Translating Social Dilemmas into Gameful Designs for WildfireResilience (2025)

MJ Johns, Yael Nidam, Mario Escarce Junior, Linda Hirsch, Yiyang Lu, Bridget Ho, Anna Toledo, Magy Seif El-Nasr, Stephen Collier, Edward Melcer, and Katherine Isbister (2025) “Translating Social Dilemmas into Gameful Designs for Wildfire Resilience.” CHI EA (File)

Abstract
Developing wildfire resilience is a complex social problem since approaches to achieving it vary significantly across the population. Our interdisciplinary team designed serious games focusing on dilemmas that affect decision-making for wildfire resilience and trade-offs among different decisions. We developed two serious games to aid individuals and communities in increasing their resilience
towards wildfires, based on need finding interviews (N=21), which revealed three critical dilemmas around home hardening and evacuation. We contribute our collaborative reflection about the process, the design of the two games, and a small user study (N=5) of the games. Our findings suggest that our approach led to designing authentic, carefully balanced serious games to support community resilience through exposure to the dilemmas that occur in crisis situations and in preparing for such situations. The collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of our team allowed us to effectively translate social dilemmas into gameplay.