Last August, I embarked on a cross-country train trip, The Millennial Trains Project, to research and design interactive disaster preparedness games. The goal: exploring ways that games could increase resilience and disseminate information. It was fascinating, and exposed some core truths about our country’s relationship with disaster. But before we dive into the conclusions, here is a little backstory:
I work for a company called The Go Game - we design interactive adventure games like The Amazing Race, Midnight Madness and The Game (with Michael Douglas). In 2011, I asked my bosses if we could create a Zombie Apocalypse Disaster Preparedness Game in which players ran around the city learning urban preparedness skills all while being chased by actors dressed as zombies. It was a blast. People went nuts over the idea. To this day, we STILL get emails from people asking about when the next game will be.
Since 2011, we’ve produced a number of games around disaster preparedness, but they’ve been specific to California-based threats – earthquakes, tsunamis, and wildfires. The reason why I applied for the Millennial Trains Project was to scale this project. In each city I met with first responders, Red Cross, disaster management agencies, etc to learn what information they were trying to share with the public about threats specific to their region. I also interviewed locals to get a sense of what they ACTUALLY knew about disaster preparedness strategies in their area, and figure out how we might close the information gap with interactive games. The goal is to design games for tornados, hurricanes, heatwaves and floods.
Here’s what I learned: the coastal cities are terrified. They feel vulnerable and unprepared. The middle states, however, are much more confident. For example, everyone I spoke to in Montana was certified in some sort of disaster training, had survived 20 different avalanches or snow storms, and had impressive stockpiles of food and supplies. In the event of an emergency… Montana will be fine.
I also learned that different regions are addressing different challenges in the effort to become more resilient. Seattle needs help bringing the safety message to high school and college students. Portland has a bunch of different institutions doing great work, but they are not working together. New York has to translate their preparedness plans to a population that speaks over 800 different languages. My job was to determine how the tools I’ve learned as a game designer might be applied to overcome these hurdles.
Ever since I started this project with The Go Game in 2011, I’ve heard disaster management professionals blame our country’s lack of preparedness on apathy. Why else would you explain the fact that people still don’t have Go Bags or basic emergency plans for their family? But I don’t think that is the case. I believe disasters are so enormous and terrifying, that people simply block them out. It is too big, it is too inaccessible.
Disaster preparedness is also very isolating and boring. Would I rather go to the hardware store and pick out flashlights by myself for a crisis that is too scary to think about, or spend time with my family and friends? The latter, obviously.
But there is one thing that was true in every place we stopped – one thing that united everyone in these incredibly diverse regions: Everyone is tired of being motivated by fear. Fear is exhausting, it’s intimidating, and it’s a massive bummer. So by creating games, we can offer people a different entry point: A way to tackle disaster preparedness in a way that is social, accessible and best of all, fun.