The Dynamics Of Disaster If 2005 taught us anything, it's that Mother Nature's fury is both unrelenting and indiscriminate. From floods and hurricanes, to earthquakes and tsunamis, the world as a whole felt first-hand just how insignificant humans can be when faced with the awesome power of nature. It also showed us all that these global events can bring out the best, and sometimes the worst in mankind, both during the disaster, as well as during the all-important process of rebuilding. Recently, Serious Games Source took the opportunity to interview Seth McGinnis, an associate scientist in the Institute for the Study of Society and Environment (ISSE) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), regarding his work on the Disaster Dynamics project. The key component of this project, the Hurricane Landfall game, is a 'serious game' that works to teach players how to deal with events associated with the rebuilding and recovery process following a natural disaster.
JD: First of all, thank you for taking the time to speak with us today regarding The Hurricane Landfall game and the Disaster Dynamics project. Could you talk about this project and game, what they are about, and specifically what you hope players come away with after experiencing what you have developed? SMcG: Sure thing! Our goal with Disaster Dynamics is to harness the power of experiential learning via serious games to teach undergraduates and other students about the interactions between natural hazards and human decisions. The Hurricane Landfall game (for which we’re searching for a better name) does this by putting the players in control of the development of a coastal community that’s subject to hurricanes and other disasters. There’s a whole host of lessons you can teach using the game, but the primary thrust of it, what we want the players to pick up on if they’re only going to get one thing out of it, is the value of systems thinking. That is, the importance of thinking about the big picture, of planning for the long term, of stepping back and trying to understand how things interact, and how that relates to natural hazards and sustainability. JD: Do you see this game and others of its sort becoming an integral part of emergency training in the future, perhaps replacing other types of arguably outdated training exercises that are in practice today? SMcG: The emergency management community has a lot of very sophisticated exercises that train people in disaster response, and we decided early on that we didn’t want to compete in that arena. Instead, our game focuses not on response, but on disaster recovery, because that’s an important issue that nobody really plans for. So we don’t view it as a replacement for, but as a complement to those other kinds of training. We’re hoping our game will become an integral part of some emergency management curricula, because we think it addresses important issues that are currently being neglected. JD: Using the example of Hurricane Katrina, since it is a natural disaster that is still fresh in our minds, many believe that the severity of the floods would have been much less had certain actions been taken prior to the event. Will your game encourage those playing it to take a more proactive approach in hopes to lessening the effects of the disasters that are emulated, or does this project focus simply on dealing with the events in the recovery period? SMcG: Absolutely. Since the action in our game takes place during the recovery period, there’s already a natural focus on mitigation and adaptation rather than simple reaction. On top of that, we try to address that point directly with a couple different elements in the game. The old aphorism “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is somewhat hackneyed, but it’s still true. We try to get the players to experience the truth of that statement, but also the barriers that stand in the way of being proactive.
JD: In the wake of the notable natural disasters of 2005, such as the devastation wrought by the Asian tsunamis and the floods along the Gulf Coast, how do you see this game helping to better prepare people for future similar events? SMcG: The important thing to realize about natural disasters is that they’re not one-time events. A disaster happens when an extreme event interacts with a vulnerable human population. You generally can’t prevent extreme events from happening, so unless you do something to reduce that population’s vulnerability, you haven’t changed the situation that led to the disaster, and eventually you’re going to get another one. Our hope is that by playing the game, people will become aware of that dynamic, and will be prepared to take actions that address the roots of the problem instead of just treating the symptoms. JD: It looks like the Disaster Dynamics project has been an ongoing project for quite some time. How have those recent events mentioned above helped shape the development of the project and The Hurricane Landfall game? SMcG: The game design has been mostly finished for quite a while, so the biggest impact has been increased publicity. I’m currently spending a lot of time trying to let people know the game exists, to get it into classrooms, and having the general public be concerned about hurricanes has helped with that. I was at SGS (the Serious Games Summit) last fall, and let me tell you, having a poster with a big picture of a hurricane on it got me a LOT of attention! JD: How does a typical turn play out in The Hurricane Landfall game? Could you walk us through a turn in a recent game that stands out in your mind as particularly indicative of how this game plays? SMcG: Each of the three rounds takes place in the aftermath of some disruptive event, so we start with a briefing that presents the current situation to the players, explaining the problems they face and the options they have for solving them. The main action of the game is basically collective