Costa Resiliente: A Serious Game Co-Designed to Foster Resilience Thinking

Resilience thinking is critical for improving disaster preparedness, response, and adaptation. While there are several strategies focused on assessing resilience capacity in human communities, there are few strategies focused on fostering resilience thinking. Game-based learning is an active and immersive teaching strategy that can foster complex skills such as resilience. However, this field needs further research in terms of its potential to strengthen community resilience to disasters. In this paper, we validated a serious game to foster community resilience. We present the collaborative creation process for the development of the board game Costa Resiliente, and its subsequent migration into a video game. We have developed an experimental study to evaluate the contributions of the mobile game against the board game. The result is a technological tool based on scientific knowledge to foster resilience thinking in coastal human communities exposed to hazards. The board game was developed using data from local research on community resilience, and from experts in emergency planning and developing games collected in focus groups. The board game’s effect on fostering resilience thinking was validated with school students from a coastal town. During the migration process into a video game, we used a design thinking methodological approach for the co-creation of audiovisual elements, in which beneficiaries participate actively and early. Through this approach, visual and auditory elements that are familiar to coastal communities were integrated into the video game elements. Our study indicates that game-based learning is a useful approach to foster resilience thinking, and that a better gaming experience can be provided by a video game. The potential of this video game for educating young age groups about community resilience is further discussed.