Recently, I played Stop Disasters!, a simulation game developed by an independent studio called playerthree and published on the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) website, playable at the following link: Game Link. Simply put, the player’s goal is to reinforce communities experiencing different natural disasters: tsunamis, hurricanes, wildfires, etc. While the thought of a disaster-stopping game had slightly intrigued me at first, I found it even more fascinating how this type of game was listed on such an official-looking platform. I knew I had to check it out further.
Figure 1: The title screen of Stop Disasters!
After playing multiple iterations of the game, one thing was immediately obvious: I absolutely suck at saving people from natural disasters. Many casualties were had. While I did improve throughout each iteration, I failed to fully figure out a strategy to protect everyone given the limited budget I had.
To get more specific, I played the game a total of three times: twice in the hurricane mode simulation, and once in the wildfire simulation. The simulations were extremely chaotic, such as a hurricane which led to screams and skull emojis popping up indicating dead civilians, or forest fires which would exponentially blaze through the entire map. My job was to put it to an end.
Figure 2: A fire blazing through my world in the “wildfire” disaster simulation
From the game itself (of which I have many criticisms), the main types of fun I experienced were dominantly Fantasy, Challenge, and Expression. I felt a lot of the fun of the game hinged on taking the gameplay seriously and appreciating the narrative of “playing god”, trying to reason as realistically as possible to figure out how to save people that were the most in danger. It surprisingly did require a decent bit of strategy to figure out which areas to fortify, and which I could leave alone. However, when I started thinking of the game as just a game, I suddenly became extremely silly and started playing irrationally, such as placing swimming pools around people in order to save them from the fire, while letting the fire consume virtually everything else. This was also a pretty fun way to play. Some quick screenshots of gameplay footage is shown below.
Figure 3: The difficulty-select screen
Figure 4: Initial introduction of the gameplay
Figure 5: Potential structures the player can buy throughout the game, to protect the community
If we try to apply the MDAO framework to this game, at first glance, the mission, intervention requirements, and outcomes are very simple. The game developers want to improve peoples’ abilities to properly prepare and respond to natural disasters. They are doing this through informing the public on “how early warning systems, evacuation plans, and education save lives” (from the website). The desired outcome is Information (raising awareness) and Implicit Skills (reasoning about how best to protect a community). I would say that it succeeded in introducing me to various ways of stopping a disaster; prior to this game, I had no idea what a breakwater was, or how it helped to prevent hurricane danger to a body of land. But the way that it portrayed this information didn’t interest me as much to continue playing after a few times.
Where this game fails (where it lost my attention), is its lack of flow and crappy onboarding. According to Chapter 6 of the paper that introduces MDAO by Browning, flow is defined as a potent source of intrinsic motivation that must provide immediate feedback on actions. It was very difficult for me to tell, in this game, how my actions were affecting the people in it. Every time I built a prevention against a natural disaster, it would just sit there in the world, and I would have no idea if it would adequately protect the population until running the simulation at the very end. The game would restart to the very beginning after running the simulation once, so I felt as if there was no room for trial-and-error, which was much needed alongside the lack of a proper tutorial. I only learned that my goal was to prevent disasters, but I never figured out what certain things did (what does a sand dune do? does it protect people behind it? around it? is it better than a buoy? what do the icons mean with the percentages?). These things felt like I was supposed to learn through experience, but the long playtime for each session made this experimentation rather difficult and annoying. My gameplay soon switched to being silly and causing the most chaos as possible. This is a different outcome, but surprisingly more fun for me as the player.
I also did not feel very rewarded when “better outcomes” were made. The final view that I would see would simply congratulate me (despite a high number of casualties), and show a classified document of my statistics. Was this good? Bad? I couldn’t really tell between playthroughs, other than the numbers changing. Gamification is difficult because extrinsic motivators can sometimes defeat the power of intrinsic motivation when trying to accomplish a goal. But I almost wish that these numbers were more prominent throughout the game, as I did not even feel an intrinsic motivation to achieve a better score.
Figures 6, 7, 8: Outcomes of the game as I continued playing
Would I recommend the game? To someone who is training to become a better preventionist at disasters, sure! For curiosity? Maybe. For fun? Maybe notsomuch.
