Gaming Livelihoods in the Bangladesh Delta:

Tala, Shathkira, Padma Pukur and Assasuni

Addressing Water Management Challenges in the polders of Bangladesh

through

Gaming and Storytelling

Introduction

Bridging the Gap: Translating Scientific Advances into Local Realities

Using Gaming and Storytelling to Bridge the Gap Between Science and Local Communities

Portraits of People in the South West Delta

Local games co-developed with local communities

Making Change Visible: Linking Satellite Timelapses to Local Experience

Introduction

The southwest delta of Bangladesh, including Tala and Shathkira, Gabura and Padmapukur, represents a critical intersection of climate vulnerability, economic resilience, and community livelihoods. Located on the periphery of the Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest in the world, these regions face unique challenges due to tidal dynamics, salinity intrusion, and the broader impacts of climate change.

Historically, the polder system was developed to protect low-lying coastal areas from tidal flooding and saline water intrusion, enabling agriculture and human settlement. However, over time, this system has faced significant challenges. These locations experience acute water management issues due to a combination of natural and anthropogenic factors:

Salinity Intrusion: Rising sea levels and disrupted freshwater flows have intensified salinity intrusion, reducing agricultural productivity, limiting potable water access, and undermining aquaculture practices central to the local economy.
Tidal Flooding and Cyclonic Storm Surges: The region is highly susceptible to tidal inundation and cyclonic events such as Cyclones Aila (2009) and Amphan (2020). These disasters have breached polder embankments, leading to prolonged waterlogging and displacement of communities.
Sedimentation and Drainage Congestion: Sedimentation in surrounding rivers and channels has reduced their drainage capacity, causing chronic waterlogging and hindering agricultural activities.
Livelihood Vulnerabilities: Over-reliance on shrimp farming has created a monoculture economy, degrading soil fertility and increasing vulnerability to environmental and market shocks.
Governance and Maintenance: Gaps in governance, limited community participation, and inadequate maintenance of polder infrastructure have hindered sustainable solutions.

Addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive approach that integrates global scientific advancements with local realities to develop innovative, inclusive, and sustainable water management strategies.

Bridging the Gap: Translating Scientific Advances into Local Realities

In recent decades, the scientific community and global decision-makers have made remarkable strides in understanding the complexities of the southwest delta. Through advancements in hydrological modeling, climate projections, and socio-economic analyses, an increasingly nuanced picture of the challenges and opportunities in regions like Gabura and Padmapukur has emerged. This progress has been supported by significant investments from donor agencies and multilateral organizations.

However, a significant disconnect persists between global knowledge production and its application in local contexts. While scientific insights and policy recommendations abound, they often fail to penetrate grassroots levels where communities are most directly impacted. This disconnect arises from several factors:

Supply-Driven Climate Information: Scientific data is often presented in technical formats that are inaccessible to non-experts, focusing on outputs determined by researchers rather than the specific needs of local communities.
Limited Community Engagement: Decision-making processes frequently exclude meaningful participation by local stakeholders, leading to solutions that are misaligned with local realities.
Institutional Barriers: Structural issues, including fragmented governance and limited capacity in local institutions, hinder the dissemination and application of scientific knowledge.
Cultural and Contextual Disconnect: Global strategies often overlook the cultural, social, and historical dimensions that shape community interactions with their environment.

Addressing these challenges requires a paradigm shift in how knowledge is generated, shared, and applied. Community-centric approaches that prioritize co-production of knowledge—combining global insights with local wisdom—can foster more inclusive and effective solutions.

Using Gaming and Storytelling to Bridge the Gap Between Science and Local Communities

Serious gaming offers a transformative approach to addressing these challenges by creating an interactive, participatory environment where diverse stakeholders can engage, experiment, and learn together. It provides a platform for connecting global scientific advancements with local contexts through dynamic, narrative-driven engagement.

Analysis Phase:

Exploring Mental Models: Gaming enables exploration of how different stakeholders—scientists, donors, and local communities—perceive challenges and solutions.
Visualizing Practical Implications: Pseudo-reality scenarios within games help participants understand the real-world impacts of scientific data.
Reinforcing Connections: The gaming platform fosters mutual understanding between scientific findings, local knowledge, and donor priorities.
Comparing Perceptions: Gaming facilitates comparisons of how hazards, disasters, and climate change are understood and prioritized by various stakeholders.
Resonance through Narratives: Storytelling within gaming scenarios connects scientific insights to indigenous knowledge, making complex information relatable and actionable.

Narrative-Driven Engagement:

Linking Science to Context: Stories resonate more deeply with communities than raw data, enabling clearer understanding and stronger community buy-in.
Highlighting Shared and Divergent Perspectives: Storytelling reveals commonalities and differences in how challenges and priorities are viewed by experts and locals.

Enhancements to the Process:

Testing in a Safe Space: Gaming provides a risk-free environment to test proposed solutions and experiment with systemic changes.
Interactive Refinement: The platform allows iterative exploration, refining solutions based on continuous feedback and evolving contexts.

The Roadmap: From Data to Actionable Stories

Understanding Systemic Disconnection: Analyze why the current knowledge-sharing system is failing to meet community needs.
Designing Gaming Scenarios: Develop scenarios that simulate real-world challenges and decision-making processes, incorporating scientific data and local contexts.
Extracting Insights: Use gaming to capture insights into stakeholder perceptions, priorities, and interactions.
Proposing Recommendations: Develop actionable recommendations for systemic improvements based on gaming outcomes.
Iterative Refinement: Use the gaming platform as a continuous test lab to refine strategies and enhance stakeholder alignment.
Measuring Impact: Demonstrate measurable changes in local decision-making and community resilience, building donor confidence and support.

