Description
Stop Disasters game helps players understand how disaster risks and outcomes are shaped by human choices.
What Kind(s) of Fun It Uses
The game uses Challenge and Expression as the main mechanisms to engage the player. Players have limited time and resources and have to decide how best to prepare the community before the disaster happens. They also have some freedom in deciding what actions to take within the limited time and how to use their resources (money) to alleviate the impact of the disaster. The game explores these two funs (challenge and expression) as a mechanism to convey serious empathetic information.
Players are also presented with varying community development choices such as building hotels to foster tourism, building houses (cheap bamboo house or expensive concrete houses) for homeless citizens as well as choosing to build flood disaster mitigation infrastructure such as sand dunes. Choice and decision making is very much intertwined in the game and the player gets to realize what the impact of their cumulative choices are at the end of the game when the disaster hits!
Analyzing the Game via the MDAO Framework Lens
Mechanics
The player has a limited budget and a limited amount of time to prepare the community for a disaster. The player can build low cost houses made with bamboo to house more citizens at a cheaper cost, or build reinforce buildings that are more costly, improve infrastructure, provide warning systems (such as buoy), and take other actions to reduce the potential impact of the disaster. All of this needs to be done with two budget axes (time and money).
Dynamics
The limited resources create trade-offs. The player cannot do everything, so they have to decide what is most important. For example, the player might have to choose between spending money on protecting buildings, improving evacuation, or educating people about the disaster. The player then sees what happens when the disaster occurs and can use that experience to change their strategy and try again.
Aesthetics
The game creates a sense of challenge because the player has to make decisions with limited time and money. It also creates expression because players can decide how they want to prepare the community. Different players can make different choices and use different strategies. There is also some discovery, because players learn what works and what does not by experimenting with different decisions and seeing the consequences.
One thing that stands out for me is that:
“the game provides both quantitative analysis of the disaster alongside commentary on the impact of the disaster to help different kinds of players and learner digest the seriousness/fun.”
Outcomes
The main outcome is helping players understand that disasters are not only about the natural event itself. Human decisions can also affect how severe the consequences are. The player of this game is expected to come out with a sense of responsibility, understanding that their life choices could prevent disasters or at least mitigate the impact of inevitable ones.
Players learn about the importance of preparation, infrastructure, location, evacuation, and other factors that influence disaster risk. The game uses the gameplay itself to communicate information about disaster preparedness rather than simply telling the player about it.
