Emergency Management and Games
Games Based Learning or Games Based Training, some suggestions on finding things to play that can help you think about Emergency Management
Since 2013, I have been digging around the various aspects of emergency management as a researcher. In 2019, I began to move from research into practice because it was not enough to look at how people react and communicate during disaster. I needed to understand how emergency management worked.
One thing that has stuck out for me in terms of emergency management is its use of games to train folks. Unfortunately, so-called “serious games” have invaded this space. While each of the serious games is in itself useful, they often suffer from poor graphic design, fiddly bits meant to provide fidelity, or are just kind of boring. sometimes you just need a commercial game meant for the audience of people who will be those who will be rescued when disaster strikes.
Along those lines, I thought I would provide a list of Tabletop RPGs (think: Dungeons and Dragons), Board Games, and Video Games.
A lot of these games are selected because they do not simulate disaster, rather, they are selected because they emulate an aspect of awareness in very specific ways. For example, Fate is a rules-lite RPG and Worlds of Fire is a collection of adventures that contains a few adventures of interest. Shadowrun, on the other hand, is an RPG that is complex much like that of D&D. The “DocWagon” portion of Shadowrun are armored EMS, essentially. This is not an actual game, but an aspect of the game that can be used to think about disasters in a futuristic sense.
The way that the rest of this post will go is simple. First, the table of games can be seen below. If you click, “View Raw” it will take you to Github where you can copy/paste the link. Below the table will be a brief description of each game in addition to what aspects of emergency management map to this game.
Some of these games are old and so, may be hard to find; however, I have tried to stick with currently available games wherever possible.
List of Games:
Role Playing Games
RPGs are derived from war games and see players assume roles based on what the setting provides. In terms of RPGs, you can do anything from the most stereotypical (The Lord of the Rings or any fantasy series) to the atypical (you are the pieces of a mouth and must arrange yourself on a face based on what that face needs at the time).
Anything and everything in between can not only be considered, but explored, re-arranged, and other forms. This collection of games is by no means exhaustive, but it is a useful primer for the robust collection of different types of games that TRPGs provide. A link is provided for each as well as a brief description of its connection to EM.
Fate: Worlds on Fire
Link: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/119383/Fate-Worlds-Worlds-on-Fire
Fate is perhaps one of the easiest RPGs to get into. The game revolves around tiny character sheets, very few dice rolls, and a very loose set of rules to worry about. Sadly, rules and limitations are often useful in RPGs for newer players who might not feel comfortable enough to assume a role.
Worlds of Fire is a collection of adventures for folks willing to run Fate. This collections gets interesting with the Jason Morningstar penned, “Fight Fire” which will allow you to explore the trauma of firefighting from a multitude of perspectives.
While each of these games and items are themselves related to emergency management (loosely, at best), there is so much work needed to get a proper representation to make itself known.
Shadowrun:DocWagon
Link: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/orgs/DOCWAGON
Shadowrun is an older game with a hugely rich and varied history. The world of Shadowrun was a fantasy world called, “Earthdawn.” It was a world filled with Dragons and dwarves and ogres and at some point, the world ends and everyone hides underground. Over time, the modern world shows up until one day, all of that old magical energy is re-released and once again, ogres, dwarves, dragons, and elves show up once again.
If you want a sample of what that world looks like, give Bright a try:
Inside of this world are a group of first responders called the DocWagon. They are a heavily armored group of emergency responders. While they are first responders, their capacity as heavily armored emergency medical staff has a useful tie-in to fleshing out an emergency operations center for a world that has disasters that now include magical spells, different species, and other kinds of what we would call natural hazards or even new forms of technological ones.
In Case of Emergency
Link: https://boyproblems.itch.io/in-case-of-an-emergency
This game is perhaps the closest to a game that allows you to think about how victims will react to disaster. In this game, players assume the roles of bystanders and victims of a disaster that they are not really sure about. The company that they work for has been taken over by…something?
The company — called foundation — is a questionable company that does not really play by the book. As such, the company being taken over could be the result of their lack of ethics, could be an attack, a protest, or something more heinous.
