A Serious Game for Training Civil Participation in Flood Crisis Management
Solmaz Goodarzi, Arseni Ivanov, David Maruscsák, Diana Quitéria Sousa
原文摘要
Floods are among the most frequent and destructive natural disasters, requiring citizens to make critical decisions under rapidly changing conditions. Most serious games related to flooding emphasize awareness, preparedness, and education in flood management, but there is still a research gap on how to train citizens to act under pressure, uncertainty, and stress. In this paper, we position Virtual Reality (VR) serious games as a promising approach to addressing this gap by providing experiential and immersive training opportunities for citizens. We propose a conceptual VR serious game that enables participants to experience realistic flood scenarios, practice decision-making, rehearse appropriate response behaviors, and develop response-related skills in a safe and controlled environment. In addition, we suggest a research agenda and an evaluation framework focused on flood risk awareness, response capabilities, and stress-related outcomes. The framework thoughtfully integrates subjective, objective, and physiological measures to assess the effectiveness of immersive flood-response training. Finally, we present design, methodological, ethical, and user-experience considerations in VR-based disaster training, and outline future research directions for the development and evaluation of immersive serious games for flood emergency response. The present study aims to contribute to the growing intersection of serious games, extended reality, and disaster risk reduction by establishing citizen-centered response training as a significant yet under-researched field.
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