2. Shocks without warning: Building games to map the future of disaster risk
This is part 2 of a series of 6 essays looking at how games and interactive models can be used to grapple with some of the challenges facing different sectors.
This series is particularly intended for practitioners in these sectors interested in new tools to address complex problems and to bring together people for rich conversations.
It’s also for any artists or game designers interested in applying their skills to real-world scenarios.
You can read the other essays here.
The first thing natural disaster experts teach you is: there’s no such thing as natural disasters.
Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and huge storms are all natural hazards. But they only become disasters when they interact with human systems.
If we’ve planned badly — or failed to plan at all — then a shock becomes a disaster, and a disruption becomes a catastrophe.
I was first introduced to these concepts as part of Boho’s 2016–18 collaboration with the Earth Observatory Singapore, a research unit that studies natural hazards in south-east Asia.
That project, Get The Kids And Run, looked at the challenges of responding to an immediate crisis. Players made decisions in the face of an approaching typhoon or volcano shock, and grappled with the complex trade-offs that come in those situations.
But the immediate blast zone of an unfolding shock is only one small part of understanding disaster risk.
Over the last several years, I’ve been working with the World Bank to look at disaster risk from a broader perspective.
The anatomy of risk
The classic way of thinking about disaster risk is to say that:
RISK = HAZARD x EXPOSURE x VULNERABILITY
Hazard refers to the scale of the shock. Is it a small storm or a category 3 hurricane? A little tremor or a major earthquake?
Exposure relates to where things are in relation to the hazard. A community on a beachfront is more exposed to a cyclone than one in the hills. A building on a faultline is more exposed to earthquakes than one 50 kilometres distant.
Vulnerability means the fragility of something if it’s hit. An old, badly built apartment building is more vulnerable than a a newly-built office building with steel reinforcing, even if they’re both hit by the same shock.
The degree of risk that a building or a community faces is a combination of these three factors.
Over the last two years, I’ve used this core framing of risk as the foundation for a series of games that explore concepts from risk research such as polycrises, goverment coordination and the psychology of inaction.
Polycrises
In 2020, I was commissioned by the World Bank’s Understanding Risk Forum to create an interactive scenario activity looking at multiple hazard crises.
Humans have always been vulnerable to hazards that hit simultaneously or in quick succession. A fire might coincide with a volcano eruption, a landslide might hit in the aftermath of a storm or an earthquake might strike during a heatwave.
In the Philippines, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 coincided with the landfall of Tyhoon Yunya. The volcanic ash cloud was swept up by the typhoon and dumped on the land, causing powerlines and flat-roofed buildings to collapse.
More recently, the Philippines was hit by a number of typhoons during the 2020 Covid lockdown. Social distancing was impossible in evacuation shelters, which quickly became Covid hotspots.
As the climate changes, these overlapping ‘polycrises’ are becoming more common. The frequency of storms, fires and floods are increasing, and with them the likelihood of multiple hazards striking at once.
Disaster risk response is always a delicate balancing act, but when multiple shocks hit at once, those critical decisions become even more complex and challenging.
But this complexity is no excuse for policy-makers to not have effective strategies in place. As Dietrich Dörner points out, the reason we fail to handle unpredictable situations is not that they’re impossible — it’s that we didn’t take the time to properly anticipate them.
Stages of preparation
Working with the Understanding Risk team, I developed Heavy Rain, a game for a virtual audience as part of the 2020 UR conference. The game explored a multiple hazard scenario — a community hit by an earthquake during the onset of a cyclone.
Using storyboard art by the excellent Sacha Bryning and Debbie Kate, Heavy Rain opens in the year 2030 with the imagined crises — a cyclone followed by an earthquake — hitting a small island community. Then the game jumps back in time to illustrate the stages of preparation that can equip us for dealing with these kinds of shocks.
In the first flashback, the game goes back to 10 years before the crisis, to look at the researchers conducting risk assessments and identifying vulnerabilities in the area.
Next the game jumps forward to five years before the shock hits, as policy-makers are attempting to address the vulnerabilities raised in that risk assessment.
Then the game goes ahead another five years to just a few days before the storm, as emergency services teams are preparing evacuation plans based on the work done by the researchers and policy-makers.
At each phase, players make choices which determine how successful that phase is. The outcome of each phase affects the next, and all the choices add up to create an outcome for the characters we meet facing the storm and the earthquake.
In the final stage, the game looks at the aftermath of the storm. This is a critical moment for a community. The disaster has revealed new vulnerabilities and weaknesses in the community’s infrastructure. The post-disaster recovery is a chance to build back better.
This imperative to make the most of the post-disaster recovery is at odds with the approach of many governments and NGOs, which is to return the community to the way it was before the disaster as quickly as possible.
After the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami hit Banda Aceh in Indonesia, it revealed deep issues in how the city was laid out. There were proposals to rebuild the city in a way that would reduce its exposure and vulnerability to future tsunamis.
However, the NGOs working on the ground were legally obliged to spend their donations within a certain short period of time, and so they pushed to rebuild as quickly as possible. The result was that existing weaknesses were reproduced, and the rebuilt city was just as vulnerable to the next tsunami as it was before.
