If a wildfire causes an evacuation, people are forced to leave quickly and make decisions under pressure about what to bring and what to leave behind. Households with multiple cars might want to pack into more than one vehicle to save more possessions, but doing so risks causing traffic that can block firefighter access and endanger people, especially in neighborhoods with few exits and narrow roads.
These challenging decisions can have serious impacts on the outcome of a fire, and are what players confront in ‘Firewise Residents,’ one of three simulation games created by University of California, Santa Cruz computational media researchers to build preparedness for a wildfire scenario.
An increasingly present local issue, several Baskin School of Engineering faculty have turned their expertise in serious game design toward the issue of wildfires. The labs of Professors of Computational Media Katherine Isbister, Magy Seif El-Nasr, and Sri Kurniawan, along with Visiting Professor Eddie Melcer, are using game design to help communities build resilience to wildfire. Kurniawan’s lab explores VR approaches evacuation preparation.
These games can help people think about stressful topics, initiating individual preparedness and larger dialogue. As the games reach more people, researchers hope to spark community-level change, as climate change fuels more frequent and severe wildfires locally and globally.
“We’re using game design techniques to have conversations with the communities that are grappling with these problems,” said MJ Johns, a Ph.D. student in the Social Emotional Technology Lab who is leading the game design. “They’ve been dealing with the issue of wildfire for a long time, but I think that giving them that frame of designing and playing a game about their experience helps open them up to have more productive dialogue.”
Connected communities
Isbister’s research has long focused on interactive gaming experiences that heighten social and emotional connections and wellbeing. With the increasing urgency of the climate crisis, she wanted to apply her expertise to affect change.
This motivated her connection to the “Smart and Connected Communities” project led by Kenichi Soga, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley. The NSF-funded effort brings together scholars along with community members, emergency
personnel, and civic leaders to develop innovative ways to manage risk from wildfires, from serious games to digital twin models of communities to simulate crises.
Researchers from UC Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Davis are working with communities in Alameda, Marin, and Santa Cruz counties. Workshops and interviews with utility workers, emergency responders, and local firewise councils revealed key community concerns.
“There were ideas coming out of those conversations that I think we wouldn’t get if we weren’t trying to engage them in the game design process,” Johns said. “We’re asking them to think of themselves as a game designer, and help us create games about the experience that they’ve had. It really opens up the dialogue with those communities and gets them very invested in iterative design.”
Over the past two years, the games have been iterated with input from Alameda and Marin communities, natural hazard and serious games experts, and communities in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties, including Highland Firewise council near UC Santa Cruz.
“All these layers of co-design and participation over the past two years that has allowed us to very rapidly iterate and develop full playable games that have a lot of different perspectives and insights embedded in the design,” Johns said.
Local residents in Santa Cruz and the Bay Area have informed the design and tested iterations of the wildfire games.
Mobile games
Now, there are three mobile mini games that are now available online: Firewise Residents, FireSafe Friends, and Find Your Things. Each deals with complex dilemmas that ask people to make hard decisions, as a recent paper reports.
In Firewise Residents, players talk with townspeople, from children to elders, about evacuation challenges. In Find Your Things, they pack a go-bag for an evacuation. FireSafe Friends, a two-player game, has players choose materials and landscaping to “harden” homes, then test them in a simulated burn. The graphics draw on fire-simulation models developed by civil engineers and fire scientists at UC Berkeley, turning the tools meant for experts into a resource for the larger community.
“We’re taking ideas from those simulation tools and putting them in a gameplay context where the general public can interact with it,” Johns said.
The games provide a safe environment to think through challenging, complex topics that people might otherwise avoid, sparking more engagement than traditional fire safety presentations. The design draws inspiration from cute, classic games such as Animal Crossing and Eco, providing a comforting environment that builds connection to the characters.
“Game simulations can give you a little flavor of the emotional texture of that experience and make it feel more real,” Isbister said. “You also have agency to make choices and see the outcome of your choices.”
‘FireSafe Friends’ teaches players techniques to harden their homes.
