Serious Game for Training to Escape from Disasters and Deal with Accidents

This paper presents the design and planned validation of a serious game intended to train players to respond to disasters and everyday accidents. The motivation is grounded in Japan's high exposure to earthquakes and in rising numbers of domestic emergency transports, with figures from the Tokyo Fire Department showing 144,548 people transported to emergency services in 2018, the highest level of the preceding five years, and roughly half of such incidents occurring in homes. The authors position serious games, which pursue real-world skills beyond game completion, as a promising training medium and draw on prior work showing that games can improve disaster risk perception and evacuation knowledge, though in one comparison a game's learning effect was slightly weaker than text-based study.

The game is structured around a protagonist with chronically bad luck who must survive a series of unfortunate events within a one-month time limit. Players respond to fifteen events distributed across locations such as homes, schools, shopping districts, parks, mountains, and beaches, choosing from timed options. Correct responses yield collectible lucky items that extend the protagonist's life, while incorrect ones cost life points, and each choice is followed by an explanation. The design balances a "serious part," whose content is drawn from specialized literature, with a "game part" intended to sustain motivation through rewards and collection mechanics. A worked example involving an oil pan fire illustrates the approach, with covering the pot identified as the correct response.

Validation is planned but not yet carried out. The study proposes a pre-test of ten multiple-choice questions covering elevator entrapment, mercury spills, fractures, CPR compression rates, house fire seasonality, choking response, and AED use, followed by gameplay, a questionnaire on knowledge gain, comparison with other training methods, and enjoyment, and a post-test. The authors report that scenarios, game stages, and core systems have been completed, with bug fixes and questionnaire refinement remaining before subject experiments are conducted to assess effectiveness.