The Mississippi State University Civic Life Laboratory conducted a research project to find ways to improve how communities talk to each other. To conduct the study, participants played a board game called Rebuilding Main Street.
Assistant Professor of Communication Melanie Loehwing, along with former assistant professor Skye Cooley and several others, started the game-making process with the help of some employees at Down To Game. Loehwing studies and researches rhetorical democracy.
“I am interested in how people use communication in order to participate, create and maintain democracy,” Loehwing said.
The purpose of this board game experiment was to produce different civil conversations. It looks at why everyone is in agreement or how they talk through their differences. The game’s goal is to use democratic deliberation to help the community work together.
There were two groups in the study: a yellow group, which was the experiment group, and the blue group, which was the control group. Both groups’ participants were MSU students.
To win the game, a group has to complete the objective of building five structures and completing two temporary objectives. Each round, the temporary objectives change. One person cannot win the game on their own; it is won as a group.
The game has four sections to build certain structures. The sections were economic stability, sustainability, culture and diversity, and quality of life. One could have a positive or negative rating of points depending on the structures built.
These structures could be restaurants, a community college, an art gallery, a strip club, bars, a farmers’ market or many other options. Each structure had a specific type of function. There are generic, tourism, commercial, beautification and entertainment structures.
In the real world, it takes many resources to build structures, and so does the board game. There are different resources an individual could use to build structures.
Every person has their own character and role, such as citizen, importer, investor, job recruiter, farmer, educator, philanthropist, conservationist and city manager.
The investor and philanthropist have the capital resource to contribute, the importer and farmer have the materials and goods resource, the city manager and conservationist have the public utilities resource, and the educator and job recruiter have the labor resource. The citizens do not receive any resources.
These resources were small, color-coded cubes. For the first three game plays, each person receives seven cubes of their certain resource, and the last game play, the participants receive eight cubes.
Every structure costs a certain number of resources needed to build the structure. Every structure card effects the rating of each quadrant on the board. Some cards help the rating, while some cards have a negative effect.
Each round, every person, besides the citizen, is dealt structure cards. The group has to decide together on which structure to build and on which quadrant.
After choosing which structure to build, each person pays the resources needed. Mostly, the individuals split the costs with the person who had the same resource.
A player also has to draw an event card. The event could strike down the structure, give the participants a chance in gaining a resource, or have no effect at all.
For the experiment group, players would participate in a mindfulness exercise after they built the first two structures. These meditations are supposed to encourage the players to focus on their senses and stay in the present.
Both of the groups lost once. Brian Shoup, who is an associate professor of political science and public administration and a researcher with the Civic Life Lab, explained why these losses were actually positive.
“There has to be that element that says that no matter your best intentions or how strategically you work to put these things together, there are things that can happen,” Shoup said. “The fact of the matter is, it’s pretty accurate in terms of reflecting political values.”
The researchers involved with the project said they are pleased with students’ participation.
Senior political science major Krishna Desai, who is an undergraduate assistant with the Civic Life Lab, said she was initially worried to conduct this community research experiment on students.
“I am interested in getting people interested in community problems,” Desai said. ”It seems, especially in my age group, there is an ignorance and apathy about community problems.”
Now, the researchers are breaking down the information they gathered from the experiment to see how it can be used in the real world. They plan on conducting the study a few more times to get a better understanding on how to help the public with democratic deliberation to help the economy and community.