When a wildfire triggers an evacuation, residents are forced to make difficult decisions quickly and under incredible pressure: What should they bring with them? What should they leave behind? What roads do they take, and in how many vehicles?
Catalyzed by CITRIS support, three UC Santa Cruz computational media professors aim to help communities in California and beyond prepare for these challenging scenarios through interactive gaming experiences, or serious games.
Katherine Isbister and Magy Seif El-Nasr are both investigators on a National Science Foundation (NSF) Smart & Connected Communities project led by UC Berkeley’s Kenichi Soga, which grew from a 2019 CITRIS Seed Award. The NSF-funded effort brings together scholars, 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.
Their work has led to two new mobile minigames: Firewise Residents and FireSafe Friends, which explore evacuation challenges and home hardening respectively.
Meanwhile, Sri Kurniawan’s team has created a virtual reality (VR) game, Find Your Things, with support from a 2021 CITRIS Seed Award. The project drew inspiration from one researcher’s experience in the 2018 Camp Fire that devastated Paradise, California.