Disaster Prevention Social Awareness The Stop Disasters! Case Study Gonc ¸alo Pereira, Rui Prada, Ana Paiva INESC-ID and Instituto Superior T´ ecnico and Universidade de Lisboa Avenida Professor Cavaco Silva, Porto Salvo, Portugal Email: goncalo.pereira@gaips.inesc-id.pt Abstract—Serious games are increasingly being regarded as a valuable means to support educative processes and make people aware of important issues. Some of these address social awareness domains with the goal of promoting collective recognition of a given local or global issue as a first step towards its resolution. Even though nowadays widely used, serious games still require further study with regard to their impact. This gap in studies is especially strong in the domain of social awareness. The goal of this work is to address this gap by studying the impact of a highly disseminated serious game that had not yet been evaluated in any way: Stop Disasters!. We studied the impact of the game both in terms of the awareness and player experience it created. As a result we found statistical evidence to a positive impact of the serious game in player’s awareness to wildfire prevention measures achieved in an overall positive and valuable game experience. This result provides further evidence to the positive impact of social awareness serious games in transmitting messages regarding social relevant issues in an overall positive and engaging experience. I. I NTRODUCTION Serious games are increasingly being regarded as a valuable means to support educative processes and make people aware of important local or global issues. Many reasons are argued to contribute to their adoption, but a fundamental one is the capacity to engage people [1], [2], [3], [4]. Motivation is a key factor in learning [5] and therefore when compared to traditional ways of communicating information games have in some situations been found to better engage [4], [6], [7] and persuade [8] learners due to their challenging and interactive nature. At present the domains addressed in these games are diverse and range from expert knowledge [9], to health [10], business and management [3], culture and heritage [11] personal and social learning and ethics [12], [13]. Social awareness games address social relevant issues that are normally forgotten or are not very publicized [14], with the goal of promoting collective recognition of the issue as a first step towards its resolution. The idea is to transmit a message and not a skill. Informing and mobilizing people to issues such as cultural differences, human rights and envi- ronmental preservation among others [14] is fundamental for societal development [15], [14]. As such, this domain may have an invaluable impact in people’s individual and collective awareness to existing local and global problems and help shape the path to their resolution. Even though widely used nowadays, serious games still require further study with regard to the impact of the games created. This gap in studies is especially strong for the domain of social awareness [14] in which highly disseminated games lack any study of their impact. To address this gap, in this work we present the study of a social awareness game that has high visibility and addresses an important issue in diverse communities worldwide: Stop Disasters! [16], [17], [18]. The specific goal of the study is to look for clues on the impact of the game both in terms of the awareness it can actually create and the means to achieve it from the player’s perspective (e.g. enjoyment, pressure, value). The document is structured as follows. In the next section we review existing social awareness games and studies ad- dressing those. Then, we introduce the background informa- tion required to understand the domain of the game studied, followed by the description of the game. Next we present the design and results of our study followed by the conclusions and future work. II. STUDYING SOCIAL AWARENESS GAMES Given the wide variety of topics included, the social aware- ness domain is currently addressed in many serious games. It was identified on a 2012 survey [14] that many games have a social awareness dimension even if not always their main focus. However, even though several of the games surveyed are widely known (e.g. Darfur is Dying [12], [19]) have been awarded prizes (e.g. Elude [20], [21]) and address problems at a global scale (e.g. Global Conflicts [22]), to our knowledge, almost the totality of those have not been empirically studied with regard to the awareness they generate and the experience which players go through when playing such games. Even though studies of social awareness resulting from serious games are still few, especially in the context of the quantity of existing games, some authors have already provided evidence to the impact that social awareness games can have. One of the studied games is Enercities [13], a simulation game designed to make players experience and learn about energy management and the implications of decisions on energy management. In this game players start with a small city which they have to expand and in this process balance the needs of the citizens (e.g. energy needs) with those of business (e.g. profit) and the environment (e.g. pollution). In order to determine the actual impact of the game, Knol and De Vries [23] carried out a series of studies. On a first study [23] with 76 participants across 4 countries a qualitative analysis of the game was performed in which the majority of students classified the game as fun to play, as providing a good challenge and said that they would use less energy after playing the game. Additionally, in another larger study [23] with 325 participants across 5