Measuring impact
The team hopes the game will reach communities in California and beyond, recruiting fire marshals and citizen firewise councils to facilitate running the games. They also envision the games as a lesson in middle and high school classrooms, so that students, a particularly at-risk group in a disaster, can start conversations at home.
Assessing the actual impact of the games is crucial, which is where Seif El-Nasr’s lab is taking the lead.
Serious games are typically evaluated at the individual level: did they change attitudes or teach something? But these researchers are looking at community impact: who’s playing, whether it sparks further learning, and if behavior changes. They’re applying a discourse analysis framework to study co-learning—how players talk, reason, and make decisions together. By analyzing real-time conversations between paired players, the research offers deeper insight into how collaborative reasoning and reflection can support real-world preparedness.
“We’re trying to understand if these games can be used as an instrument to foster collaborative learning among community residents,” said Mario Escarce Junior, a postdoc in Seif El-Nasr’s lab. “We have a specific framework in which we’re trying to understand if we can observe learning through conversations while players are playing in pairs and discussing their strategies.”
“It’s not just that participants are learning from each other and discovering knowledge together: it’s also planning, goals, role composition—these meta-cognitive skills are important for working together and learning,” Seif El-Nasr added. “Wildfire is a community issue; it’s not just about one house being hardened, there’s a whole community working together. There are a lot of aspects around collective action and collective resilience in a whole community – developing measures to assess and investigate these is essential.”
The researchers are also interested in evaluating the games’ performance in other countries and cultures, with Escarce Junior testing Firesafe friends in his home country of Brazil.
The researchers envision that lessons drawn from this work could inform other climate resilience efforts beyond wildfire. For example, drawing on lessons learned from these efforts, Seif El-Nasr’s Ph.D. student Mennatullah Hendawy is leading the development of various alternate reality games related to sea-level rise. In the future, the researchers hope to build more games to address resilience in the aftermath of a disaster, like the rebuilding efforts currently underway in the wake of disastrous fires.
Leveraging VR
When the CZU fires devastated parts of Santa Cruz county, Kurniawan, along with her Ph.D. student Allison Crosby, who was affected by the 2018 Paradise fire, became interested in using technology to educate on wildfire-evacuation preparedness. Kurniawan has deep experience in developing assistive-technology games, often making use of virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR).
With funding through CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, a UC-wide research center, her lab is developing a timed virtual reality game on preparing a go-bag for a wildfire evacuation while managing the capacity of their car.
To inform their design, Crosy interviewed people who experienced the local CZU fire, including survivors of the local Bonny Doon fire who had to evacuate their homes at 3 a.m., people who evacuated from the UC Santa Cruz campus, and voluntary evacuees from the surrounding area. The stories they heard directly influenced the narrative of the game.
“Some of the stories were really sad, they lost their homes or they lost their pets,” Kurniawan said. “The scenarios inside those games were informed by those interviews, literally front and center are pets. The theme that came up was making decisions under pressure.”
Mobile vs. VR
Kurniawan and Crosby are measuring the game qualitatively, aiming for people to feel more confident and comfortable for an emergency situation, and often hear reports that the game prompts people to consider what they’d pack in an evacuation for the first time.
Realizing they were both developing wildfire go-bag games, Crosby and Johns ran a study comparing the mobile and VR versions.
They found that people had similar behavior changes and learning outcomes, although they found the VR game more exciting. So, researchers could pick the version most suitable for a specific audience—VR is not always ideal for children, older adults, or people who get motion sick with VR, and many people may not have access to VR headsets. The researchers are also experimenting with using smoke odors in the VR game to boost engagement and memory retention.
Kurniawan is working with the UC Santa Cruz fire marshall to explore integrating their VR game into the wildfire training that undergraduates on campus are given.
“Everything we have built would be good for the UC Santa Cruz fire marshall to use to attract the attention of younger people,” Kurniawan said. “If we have resources available to us, I would love to get more headsets, install the games, and just distribute them freely in the public library or on campus to get people to try them and trigger conversation.”