Jean Hardy knows firsthand the challenges rural communities face when it comes to broadband infrastructure and digital equity.

Hardy, an assistant professor with MSU’s College of Communication Arts and Sciences, lives on a 42-acre farm 30 miles from East Lansing with no wired internet access. Facing the prospect of a $127,000 price tag to connect via fiber, he opted for Starlink, a satellite internet provider.

Residents in rural areas across Michigan face a plethora of digital challenges as varied as the state’s terrain. They may have access to broadband, but at a higher cost than in urban areas. Even where broadband is available, other challenges arise, whether keeping young people safe online or helping seniors navigate healthcare portals. Geographic inequality can exacerbate these digital inequities, according to Hardy’s research on the “rural information penalty.”

Rather than launch a strategic planning session or organize a workshop or seminar, Hardy chose an unconventional approach to help local leaders bridge the digital divide: a board game called Connected Community.

“Everybody loves to play a game,” he said. “I see games as a really powerful tool because they’re so welcoming to people, and they can be leveraged in these unique ways to collect interesting data.”

Hardy’s work focuses on researching broadband infrastructure and digital equity, so he tapped the expertise of MSU colleague Cory Heald, who teaches game design. They created a role-playing game that challenges players to think creatively about how best to allocate resources to achieve goals ranging from connecting the local library to broadband internet to implementing a digital literacy campaign.

“We literally took the work of being part of a community broadband task force and transformed it into gameplay,” Hardy said. “You win by doing the things that are best serving your community.”

A partnership to bridge the digital divide

The project is a collaboration with Merit Network, a nonprofit that works to expand internet access for education, government, healthcare, libraries and nonprofit organizations in Michigan and beyond.

Merit approached Hardy in 2025 after receiving an $831,865 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture under the Rural Utilities Service’s Broadband Technical Assistance program. The program focuses on providing technical assistance to rural communities identified as high need to develop digital skills, enhance online safety and strengthen digital readiness for municipalities and businesses.

As part of the grant, Merit deployed the Digital Opportunities Compass, a framework for broadband and digital equity planning to help rural communities expand affordability and access, said Megan Knittel, Merit’s digital opportunity project manager. The framework was co-authored by Johannes M. Bauer, director of the MSU Quello Center. “We go into communities and recruit a citizen task force to serve as a focus group and inform our efforts,” Knittel said.

The idea was to take a “serious games” (a genre that uses games to solve problems) approach to: “How can we help people build that strategic planning perspective and evaluate their own community’s capacity to engage with some of these issues?” Knittel said. “There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that playing a game can be really valuable for building some of these skills.”

Using games to navigate broadband challenges

Knittel was aware of Hardy’s work on an earlier project called The Game of Rural Life, based on his extensive research on broadband equity in the eastern Upper Peninsula. Prior to developing the game, he and his graduate students designed workshops “to get people to engage in conversations about what internet infrastructure might look like in rural communities,” Hardy said. But few residents participated.

“We opted to create the first board game in response to this,” Hardy said. “We were trying to engage people in a more creative and playful way of thinking about problems.” Funding constraints prevented Hardy from deploying the game, so he tested it with MSU students who grew up in rural areas.

“The rural students found the game to be a productive way to reflect on their own experiences of digital disconnectedness and to learn about other people’s experiences,” he said.

The Connected Community board game offers leaders a playful way to consider how best to allocate resources to improve digital access and equity.

When Merit approached him about the USDA grant, Hardy reached out to Heald to create a more polished board game that would focus specifically on communities and broadband task forces.

Heald suggested a role-playing game that would encourage players to invest limited resources in broadband access and equity, navigating challenges along the way. Players collect resources including staff/volunteers, funding and bandwidth (capacity), then allocate them to various community broadband and digital equity programs.

The game also encourages conversation. “After your turn, you talk through what you did, why you did it, and kind of explain that to everybody so they can see what those challenges were and why you made those decisions,” Heald said.

Engaging communities through play

The game immerses participants in real-world decision-making, Knittel said.

“Connected Community puts [players] in the position of a member of a local broadband task force where you’re actually making decisions about how to invest resources, financial and otherwise, to improve your community’s broadband infrastructure or develop digital literacy programs,” she said.

Unlike meetings or seminars, participating in a game offers an opportunity for participants to grapple with complex issues yet have fun doing it, Heald and Hardy said. The “decision tree” in the game gives players an opportunity to make choices based on their specific situation.

“If you go to a workshop, you might hear what’s going on. You might write down some notes. But you’re not actively thinking about how this is going to achieve something down the road,” Heald said. “If you can get engagement where people are excited to learn about something and interact with the information, then you’ve got a captive audience."

The goal of the game is not to increase broadband access or solve digital equity issues for communities, Hardy said. It’s about capacity-building, he said. “And helping communities determine: What are the most pressing problems for us to address right now when it comes to broadband access and digital equity? And helping them prioritize those things.”

As part of his research, Hardy also plans to measure the impact of the game by evaluating its impact on communities’ efficacy in broadband planning.

Preparing for community rollout

For now, Merit is holding off on deploying the game with broadband task forces that are part of the grant while collecting data to determine community needs and existing digital resources.

In the meantime, Knittel would like to deploy the game with Merit members including digital equity committees, local governments and organizations like schools and libraries.

Hardy and Knittel also have met with organizers of the Tribal Broadband Bootcamp, a national organization that brings together Tribal leaders to explore how to tackle broadband equity issues in their communities.

“I think it’s going to be a useful tool to deploy with any community organizations that are place-based and are interested in doing digital equity work,” he said. “Whatever community is willing to put four people in a room and play a game with me, I’ll sign them up.”

This story originally appeared in the Engaged Scholar enewsletter.