The Evolution of Sustainable Use is a flash-based game that allows multiple players to simultaneously exploit a model fishery. The game presents a fishery as a metaphor for any communally-exploited resource. This imaginary fishery is scaled down so that the actions of 2-8 players influence the sustainability of the system. In the game “boats” represent the unit of fishing effort, and each player is free to decide how many boats to put out each year. The game simulates the economic consequences of different decisions: players who are successful at fishing have the potential to earn more boats, but unsuccessful players may lose boats and may even go ‘out of business’ completely.
The game is currently configured to play in two modes. In the first mode, each year the fish population is replenished to the same level regardless of how heavily it was exploited in the previous year. While ecologically unrealistic in the long term, this mode allows students to understand the exploitation dynamics that emerge when a resource is very abundant in relation to our ability to exploit that resource (a situation that resembles early human exploitation of ecosystem services). In the second mode, the growth of the fish population is realistically dynamic: the population in the current year is dictated by the fecundity of the species and the population surviving the previous year’s fishing effort. In this mode, the fishery can crash and even go extinct.