Mário Escarce Junior

Wildfire preparedness is a deeply social challenge that depends on shared understanding, coordinated action, and community-level decision-making. Serious games have emerged as promising tools for supporting preparedness learning, yet their evaluation often relies on individual outcomes or surveys, leaving interactional learning processes underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing how players from wildfire-affected communities collaboratively constructed preparedness knowledge while playing Firesafe Friends, a two-player serious game. Using a Discourse Acts approach, we analyzed dialogue from onsite and remote sessions (n = 20) and triangulated the findings with pre/post surveys and observational notes. Our analysis reveals distinct phases of collaborative learning – orientation, strategy formation, collaboration, and reflection – marked by shifts in cognitive, social, and integrated discourse acts. Budget constraints prompted negotiation, contested upgrades supported collective reasoning, and reflective dialogue helped players connect in-game decisions to real-world preparedness. We contribute (1) an empirical analysis of discourse as a mechanism for resilience learning, (2) a discourse-centered triangulated evaluation method, and (3) design implications for resilience games that scaffold negotiation and reflection to strengthen community preparedness.

As wildfires increasingly threaten communities worldwide, those at risk can benefit from community-centric approaches to designing interventions. A multi-layered approach can make members of the community powerful co-designers by incorporating their ideas alongside insights from experts and designers to successfully create and deploy an intervention. We took a community-centered Research through Design approach to develop a Serious Game to promote wildfire preparedness in two communities. Participatory Design workshops, interviews, and targeted user studies allowed us to leverage local knowledge of residents and expertise of stakeholders at distinct stages where their insight could be best utilized. Based on this work, we propose a process for designing Serious Games as interventions for complex societal challenges by utilizing community and expert involvement throughout iteration. Our findings suggest that the games we designed following this process lead to concrete learning and opportunities for discussion, and offer flexibility for integration with other community initiatives.

Climate change uniquely impacts various communities and stakeholders. Serious Games have become a prominent mobilization force to educate local communities about the impact of climate change and a communities role in climate action. Game designers have utilized diverse narrative and design strategies to convey concepts of climate change to players. Despite the influential role of religion as a game mechanic and its role as a major mobilization force worldwide, there is minimal research on leveraging this powerful motivator in serious games for climate action. In our paper, we use a UX approach to design a climate action game focused on the Hindu religion. In this WIP paper, we detail our methodology, share insights from our ethnographic UX research, introduce a climate change game featuring unique mechanics and narrative, and outline our strategy for evaluating and comparing this newly developed game with existing climate change games.

Serious games can be a valuable addition to the resources available for increasing community resilience in the face of disaster. The purpose of this project is to work closely with two communities at risk of wildfire to design and develop a serious game that can be used by experts and leaders within those communities as part of their holistic approach to increasing resilience and improving readiness of their community members. We follow a community-centric approach, utilizing Participatory Design and Research through Design to engage directly with community members and local experts. This paper documents our findings at two workshops involving the early game designs and contributes to the broader exploration of the use of Participatory Design with serious games in support of community initiatives around disaster preparedness.

This work presents an autonomous approach that explores the dynamic generation of relaxing soundscapes for games and artistic installations. Differently from past works, this system can generate music and images simultaneously, preserving human intent and coherency. We present our algorithm for the generation of audiovisual instances and also a system based on this approach, verifying the quality of the outcomes it can produce in light of current approaches for the generation of images and music. We also instigate the discussion around the new paradigm in arts, where the creative process is delegated to autonomous systems, with limited human participation. Our user study (N=74) shows that our approach overcomes current deep learning models in terms of quality, being recognized as human production, as if the outcome were being generated out of an endless musical improvisation performance.