About the Game
I played Stop Disasters, a game that teaches adults and children how to build safer villages and cities against disasters. The game mainly involves two kinds of play: fantasy and challenge (read more below).
How does the MDAO framework apply to this game?
The Stop Disasters uses the MDAO framework to create a carefully designed educational game, tying intrinsic motivations and in-game goals with real-life outcomes. First, it’s clear that the outcome of the game involves learning information and explicit skills: to raise awareness of and educate users on building safer villages and cities against natural disasters. In particular, in the beginning of the game, a character explicitly states the goal of the game is to prevent as few deaths as possible when the tsunami arrives (Fig 1).
Figure 1. Game character explicitly provides context and states goal of the game in the beginning
As for aesthetics, the game focuses on fantasy and challenge. It involves fantasy because the game creates an external hypothetical world, different from the player’s current situation—the game is set in Southeast Asia, in a small town where a tsunami is about to hit. The game also involves challenges by giving users a limited budget, criteria to meet, and time limit to successfully build shelters and defenses against a tsunami (Fig 2).
Figure 2. The game includes a cash budget, specific criteria (a to-do checklist), and time limit
The aesthetics of the game feeds into its dynamics. In particular, the key dynamics of the game include purchasing and building housing and trees (Fig 3), analyzing damage risk on plots of land (Fig 4), reviewing key information regarding plots of land, and finally, triggering the tsunami. All of the dynamic components simulate real-world conditions where the player as a town mayor or urban planner has to consider the tradeoffs between budget, sufficient housing in low-risk zones, housing proximity to villagers, as well as other factors.
Figure 3. List of housing options to purchase and build
Figure 4. Colored borders on each plot of land indicate level of risk
Lastly, the mechanics of involve components like homes, hotels, hospitals, trees, sand dunes, plots of land, cash, timer as well as rules such as the maximum budget, housing goal (need to house X number of people), build criteria (need to build X hospitals and X schools). The in-game goal is that once the timer runs out and the tsunami hits, less than the given max fatalities number of people die from the tsunami.
In short, I thought this was an engaging game that motivated me to consider a careful strategy when building shelters around the village. I learned to build shelters in low-risk zones, plant trees near buildings and high-risk zones to prevent flooding, and build shelters near high population density areas. However, the Hard level I chose was still pretty easy and I didn’t need as much time as the timer gave me so this didn’t feel as exciting of a challenge. One thing this game lacked was also immediate feedback which the MDAO framework paper recommends—to motivate users, there should be immediate feedback on their performance. But this game only allows users to build an entire village, wait for the timer, then see a binary result of whether the tsunami killed over the max fatalities number of people (lose) or did not (win). In that sense, I feel like the game could have been designed to be more engaging throughout the building process.
