this privilege too.
In every problem statement we undertake at Reap Benefit, I try to cater to the needs of the young student within, building tools and leveraging media for the motivations that the projected student in me never had.
We’re now working on taking this online game test up several notches higher and testing out better tools to engage more young-citizens from across the country, and get them to have a gamified taste of what it means to celebrate and honour citizenship, and become an active citizen.