Like the other games, this one’s focus is on other kinds of disaster from other perspectives. Unlike the other games, this one is related to what might be considered dis/mis-information as it is based on a project called SCP: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/ which is best described with this image from their “new player” content:
And so, this game can see players thinking through a variety of ethical dilemmas, something that is increasingly prevalent as we begin to try and understand how consequences of action are not always considered beforehand. For a different example, consider the mulching proposal:
Our Last Best Hope
Link: https://magpiegames.com/products/our-last-best-hope-print-pdf
Finally, we have what might be the most useful game on the list…but also the most fun. What makes TTRPGs interesting is that you can be as intense, fantastic, and obnoxious as you want to be. Our Last Best Hope is a game that allows you to live your Gerard Butler disaster movie of choice.
From the description of the game:
During the game, you and your friends will play through a classic disaster movie, like Sunshine, Deep Impact, The Core, or Armageddon, where your characters are the stars. Each game is unique, as your group confronts a new crisis with a new set of characters and a new plan to save the earth.
So, we might consider employees of the EOC tasked with responding to an attack from Godzilla. We might become the crew of the shuttle that goes into space to stop the asteroid from hitting the earth in Armageddon, or we might be Gerard Butler, an EOC-style employee trying his best to get his family to survive a world-ending event.
The utility of this game is to mix and match what aspects of practice are at the front and being accented versus those that can be glossed over and missed. Different mixtures and matches of these kinds of rules are those things that will make or break this game.
Be as fantastic or not-so-fantastic as you like!
Board Games
While we begin with games that are derived from war games (which are essentially high fidelity simulations of battle), the world of board games themselves are currently in what we might refer to as, “the golden age” in that our existence online and with computation has fostered a better sense of how data, how information, how variables will impact decision making processes.
The useful aspect of the games below is that they isolate specific concepts to play with for EM. This could be situation awareness, cognitive load, improvisation, or how to deal with cascading threats. While not all of these games are direct 1:1 links to EM, each game will no doubt stoke some aspect of EM or another. As with the last collection of TRPGs, a link is provided for each as well as a brief description of its connection to EM.
Aftershock
Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/180994/aftershock-humanitarian-crisis-game
Aftershock may be the most obvious inclusion on this list. It is a game about humanitarian crisis response and is modelled after the Haiti Earthquake of 2010. The creator, a political science professor in Canada, created the game. In the instruction manual, the creator credits one Brian Train with some advice. Train is an important part of this list as he has created a number of counter-insurgency wargames that could be useful for emergency management.
For more about Brian Train and COIN games, see: https://theplayersaid.com/2022/04/15/secrets-to-teaching-the-coin-series-from-gmt-games-a-guide-to-making-the-process-seamless-and-getting-your-players-to-enjoy-the-system/
What Aftershock provides, is a rich, immersive simulation that can have 4 players or 100. The asymmetrical nature of this game (as it is partially based on the COIN games), affords a rich discussion of the disparate goals different levels of agency will pursue within a given response.
More about the game can be found here: https://paxsims.wordpress.com/aftershock/
Antiquity
Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/13122/antiquity
As a person who likes games, I am constantly on the lookout for games that alter my perception. What I notice, how I notice, how I plan, how I react, and other aspects of perception are always on the cusp of atrophying. Complacency and siloing myself, getting comfortable, is often something that I try and avoid (at least until i’m getting ready for retirement).
What Antiquity does is force a mindset that involves relying on each other to not do enough to destroy the world. But this isn’t just about destroying the world to win, it’s about all mutually working together to establish a civilization that doesn’t rob the world of enough resources as the choke the entire world, thus eradicating the whole planet.
This is a game about climate change, about understanding the relationship between peoples, and about fostering a mindset that seeks resiliency rather than victory.
Of all the games on this list, Antiquity would fall under the “heaviest” game. It is massive (as in, it will require a large table) and is extremely detailed and complex. It is also incredibly brutal and will result in catastrophic failure more often than co-operative victory.
While these may be reasons to avoid it, I would urge giving it a shot.
The Captain is Dead
Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/159503/captain-dead
For this list, I tried to include games that fostered the following:
- Asymmetrical
- Team-based
- Forces weird mindsets to play
- Dispels complacency in favor of a mindset so alien as to be memorable.
