Ready! Lessons in the Design of Humanitarian Games

This 15-page report shares a study exploring the effectiveness of games designed to create awareness and trigger conversation about disaster risk reduction (DRR), particularly focusing on the example of Ready! played in Namibia. Designed by PETLab, at Parsons The New School for Design for use by the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre, Ready! is a relatively physical game that can be played using virtually any disaster scenario. The goal of this Climate Centre working paper is to identify best practices for using games in DRR and to document what has been learned for the benefit of international humanitarian organisations, designers, and practitioners interested in the potential of games. It proposes using games as a shared language between organisations and local communities – one that enables responsiveness to dynamic and complex local and global challenges.

The game mixes some of the qualities of physical sports such as foot races and scavenger hunts with games of chance such as dice, as well as player content-creation. The game's key steps are described below:

• Introduction and scenario - The facilitator splits the groups into teams of up to 20 players each, tells participants how long the game will take to play, and describes the game scenario. In the case of Namibia, the scenario was: "The river is rising and will reach your village within a week! What will you do to make sure your household is prepared?" The timeframe is an important consideration for the next step, envisioning the actions one would need to take to be better prepared and mitigate losses from the flood.
• Community brainstorm and envisioning -During this phase players participate in a brainstorming activity to think of actions to reduce the community’s flood risk. One member of the group writes the ideas down on a sheet of paper.
• Prioritising actions - From the brainstorm, community members decide on eight priority actions. These are up to the groups to negotiate; this part of the activity often generates a great deal of debate and discussion. Once they have their eight, they list them each on separate sheets of paper. Teams have a limited amount of time to for discussion and prioritisation.
• Assigning difficulty - The team then decides on the relative difficulty for each of the eight actions the community has prioritised by distributing 20 dice between the eight sheets of paper. For example, one dice would be an easy task; five indicates a very difficult to ask. This involves a level of abstraction and evaluation that usually emerges from plentiful discussion and debate among team members. Again, the facilitator applies time pressure for carrying out this task, adding to the anxiety and excitement amongst players.
• Prioritising, part 2 (optional) - This involves players ordering their top priorities by numbering them from 1 to 8. This can be useful in the post-game discussion and as a way to assign a point value to each action. This is not a necessary step for play, however, and actions can each carry the same number of points for the game to have a clear outcome. In Namibia the organisation tested several games with and without this step. They removed it in some cases for the sake of time.
• Playing the game - All of the activities prior to this step involve creating the content for the game to be played. Now the actual gameplay, goals, and rules are described.
• Set-up and strategy - Facilitators and volunteers take each team’s action papers and dice, and distribute them around the game space. In Namibia, this was usually a field about the size of a soccer field. It is also possible to play in an indoor space at least the size of a basketball court. While the action sheets and dice are being scattered throughout the space, players are asked to come up with a strategy. Will they each act as individuals, or will they form small teams to complete actions?
• The race - This is often described as the most fun part of the game. Players line up and at the count of three, race to find and complete as many actions as they can within one minute. This phase is usually very chaotic, with players running in circles as they try to find actions to complete, yelling for help, and frantically trying to roll the number one. Many players comment on how this phase of the game replicates the chaos and confusion of its real-world equivalent.
• The outcome - During this phase, the number and types of actions each team has completed are tallied and read out loud. This moment is usually amusing, as teams are congratulated on the actions that they did complete and teased about those left undone: "You saved your livestock, but forgot to evacuate yourselves!" for example. The result is announced based on the number of actions players completed. If a priority number was assigned to each action then that number is tallied for the final result.
• Post-game discussion - This is when what was learned in the game is compared to real life and a discussion follows about how the actions in the game might be accomplished during an actual a disaster. In Namibia, flooding is frequent, and the discussion of the actions communities prioritised during gameplay formed the basis of discussion for local planning activities.

According to the report, Ready! and other games have the most learning impact when it’s followed by discussion. The essential learning moment in the game is the post-game discussion. This is when what was experienced in the game is compared to real life and how the gameplay models and frames the community’s past experiences and future goals. By answering questions about their experience in the game, participants begin to see the gaps between the make-believe scenarios in the game and what they know or have experienced in previous disasters.

The report further notes that following the Namibia test phase, the game has been played in several other countries and settings by over 400 participants: from communities in Ecuador to Uganda to senior Red Cross staff at a meeting in the Netherlands and participants at the COP 18 UN climate talks in Doha, Qatar. One of the unique features of Ready! is that the content is always rewritten by players; the game can be about anything from community activism to disaster preparedness. The structure of the game remains the same, however. It involves discussion, debate, teamwork, and the ability to quickly change tactics based on current conditions.

The report outlines the following lessons learned and design recommendations, among others:

• Localise, localise, localise - Perhaps the most important lesson is to learn how your games are received in different cultural contexts and how to localise them so that they can be run in areas with varying access to materials, technologies, and spatial configurations. This involves addressing local perceptions of games, play-testing with local partners before the games are widely released, and engaging local stakeholders in the game design process. It is important to know how community hierarchy, including gender, is perceived.
• Design and test locally - Instead of a linear process of research, design, and deployment, the best process for designing games that are culturally suitable and well integrated into Red Cross Red Crescent goals is an "iterative" process of trial and error. This is not unusual; most games undergo a cycle of research, design, testing and modification. However, in the case of game design for a global context, this involves several cycles of research, prototyping and testing, both within the design group and in the locations where the games will be used.
• Play local games - In the context of the Games for a New Climate initiative, power dynamics are further complicated by the nature of the project: they often involve foreigners representing a powerful organisation visiting a local community that perceives the organisation as more powerful than it actually is at solving real local problems. One way to shift the balance of power in the very beginning of a field visit is to start off by asking participants to teach the team some of their games. Playing local games with the participants, often games the visiting team is not very good at, can help provide some levity as well and set a playful tone.
• Plan for facilitation - A plan for training game facilitators needs to be integrated into the process of designing your games. Like most non-digital games, all of the games developed by PetLab depend on someone to facilitate each game (prepare materials, explain rules, referee, and chair discussions).

The report concludes that designing games involves responsiveness to how our experiences and knowledge differ, and how we can open the design process up to designing games with communities and practitioners from different fields. A game is not designed – and can’t exist – in a vacuum, it is a community of designers and players who make it meaningful. This paper is an attempt to capture some of the work applying games to problems such as climate change, and to share what has been learned so that we can be more resilient, knowledgeable, and engaged in the face of an uncertain future.

Click here to download the Ready! game instructions in PDF format.