A Disaster Multiplayer Online Game (DMOG) to Enhance Emergency Preparedness and Resilience in the Midwest

Communities face several challenges that inhibit their ability to successfully adapt to, mitigate, and respond to disasters. Emergency preparedness and response involve multiple organizations and decision makers, each with different roles and responsibilities, objectives, and limited resources. Although training and exercises can help overcome these challenges, emergency management (EM) trainers encounter other obstacles such as logistical challenges and a long preparation lead time. The vision for this research-centered pilot project will be to create, implement, and test an online serious game that focuses on disaster response. Iowa State University (ISU) and Polk County Emergency Management (PCEM) in Iowa will collaboratively develop the Disaster Multiplayer Online Game (DMOG). DMOG will bring EM decision makers together in an engaging, online interactive activity in which each player assumes a role (county emergency manager, law enforcement, fire department, emergency medical services, public works, or city official). DMOG will simulate a derecho occurring during a farmers’ market in a major city, and the players will be forced to grapple with the uncertainty and trade-offs in disaster response. The learning objectives of DMOG are to: (i) increase knowledge about roles in EM, (ii) enhance EM decision-making competencies, and (iii) foster collaboration and communication among EM decision makers. The goal of creating and evaluating DMOG is to empower EM decision makers with the skills to prioritize among competing demands and allocate resources effectively during a high-pressure, high-stakes situation, thereby enhancing their communities’ resilience. The Stage 2 pilot project will accomplish this goal by delivering a fully functional DMOG to PCEM and evaluating its effectiveness. The game will feature a complex set of decisions and consequences around the derecho scenario, the creation of a virtual environment of the farmers’ market, and the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) to produce short (2 minutes or less) videos, audio, and text for the game.