The Captain is Dead may be the prototypical game for this list. In this game, the players are in control of a starship within which the captain has just been killed. As chaos descends upon the ship, the remaining players must work together, predicting as best they can how things will go, to not only prevent future calamities, but also to 1) stop the ship from self-destructing, 2) stop the alien invaders from reaching the bridge, 3) stop alien attacks from the enemy ship from destroying the ship, and 4) maintain ship systems so that everyone can work together.
This is teamwork: the game, and it does a fantastic job of presenting tension, rewarding good teamwork, and providing unexpected sources of surprise. It also has a mindset of cascading. One mistake may break an entire session if the mistake is in a specific part of the ship.
Flashpoint: Fire Rescue
Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/100901/flash-point-fire-rescue
One of the very first things folks tell me when they see this game on this list is, “firefighters are not emergency management practitioners.” And that is correct. However, this game, which sees players engaging a home that is on fire as they struggle to rescue the humans trapped inside, has a number of expansions that take this from Firefighting: the game, to a more EOC-oriented game.
The expansions for this game are called:
- Urban Structures
- 2nd Story
- Extreme Danger
- Veteran and Rescue Dog
- Dangerous Waters
- Honor & Duty
Each expansion adds fidelity and challenge to the game and as the expansions are combined, they move this game from first-line response to a multi-jurisdiction coordination simulation.
While this game focuses heavily on firefighting, it can provide useful ways for EOC personnel to think about coordination and consequences within coordinating.
Pandemic: Rising Tide
Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/234671/pandemic-rising-tide
This list could describe every Pandemic variant or just Pandemic itself and leave it at that. However, I wanted to provide a list of games that are unique and weird and help us think in ways we might not naturally do.
Pandemic: Rising Tide is a game that focuses on the Dutch dikes and how to cope with the water that is constantly threatening the country. Where this game shines is in basically forcing a mitigation mindset and to see how much coordination is required for folks to go through to actually mitigate threats.
If you are familiar with pandemic, it is the same premise…just with water. There are multiple playthroughs online but I liked this one:
Game is hard and that this playthrough fails is indicative of that.
Tragedy Looper
Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/148319/tragedy-looper
This is maybe the weirdest part of this list but it also may provide some of the most useful insights into problem solving ability, thinking differently, and pattern recognition. For emergency management, a recognition of how things may cascade while planning can help better prepare a jurisdiction for the various aspects of potential hazard events. Yet, it can be hard to train this as intuition, curiosity, and thinking beyond a job’s scope is often something that is traded for a more agile and reactive unit that can integrate with ICS without friction.
At its core, Tragedy Looper is a game about cascading hazards. A school nurse may react poorly to a student’s mental health issue resulting in a vulnerability that then leads to the tragedy that is at the core of a particular case. The goal of the game is not to be victorious as tragedy is often completely unavoidable. Instead, the goal of the game is to simply, “not lose” just 1 time.
This is a 1 vs many game. The 1, in this case, is in charge of the tragedy. They alone know all the secrets and will maneuver a board to maximize the potential for tragedy. Each round, players and the 1 will make moves of people between rooms, between people, and with different results. The round ends when the tragedy occurs and if the 1 wins (which they almost always will), the board is reset and the players must begin again.
For the 1 player, they must mask what aspects of the tragedy are triggering the scene. For the many other players, they need to figure out what aspects of the 1’s movements actually matter so that (just once), the tragedy doesn’t occur.
This game is weird for this reason. You simply don’t lose to win and you do so by not allowing events to transpire the way that the 1 player wants them to.
Forcing this sort of mindset, even for a moment, is uncomfortable but useful in the scope of emergency management. If you can get past the Japanese art (as it is a Japanese game), you and your EOC will benefit.
Video Games
One of the biggest issues with computation is that it fundamentally alters the ability for humans to perceive the relationship between what they’re seeing and their reactions. It’s such a strange issue that it is often masked by folks who love the computer. This is fine but it remains to be seen just how much of an impact automating and hiding what is happening on screen can have.
