WILDFIRESGames Can Promote Preparedness and Build Community Resilience to Wildfire
If a wildfire causes an evacuation, people are forced to leave quickly and make decisions under pressure. These challenging decisions can have serious impacts on the outcome of a fire, and are what players confront in ‘Firewise Residents,’ one of three simulation games created by University of California, Santa Cruz computational media researchers.
If a wildfire causes an evacuation, people are forced to leave quickly and make decisions under pressure about what to bring and what to leave behind. Households with multiple cars might want to pack into more than one vehicle to save more possessions, but doing so risks causing traffic that can block firefighter access and endanger people, especially in neighborhoods with few exits and narrow roads.
These challenging decisions can have serious impacts on the outcome of a fire, and are what players confront in ‘Firewise Residents,’ one of three simulation games created by University of California, Santa Cruz computational media researchers to build preparedness for a wildfire scenario.
An increasingly present local issue, several Baskin School of Engineering faculty have turned their expertise in serious game design toward the issue of wildfires. The labs of Professors of Computational Media Katherine Isbister, Magy Seif El-Nasr, and Sri Kurniawan, along with Visiting Professor Eddie Melcer, are using game design to help communities build resilience to wildfire. Kurniawan’s lab explores VR approaches evacuation preparation.
These games can help people think about stressful topics, initiating individual preparedness and larger dialogue. As the games reach more people, researchers hope to spark community-level change, as climate change fuels more frequent and severe wildfires locally and globally.
“We’re using game design techniques to have conversations with the communities that are grappling with these problems,” said MJ Johns, a Ph.D. student in the Social Emotional Technology Lab who is leading the game design. “They’ve been dealing with the issue of wildfire for a long time, but I think that giving them that frame of designing and playing a game about their experience helps open them up to have more productive dialogue.”
Connected Communities
Isbister’s research has long focused on interactive gaming experiences that heighten social and emotional connections and wellbeing. With the increasing urgency of the climate crisis, she wanted to apply her expertise to affect change.
This motivated her connection to the “Smart and Connected Communities” project led by Kenichi Soga, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. The NSF-funded effort brings together scholars along with community members, emergency
personnel, and civic leaders to develop innovative ways to manage risk from wildfires, from serious games to digital twin models of communities to simulate crises.
