The issue that is addressed in this paper concerns the way interacting agents should understand their environment so that a common good used by the whole group would last. We synthesise the results of four models with agents interacting in artificial societies in which they have to share a resource. The four societies were built using multi-agent based simulation models that address issues related to the use of common renewable goods. The resources that are used by the artificial communities of agents are of two types: for some, agents must co-ordinate to exploit the resources; for others, the distribution of goods among agents is directly dependent on the distribution of the agents in space. But that classification cannot necessarily hold: the good use of the resources relies on an even distribution of agents in space, but this can be obtained with individual processes in some cases whereas in others it implies coordination too.