It’s so weird that I wrote a dissertation about ways to actually begin to understand it. The games below, much like that of the TRPGs or board games provide some useful collections of alternative perspectives of EM through the lens of “fun.” While play is merely, “learning how a system works,” we tend to use, “was this fun” to measure, “did you learn things from this that can transfer to your job?” We just don’t know and it remains to be seen if digital simulations are worth the intense price. As with the last collection of TRPGs, a link is provided for each as well as a brief description of its connection to EM.
9–1–1 Operator
Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/503560/911_Operator/
Perhaps one of the most emotionally draining aspects of anything related to emergency management is the grind of the 9–1–1 operator, dispatcher, or PSAP employee. This aspect of everyday life is overlooked while “sexier” versions of it like Facebook moderators are often given far more press: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona
What this game does though is mostly avoid the emotional distress of constantly engaging with humans at their worst. Instead, what it provides is an increasingly complicated situation awareness and cognitive load simulation that allows you to watch a municipality deal with its everyday emergencies. While I personally was not a big fan of this game it does certainly provide something useful to engage.
Disaster Report
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disaster_Report
This game and its sequels are a bit odd. They see players:
The game deals with the characters’ survival and escape from the slow collapse of an artificial island. While dodging falling buildings and debris from periodic earthquakes, the player must find a way off the island. In addition, the main character, a reporter, must investigate the reasons for the disaster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disaster_Report
While a bit odd, this game provides a useful simulation of wandering around as a sort of SAR operative while simultaneously trying to figure out what happened. As with nearly all the games on this list, it focuses on cognitive load, analytical abilities, and twitch reactions. There are multiple playthroughs on youtube of each game. One that stuck out to me is:
Emergency HQ
Link: https://world-of-emergency.com/
Emergency is a long-running series of games that sees players build EOCs for the types of disasters the game will throw at you. Emergency HQ is the latest version of this, is available via mobile devices, and like Disaster Report 4, is also available on the Nintendo Switch.
You can read about the whole series on their wiki entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_(video_game_series)
While this game concentrates on emergencies and responding to the damage of hazards, it is additionally limited by its free-to-play status in addition to its networking capabilities. If you are not a fan of this sort of thing (i.e. energy limiting actions, paying for currencies to progress in the game, and other things like this), i would actually argue that these limitations simulate a budget unlike any of the other games on this list.
See the playthrough below and additionally, check out that channel if you are a law enforcement fan.
EmergeNYC
Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/461430/EmergeNYC/
This is a game that isn’t finished quite yet. In fact, the company making the game was recently purchased which puts this game ever being finished into question. Despite that shortfall, this game is unique. It sees players assuming the role of emergency responders (in this game Firefighters) in New York City.
Your job is to respond to incidents, wander around burning buildings, and other types of disasters. This game is unique though in that it isn’t just simulating this at an abstract level like the previous games, but is a high fidelity simulation that sees players coordinating on the ground and in high resolution. Please see an example of play here:
Mission Chief
Link: https://www.missionchief.com/users/sign_up
The final game on this list is a browser game that sees you taking control of a 9–1–1 center. While this may seem a bit similar to the first game on this list 9–1–1 operator, there are a lot of differences. Where Mission Chief tends to shine is that it:
This game was developed by a real firefighter. So it was always important to have realistic emergency missions with realistic demands for vehicles — from small missions like a burning car to big ones like a bridge collapse — all on real life maps!
Someone actually put together a video that describes the differences and can be seen below:
Since this is a browser game, it can be played on any device on the internet but additionally has a variety of apps that can be loaded on mobile devices.
The above has been a list of 15 games that all deal with specific aspects of EOC operations. From riots to kaiju attacks, hurricanes, even trash bins catching fire, the fidelity of simulation, accuracy, or imbalance of representation of EOC operations is as such that nearly any aspect of operations can be highlighted and focused on. Much of what the content of those games becomes useful is much like any sort of simulation — your players will carry away what is relevant to them.
Your job as a game maker is to make players consistently try your simulation out and to pull something anything from it.
So while these games may provide some use, your own mileage will vary and with that variance, I would urge you to think about how to make it relevant to your own EOC or practice in as customizable a way as possible.