The message from the World Bank’s Understanding Risk team, expressed in the Heavy Rain simulation, is that disaster recovery is actually part of the preparation stage for the next disaster. This mindset needs to be adopted at all levels of decision-making.
Shocks without warning
When Boho worked with the Earth Observatory Singapore, our brief was to create games that looked at the period from the first warning of a natural hazard up until the impact itself. EOS wanted our scenarios to examine the decisions that we make in that brief window of preparation.
For that reason, we focused our attention on hazards that give some warning before they hit: volcanos, typhoons and fires.
But more recently, I’ve been looking at a hazard which strikes with virtually no warning: earthquakes.
In 2021, I was invited to join the World Bank’s mission to Romania to address seismic risk.
Romania is one of the most seismically active countries in Europe. A major earthquake devastated the city of Bucharest in 1977 and it’s a matter of time until the next one strikes.
Working with a World Bank team of seismic engineers and risk experts, I was tasked with making a series of interactive scenarios examining different aspects of earthquake risk.
These scenarios were designed for policy-makers, NGOs and community groups throughout Romania, to communicate the dangers facing the country from the next earthquake shock, and to help them translate that understanding into meaningful action.
Multiple perspectives
In the first game of the series, we looked at the multiple factors that turn a hazard into a disaster.
Players took on the role of investigators arriving in Bucharest after a major earthquake. Their job was to interview people on the ground to find out why the earthquake had been so devastating.
In conversations with people such as paramedics, seismic engineers and local tenants, players tried to uncover what went wrong and who was responsible.
The hydrologist told stories about how the river overflowed. Emergency service workers talked about needing to sleep in their cars because of a lack of emergency shelters. Government officials discussed the lack of construction vehicles available to remove the rubble.
There’s an old adage that the best way to understand a system is to look at it when it breaks. By seeing the fractures as the city failed to handle the impact of the earthquake, players were introduced to the many sub-systems at play within disaster risk management, where they are strong and where they are vulnerable.
Psychology of inaction
Equipped with this knowledge, players could see the multiple vulnerabilities exposing Romania to danger when the next earthquake hits.
But the very scale of the challenge facing Romania creates a new question: When the problem is so big and your resources are so few, where do you even begin?
Inaction in the face of risk is a complex behaviour. It stems from a lack of successful references, concurrent priorities, and from a sense of being overwhelmed by the scale of the problem.
Bucharest has a significant number of buildings that are ‘vulnerable to seismic risk’ — meaning, if an earthquake hits, they will collapse.
It’s possible to ‘consolidate’ these buildings — to reengineer them with reinforced steel and make them safer. But this takes time and costs money. At the present moment, the Romanian government has only enough budget to consolidate a small number of these at-risk buildings.
What do you do when you can only address a fraction of the problem? It’s easy to be paralysed. There’s a temptation to do nothing, to avoid panicking the public by drawing attention to the scale of the problem.
Our game Vote to Consolidate unpacked this dynamic. Playing as a government authority, players had a small budget and a large number of buildings in need of consolidation.
The game invited players to look at these buildings through a number of different lenses: occupancy, age, resident income, and so on. Risk tends to concentrate in specific parts of the system (the most fragile communities, the most fragile infrastructure, the most fragile institutions).
By viewing these buildings from these specific perspectives, the game allowed players to break the system into small parts and assess their risk separately. This ‘risk-informed prioritization’ is a powerful way to break down the problem of how to maximise risk resilience when you can only address a small part of the problem.
As players began to see that risk was not uniformly distributed throughout the city, they were able to utilize cost-benefit considerations and identify the critical places to begin work, breaking the paralysis of inaction.
Coordinating government response
Other games in the series I created for the Romanian mission focused on familiar issues for policy-makers managing risk: balancing budgets or schedules, trading off competing priorities with limited money or time.
The last game in the series, though, looked at a different dynamic entirely.
Ministry of Coordination focused on the trade off facing government departments working to prepare a disaster response.
Departments within government agencies have their own projects and priorities that they must deliver.
But an effective plan for a major crisis like an earthquake can only be created by a coordinated effort at scale.
In Ministry of Coordination, players worked in teams. Each team represented a different department of the fictional Ministry of Coordination — legal, marketing, HR, finance and so on.
Teams negotiated among themselves and with each other to decide how much effort to focus on their own team’s tasks, and how much to contribute to collaborative projects, such a Ministry-wide earthquake planning project.
So it was a planning game about coordinating to make a plan. On the one hand, it’s very meta and seemingly removed from the realities of the disaster risk. On the other hand, the ability to coordinate action between diverse government units is one of the most critical skills needed to plan for a major shock.
Future disaster risk games
After more than six years creating games in collaboration with disaster risk experts, I feel we’re only just starting to delve into the possibilities for interactive scenarios in this field.
Areas such as post-disaster recovery and international development are under-explored topics for modelling and developing into playable scenarios.
There are also emerging fields such as anticipatory action, where agencies try to provide disaster relief to affected regions before a hazard hits.
These games and scenarios can be adapted for policy-makers, NGOs, businesses and community members in vulnerable areas.
As the shocks associated with a warming world increase in size and frequency, we can get better at handling them — and these kinds of scenario activities represent another tool up our sleeve for preparing for them.
