Fishing Game and Fishbanks:
The Fishing Game and Fishbanks are designed to illustrate the "Tragedy of the Commons" and give players and idea of some of the issues that affect the management of fisheries for sustainability. Fishbanks is available from its author, Dennis Meadows at: lataillede@aol.com
Fishbanks Game: The usual way of playing Fishbanks is in a group of up to 30 players. They are divided into groups, each one representing a fishing company. This is ideal in a lab setting where a lot of discussion between players is wanted. Each company decides how many ships to sell, purchase, and send to the fishing areas. Company decisions are entered into a computer program (by a single person). The program computes the fish caught and resulting bank balances of each company. The results are printed and distributed to each company team, where the next round (or year's fishing) is discussed and planned.
The Fishing Game: The new "Fishing Game" (derived from Dennis Meadows' Fishbanks Game) allows a single player to play against two virtual companies under a variety of management scenarios. It encourages in-depth thinking about and a comparison of the effectiveness of these strategies. A modeling tool is provided. This enables students to model the fish population and company profit to choose the optimum values for each scenario's parameters (e.g. fishing season length, size of marine reserves, maximum catch for "catch shares", etc).
The Fishing Game is suitable as a homework assignment. The results, including the answers to pre and post-game questions, are emailed to the teacher and (optionally) can be printed. This version is now available <link>.