Gamified crisis framework : the development of serious games for improving behaviors and skills when facing major disasters

Every day all over the world, social, economic, health, environmental and political movements convulse and revolve with no limit. Out of these events, some may gain status as paradigmatic, events that affect the world, marking a before and after in the territory they affect. There is always a risk of being on the path of a crisis and dealing with the disaster that follows it. To ameliorate the repercussions of these disasters, people need to have a solid grasp of skills and behaviors that can help them better survive these events, particularly those that become paradigmatic. This study focuses on the potential of video games as a vehicle for the fomentation of Awareness, Empathy, Knowledge & Skills, and Active Behaviors. To this end, this study proposes creating the Gamified Crisis Framework (GCF), a guideline for researchers and creators. The GCF is based on the characteristics of the phenomena from a complete perspective that includes the societal context, the actor's characteristics, and cultural location, on top of the best practices of risk amelioration, emergency response, and recommendations on how to obtain them. To get an insight into the framework's effectivity, this study conducted a qualitative study, divided into a play phase and a questionnaire phase. The play phase revolves around a game created through the GCF by the title of "Storm Line", based on the 2017 hurricane Maria, nurtured by a combination of existing research and the researcher's firsthand experience conducting field research. The game, presented as a text adventure, is a rudimentary but functional Twine prototype. 31 people took part in the study, 3 for in-depth interviews for preliminary questionnaire assessment, and 28 respondents of semi-structured queries. The respondents provided insightful answers that culminated in the codification of the most important themes for them. Findings revealed that not only the framework provides an experience that successfully conveys its themes of Awareness and Empathy, but that the game in its current state makes a better job at helping them reconsider and affirm their own practice for Active Behaviors, and Knowledge & Skills. In this study, we also get the insight that for the games developed through the GCF, the production can benefit from more sophisticated games.