Agnessa Spanellis is a gamification researcher at the University of Edinburgh. Agnessa thinks games are too good to be reserved for entertainment purposes only, and her research aims to use games to help solve global challenges. Follow Agnessa on LinkedIn.
For many of us, volcanic eruptions only capture our attention when they are in the news, or when our daily lives might be disrupted. When the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 2010, people in Europe closely monitored its impact because their travelling plans were at stake. However, for the millions of people worldwide who live next to a dangerous volcano, the threat is far more significant. Six months after Eyjafjallajökul began erupting there was another major volcanic eruption that killed hundreds of people and disrupted hundreds of thousands of lives. On the 25th of October 2010, Mount Merapi in Indonesia began violently erupting lava and ash in its largest event since the 1870s. In this blog, we explain how we developed a game to help with risk communication in the aftermath of this devastating event.
What happened at Merapi in 2010?
Mount Merapi is one of the largest and most active volcanoes in the world. Its slopes are densely populated, with around 70,000 people living close by. The lives of those inhabiting the slopes of the volcano are deeply intertwined with it. Volcanic ash makes the soil fertile, supporting farming, but proximity to the volcano also creates risks to homes and the lives of farmers. If the eruption intensifies, everything they have worked for might be destroyed in a moment.
Indonesia is the most volcanically active country in the world and has well-established systems in place to reduce the risk from natural disasters (an area of science and policy known as “disaster risk reduction”). The country has dedicated government agencies at the national and regional level, and rescue teams. The alert level system for Merapi ranges from one to four. At alert level three people are asked to prepare to evacuate and vulnerable groups are supported to safety. At alert level four everybody is asked to evacuate to designated shelters located at a safe distance from the crater.
Mount Merapi, a volcano in Indonesia. Credit: A Spanellis.
In 2010, alert level four was activated for Merapi on 25 October. A total of 350,000 people were safely evacuated. However, 353 people died during the eruption. Despite the guidelines and order to evacuate when the eruption 2010 started, some local spiritual leaders advised their community to remain in their homes. Those who ignored the disaster risk reduction process and followed the advice of local leaders, or who chose not to evacuate for other reasons, lost their lives. Why would people go against orders that are designed to protect lives? In 2020, together with researchers from Universitas Gadjah Mada in Indonesia, the Gamification Lab for Sustainability at Heriot-Watt University started a project that aimed at addressing some of the issues identified during the 2010 eruption. The team included game designers, risk modelling and community resilience researchers.
What has changed since 2010?
When we started our study, our goal was to find out how games can be used to bridge spiritual beliefs and official guidance during evacuation. However, we soon discovered that risk perceptions and risk reduction practices had changed a lot since 2010. Disaster risk reduction agencies now make full use of social media, allowing residents to regularly check for updates about the volcano activities. Disaster risk reduction practices had become more participatory; agencies trained groups of volunteers who maintain a two-way communication with them on a dedicated radio frequency. Evacuation drills were routine, so most communities have general awareness of the evacuation procedures. The trust in their official government recommendations had improved a lot.
The new challenge was that evacuation drills, although routine, were infrequent – so in between drills people tended to forget what they had learned. In addition, the number of disaster risk reduction volunteers had reduced, and there were now so few that, as well as the need to boost recruitment to bolster volunteer numbers, communities also needed to be more self-reliant during the evacuation.
Developing a game to aid volcanic risk communication and risk reduction practice at Merapi
With these insights in mind, we set out to develop a game showing what it takes to evacuate a village. The game would add to existing training programmes as it can be played any time, as many times as you want, and at no cost. The primary purpose of the game is to help people to remember what to do when they need to evacuate. A secondary aim is to emphasise the important role of volunteers, with the hope that this would boost volunteer numbers.
We developed a mobile game called SIGAP Merapi Adventures. The game consists of two phases: preparation and evacuation. During the preparation phase, a player is offered to develop a disaster risk reduction plan to prepare a village for the evacuation. They have to choose which actions to prioritise. For example, recruiting volunteers, repairing watersheds, or fixing road signs. Different decisions each have their trade offs. And then, when the eruption starts, they are asked to evacuate. During the evacuation phase, the player encounters different situations that are partly determined by the actions they prioritised during the planning phase. For example, if they did not repair watersheds, the exit road might be blocked by a landslide, so they have to take a detour. We based the village described in the game on the village of Argomulyo. The planning phase of the game was developed with the help of the resilience framework of this village that includes 30 different parameters. Argomulyo was recognised as the village in the area that is most resilient to natural hazards, partly due to this framework, where resilience refers to the ability to bounce back after a disruption.
Imagery from the SIGAP Merapi Adventure game.
Our SIGAP Merapi Adventures game is tailored to the specific needs of the area and the communities that live there. It has been developed for the Merapi community, by community members. We collaborated with the researchers from Universitas Gadjah Mada all throughout the project. They were responsible for fieldwork (interviewing and periodic involvement of the local communities to validate game designs) as well as implementation and dissemination of the project. The UK team was responsible for designing the structure of and developing the game. As one Indonesian researcher commented on the look and feel of the game, “it just looks so Indonesian”! The attention to local context and local needs is what makes the game so powerful. On 11 March 2023, Merapi erupted again. Through gamification and interdisciplinary working with Merapi communities, the communities are now better prepared.
The future of Gaming in geoscience
The use of games to communicate geohazards is well established. For example, in Japan, community games that explore ethical dilemmas in the context of natural hazards are quite popular; through group discussions, people develop strategies on how to behave in various difficult situations. In Singapore, a group of researchers designed the Earth Girl game which aimed to expose people to risks from natural hazards in different environments. And Geoscience for the Future has heard from researchers who are using games to deepen people’s knowledge of earth systems and climate action (see Chris Skinner and Jazmin Scarlett’s blogs). I believe that the use of games in geoscience will grow: games are engaging, they can invoke emotions that written guidelines or a presentation cannot. These emotions influence our experiences, and those influences can mean that we are more likely to consider alternative options, change behaviour, or enhance our memories.
Interested? You can find out more about our work on the Merapi game here: