An overview of serious games for disaster risk management – Prospects and limitations for informing actions to arrest increasing risk

ANYCaRE: a role-playing game to investigate crisis decision-making and communication challenges in weather-related hazards

“…Secondly, input data include hydrological forecasts for three different locations (i.e. A-C) based on the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS), which is operationally running on the European scale under the Copernicus Emergency Management Services (Copernicus EMS) (Smith et al, 2016;Thielen et al, 2008). EFAS products were particularly selected because they present successful implementation of probabilistic medium-range flood forecasts with special attention on the communication of uncertainty (Demeritt et al, 2013;Pappenberger et al, 2013) and their EU-wide operational availability (Smith et al, 2016).…”

“…This "learning by doing" process -a fundamental principle in experiential learning theory (Kolb, 1984) -has the privilege of taking place in an informal setting without real consequences. Role-playing games (RPGs) are virtual simulations of real-world events especially designed to educate, inform and train players for the purpose of solving a specific problem (Bowman, 2010;Drachen et al, 2009;Susi et al, 2007). In this study, ANYWHERE (http://anywhere-h2020.eu, last access: 11 March 2019) Crisis and Risk Experiment (ANY-CaRE) is developed with the aim of providing a wide range of audiences with the opportunity to enhance their understanding of the recent uncertainties and dilemmas embedded in the real-time warning and emergency response processes.…”

“…Originally such games have been used for training in the military, but have since expanded to many domains (Mayer, 2009;Djaouti et al, 2011). Although evaluating the effectiveness of role play-ing or serious computer-based games is not always a straightforward task (Backlund and Hendrix, 2013), the literature values such educational or training games as motivating experiential learning tools that go beyond traditional passive learning approaches often applied in conferences and seminars (Boyle et al, 2014;Dieleman and Huisingh, 2006;Salas et al, 2009;Solinska-Nowak et al, 2018).…”

“…The overall objective is to "quickly converge toward a normalization of the situation" (Di Loreto et al, 2012, p. 2) using predictive models and plans to anticipate foreseeable events and soft skills allowing the necessary flexibility and capabilities to overcome unexpected events (Robert and Lajtha, 2002). With respect to crisis and disaster risk management, Van Ruijven (2011), Di Loreto et al (2012), Alharthi et al (2018) and Solinska-Nowak et al (2018) proposed reviews of serious games and simulations, specifically looking at the challenges of using serious games for research and assessing their effectiveness in soft-skills training. If the ANYCaRE game falls in the most common category of face-to-face multi-player experience with lively interactions between players, it is one of the few role-playing game dealing with early warning systems (EWSs) and allowing to test new forecasting products (Solinska-Nowak et al, 2018).…”

“…With respect to crisis and disaster risk management, Van Ruijven (2011), Di Loreto et al (2012), Alharthi et al (2018) and Solinska-Nowak et al (2018) proposed reviews of serious games and simulations, specifically looking at the challenges of using serious games for research and assessing their effectiveness in soft-skills training. If the ANYCaRE game falls in the most common category of face-to-face multi-player experience with lively interactions between players, it is one of the few role-playing game dealing with early warning systems (EWSs) and allowing to test new forecasting products (Solinska-Nowak et al, 2018). With a similar purpose the UK Met office developed the Forecastbased early action game, simulating a community affected by floods who need to prioritize their actions based on a severe-weather forecast (UK Met Office, Deltares, and Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, 2018).…”