Unified Effort: Developing a Mixed Reality Serious Game for Collaborative Crisis Management Training

"Unified Effort" presents the design rationale and development process for a mixed reality serious game intended to train municipal and county crisis management staff in Norway. Its central premise is that collaboration failures have contributed to major disasters, and that existing exercises tend to leave organizations practicing within their own silos. The game is positioned as a supplement to hard-skills training, targeting soft skills such as communication, situational awareness, and group decision making, with cross-organizational learning as its core aim.

The design was shaped through expert interviews and an eight-participant workshop composed of emergency-service professionals with 11 to 20 years of experience. These processes converged on an extreme-weather scenario, a Proactive Staff methodology with a standardized startup-meeting agenda, and a timeline that combines joint briefings, separate municipal command posts, and a cross-municipal coordination meeting. The authors acknowledge prerequisites, including baseline competence in staff organization and crisis management software, and they claim the design can transfer to other two-level crisis contexts.

The work is explicitly preliminary. It reports no empirical learning outcomes, as evaluation is reserved for a planned pilot followed by qualitative and quantitative assessment of collaboration, situational awareness, and soft skills. Accordingly, the findings concern design and development rather than demonstrated effectiveness.

The concluding position is that serious games should not replace procedural instruction or field exercises. Instead, they are framed as one component of a progressive, layered capability-building process that integrates both soft and hard skills. The supporting literature spans more than forty works on crisis management, serious games, and mixed reality training.