By integrating gaming and storytelling into water management strategies, this approach bridges the gap between scientific advancements and local realities. It fosters shared understanding of challenges, co-creates solutions, and empowers communities to become active participants in building a sustainable and resilient future for Polder 7/1 and beyond.

Portraits of People in the South West Delta

Local games co-developed with local communities

Ludo Game

In the climate-vulnerable southwest of Bangladesh, adaptation is part of daily life—but rarely something people get to explore together. This board game creates that space.

Inspired by the familiar game of Ludo, the game brings community members around a shared table to play through the realities of living with climate risk. Players take on different livelihood roles from the delta and move across a physical board using dice, coins, and tokens. Each turn reflects real challenges such as salinity, cyclones, floods, and uncertain incomes. Wins and losses are tangible, sparking emotions, debate, laughter, and reflection.

The game is deliberately slow and social. As players progress, they talk—about risk, cooperation, fairness, and the choices they make when the future is uncertain. Rules are flexible and evolve through discussion, allowing local knowledge and lived experience to shape the game itself.

More than a game, it is a shared learning experience. It helps people recognize vulnerabilities, imagine alternatives, and understand that adaptation is not only about individual survival, but about collective choices.

Played multiple times in PadmaPukur and Assasuni in Bangladesh South-West delta.

Tidal River Water Custodian Game

The Tidal River Water Custodian Game is a participatory role-playing tool that brings together local communities, students, and decision-makers to explore resilient water management and livelihoods in Bangladesh’s South-West Delta. Using life stories, scientific data, and hydrological simulations, players take on different stakeholder roles—farmers, fishers, engineers, and policymakers—to understand diverse perspectives, test adaptation strategies, and negotiate shared solutions. The game turns complex water and social challenges into an interactive, safe space for dialogue, helping communities and authorities co-create inclusive, locally grounded strategies for sustainable development and climate resilience.

Played multiple times in Shatkira and Tala, Bangladesh South-West delta

Making Change Visible: Linking Satellite Timelapses to Local Experience

To complement the gaming and storytelling approach, satellite-based animated timelapses are used to make patterns of inundation visible across seasons and years in Gabura and Padmapukur. These animations translate complex spatial and temporal data into an intuitive visual language that can be understood without technical training.

The yearly timelapses reveal long-term trends in inundation, highlighting how waterlogging has gradually expanded, persisted longer, or shifted spatially over time. They make visible the cumulative effects of sea-level rise, sedimentation, embankment failures, and changing drainage conditions—processes that are often discussed abstractly in reports but are clearly recognizable when seen unfolding year by year.

The monthly timelapses, in contrast, expose interseasonal dynamics. They show how monsoon flooding, dry-season drainage constraints, tidal influences, and post-cyclone impacts interact throughout the year. These seasonal rhythms closely mirror lived experience, allowing community members to connect what they see on the screen to moments in their own agricultural calendars, livelihood decisions, and past disasters.

Crucially, these visualizations act as a boundary object between science and local knowledge. Scientists may interpret the animations through hydrological processes and trends, while local communities recognize places, seasons, and events that shaped their lives. This shared point of reference creates space for dialogue: Why does water remain here longer now than before? What changed after a cyclone? Which areas drain—and which do not?

Within the gaming sessions, the timelapses provide a grounded starting point for storytelling and decision-making. They anchor game scenarios in observable reality, help validate local observations, and challenge assumptions held by external experts. Rather than presenting satellite data as authoritative evidence, the animations are used as conversation starters—inviting interpretation, questioning, and collective sense-making.

By linking satellite-based timelapses with serious gaming and narrative exploration, long-term and seasonal inundation patterns are no longer abstract indicators. They become shared stories of change, risk, and adaptation—stories that inform better decisions and strengthen community-led climate resilience in Polder 7/1.

Landsat False Color 1992 - 2025

How to Read the Landsat Animation

(Yearly change, 1992–2025 – “What has changed over our lifetime?”)

This animation shows how land and water have changed over many years in and around the polder.

Dark blue / black areas show water or land that stays flooded for a long time
Green areas show fields, vegetation, or productive land
Pink / brown areas show bare land, settlements, or stressed soil

As the years pass, notice:

Where flooding becomes more frequent or lasts longer
Which areas recover and which do not
How land use slowly changes over time

In the game, this animation helps explain why some livelihood options become more risky or less productive over the years, even if nothing dramatic happens in a single season.

Sentinel-1 2018 - 2025 (monthly)

How to Read the Sentinel-1 Animation

(Monthly change, 2018–2025 – “What happens within a year?”)

This animation shows how water comes and goes during the year, month by month.

It can see water even during heavy clouds and storms.
Dark areas mean the land is flooded or waterlogged
Lighter areas mean the land is dry or draining well

As the months move, look for:

When flooding starts and ends
How long water remains after the monsoon
Sudden changes after cyclones or embankment failures

In the game, this animation links directly to:

Seasonal decisions (cropping, fishing, migration)
Dice-based events like floods or cyclones
Discussions about why some choices work in one year—but fail in another

Why We Use These Animations in the Game

The animations are not answers—they are starting points for discussion.

They help players connect:

Their own experiences
Scientific observations
The choices they make in the game

Together, they support better understanding of risk, timing, cooperation, and adaptation in a changing climate.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse