A Review of Digital Serious Games for Tsunami Risk Communication

Digital serious games represent a transformative, albeit underdeveloped, frontier in tsunami risk communication for secondary school students. By shifting from traditional fact-transfer pedagogical models to interactive, experiential learning, these digital tools offer a unique capacity to improve evacuation decision-making and disaster preparedness. Despite this potential, the current landscape is characterized by a severe scarcity of classroom-ready resources. Most existing software suffers from technical obsolescence, excessive complexity, or a failure to align game mechanics with established safety protocols, leaving educators with few viable options for formal instruction.

The effectiveness of current offerings, such as Disaster Master, Stop Disasters, and Tanah, remains largely anecdotal due to a lack of rigorous, large-scale experimental evidence. A critical design challenge persists in balancing altruistic gameplay mechanics with the self-reliant Tendenko evacuation philosophy, which prioritizes individual survival to ensure broader community safety. When game design fails to reconcile these conflicting objectives, the resulting educational outcomes often deviate from essential safety goals. Consequently, the industry currently lacks a standardized framework to ensure that game-based learning is both scientifically accurate and pedagogically sound.

To bridge this gap, future development must prioritize deep collaboration between disaster management specialists, educators, and game designers. Moving forward, the industry requires a more systematic approach that anchors game mechanics to verifiable learning objectives and actionable safety protocols. By integrating evidence-based disaster risk reduction strategies into the design process, serious games can evolve from experimental novelties into essential, reliable tools for building disaster resilience among younger generations. Establishing such a foundation is necessary to move beyond the current reliance on limited, fragmented resources and toward a more robust, standardized educational ecosystem.