A new video game has been produced to teach rangatahi how to prepare for a natural disaster, what dangers could be present, and what steps to take to survive the aftermath.
A team at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, has developed a game called Cascadia 9.0, which has been released just before International Shakeout Day (today) to practise earthquake safety and preparedness.
Lewis & Clark earth system science and environmental studies programs director Associate Professor Liz Safran is the creator and lead of the earthquake preparedness project.
Safran said “We were trying to get some basic understanding of what people can learn from games and what games can do to boost people’s intentions to prepare for earthquakes,”
Safran said she was happy with the build of their game and explained that the game covered a lot of survival information, which was an important part of the game’s purpose.
With a grant from the National Science Foundation of more than US$500,000, Sarfran built a team comprising computer scientist Peter Drake, psychology professor Erik Nilsen, and media scholar Bryan Sebok to embark on their proof-of-concept pilot study, which started in 2018.
Game players absorbed more
In studying the effectiveness of the game the research group had two groups, one which played the game and the other group whose members found their information on the internet.
The research found that rangatahi who played the game spent longer learning and interacting with the task at hand than the people finding information on the internet.
Afterwards, the gaming group participants were recorded to have felt more confident in taking on earthquake-related challenges than the internet group.
“We discovered that the elements they seemed to remember best and reflect on were those that required ‘stickiness,’ where they had to go through a series of actions or problem-solving to be successful in the game,” Nilsen said.
Further iterations of the game will come in the future, creating more challenges focusing on the ideas of cooperation, environment and social reinforcement of others to prepare for disasters.