decision-making. The players make proposals about what to do, and then discuss (or argue about) what’s the best choice until someone calls for a vote on one of them. Each player gets one vote, but they can cash in ‘favors’ to get extra votes. After the vote is done, the proposal takes effect if it passed by a majority, and the players then return to making proposals, negotiating, and voting until they run out of budget. This is all complicated, of course, by the fact that the players have roles that influence what the care about: the hotel manager is worried about tourism, for example, while the local resident cares about having a safe and affordable place to live. When the players get into their roles, it can be a lot of fun. We had a recent game where the vacation resident evaluated every proposal in terms of whether or not it would lower his properly values. The players got into a bidding war with favors on one proposal and ended up with a final tally of twelve votes for and nine votes against – on a four-player vote! JD: That sort of leads into my next question. How does The Hurricane Landfall game ensure or otherwise encourage cooperation between the four players involved, and what are some of the consequences you have seen that arise from players not working as a team? SMcG: Actually, it’s OK if the players don’t cooperate. We tried to build in some tension between cooperation and competition, because one of the educational objectives is for players to realize that real-world problems aren’t zero-sum finite games. The word “game” often carries with it is this tacit assumption that at the end of the game, there will be a winner and a loser, but real life doesn’t work that way – the game keeps going. When the players experience a win-win or lose-lose scenario first-hand, it breaks them out of that short-term competitive mindset and gets them to see things from a synoptic perspective.
JD: Given the serious nature of this project, how have you kept the game entertaining or otherwise engaging so that it keeps the players immersed in the experience? How has fun, in general, been a design limitation for you with this project? SMcG: Fun was one of our explicit design goals from the very beginning. One of the reasons experiential learning is effective is because the students get really engaged, and if the game isn’t fun (and boy, we found a lot of not-fun educational games out there), the students aren’t going to be interested. So we tried very hard to make the gameplay itself enjoyable. In terms of the design process, that means that once we had some ideas about how we were going to approach our subject matter, we roughed out the basic structure of the game and tried it out on our friends, to find out if the fundamental game action was at all interesting and enjoyable on its own, independent of the content. Greg Costikyan’s essay, "I Have No words & I Must Design", was very helpful, as were our experiences with playing lots and lots of board games. Anyway, “fun” is a really big design constraint. It’s kind of hard to say how it affected the design just because it was such a pervasive concern for us, but I can think of a couple instances. The costs of the various proposals, for example, are as much based on balance and difficult trade-offs as they are on realistic construction tradeoffs. And the selection of roles, which contribute to immersion, was also influenced by the fun factor. An emergency manager and a developer would both be obvious roles for the game, but realistically, the latter has an enormous amount of political influence while the former has almost none, and it’s not much fun to play a game where one player has fifty votes and another has none. JD: A factor that seems as if it would be hard to predict and thus emulate would be the actions of the people affected by the natural disaster who are present during the recovery. Using the previously mentioned floods, one of the issues faced by relief workers was the behavior of the residents of the area as they were impacted both directly and indirectly by the disaster. How does your game convey this very real component in the disaster equation? SMcG: In many ways, the players are those residents. We’ve given them roles that have an interest in some part of the town, and then a disaster comes along that messes everything up, and they want to fix things because it’s their town. So they get to explore disaster recovery from the perspective of someone who stands to lose something, rather than as a disinterested outsider. JD: What has been the most interesting hurdle you have had to overcome during the development of this game? SMcG: Probably the loss of half my development team! For most of its life, Disaster Dynamics was a two-man project, developed by me and my colleague, Eric Scharff, working very closely together. Last year, he received a fantastic job offer that he really couldn’t pass up, so suddenly it was just me working on the game. Fortunately, most of the areas he’d been working on were complete or nearly so, and I now have some student assistants helping me finish things, but I miss working with Eric; we had a good partnership. JD: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us regarding The Hurricane Landfall game and the Disaster Dynamics project. Is there anything you would like to add that we have not touched on? SMcG: If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this project (well, besides Java), it’s that in an educational game, the teaching objectives really need to come first. Figure out what it is you want the game to teach people, and then come up with a game concept and mechanics that center on those learning objectives. We developed gameplay and teaching objectives in parallel, and I think we could have saved ourselves some difficult retooling later on if we’d defined our teaching points more clearly at an earlier stage.
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