"I have a plan to start": Empowering Awareness and Behavior Change through a Collaborative Flood Resilience Game

Paper Title

"I have a plan to start”: Empowering Awareness and Behavior Change through a Collaborative Flood Resilience Game

Publication Info

• Topic area: Climate resilience education through collaborative game design.
• Keywords: Flood resilience, serious games, climate adaptation, intergenerational play, collaborative learning, behavior change, local adaptation, community empowerment, participatory efficacy, HCI.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: There is a lack of tools to empower bottom-up climate resilience by increasing awareness, agency, and participatory efficacy in local communities. Existing serious games often focus on preparedness but rarely address recovery or foster long-term engagement.
• Significance: Empowering individuals and communities to take proactive, locally relevant actions is critical for mitigating the impacts of natural hazards like flooding, especially as climate change increases risks.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work has shown that serious games can foster learning and behavior change, but climate adaptation games remain underexplored. Existing games often fail to address the full resilience cycle (preparedness, impact, and recovery) or to integrate locally adapted, actionable content. This paper builds on these gaps by designing a game that emphasizes local relevance, intergenerational collaboration, and practice-based mechanics.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A locally adapted, intergenerational, collaborative, and digitally enhanced tabletop-card game focused on flood resilience, developed using a research-for-and-through co-design methodology.
• Novelty:
  1. A methodological approach to identifying and embedding locally relevant features into game mechanics.
  2. A collaborative game artifact that spans all flood-related stages, including recovery.
  3. Empirical insights into the role of intergenerational and collaborative play in fostering bottom-up climate action.
  4. Findings on the distinction between empowerment and long-term engagement for real-world action-taking.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted field visits, focus groups, and surveys to gather local insights.
  • Developed a tabletop game with card-based actions mapped to four flood phases (long before, immediately before, during, and after).
  • Integrated local data, animated flood scenarios, and tangible components (cards, NFC readers) to enhance engagement.
  • Iteratively tested prototypes with community members and experts, refining design values such as local adaptation, collaboration, and intergenerational play.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • 254 participants played the game; 57 completed an onsite survey, and 11 completed a follow-up survey.
  • Players reported increased awareness of local risks, countermeasures, and their participatory efficacy.
  • One participant took real-life action (preparing an emergency kit for their pet), while others cited a lack of urgency as a barrier to action.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • The game uniquely integrates local context, intergenerational collaboration, and the full resilience cycle, addressing gaps in prior climate resilience games.
  • Players reported feeling safer and more empowered after playing, with increased understanding of shared responsibilities and actionable steps.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Conducted a two-week field study at a community-led educational center, including observational notes, sensor data, and surveys.
  • Observed diverse intergenerational and collaborative dynamics, with players discussing strategies and learning from each other.
  • Likert-scale responses indicated high perceived local relevance and empowerment (e.g., M=4.2 for impacting neighborhood flood resilience).
• Limitations and future work:
  • Low follow-up survey participation (n=11) and limited long-term action-taking.
  • Lack of co-design iterations with children and inability to match onsite and follow-up survey responses.
  • Future work will explore scalable local adaptation methods, long-term engagement mechanics, and hybrid tabletop-digital designs.

Summary

This paper presents a collaborative tabletop-card game designed to empower local communities in flood resilience through intergenerational and locally adapted play. The game increased players’ awareness, agency, and understanding of participatory efficacy, with one participant taking real-life action. However, long-term engagement remains a challenge. The work contributes a methodological framework for embedding local relevance into game mechanics and highlights the potential of social play to foster bottom-up climate action. Future research will address scalability, sustained engagement, and broader applicability to other contexts and hazards.