Disaster Prevention Social Awareness: The Stop Disasters! Case Study

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.