Transdisciplinarity in Serious Gaming Design for Improved Crisis Preparedness

Abstract

Transdisciplinarity is identified as an important paradigm to cope with the complexity of societal problems, such as public health crisis and climate change. It refers to problem solving and research strategies that integrate the knowledge from diverse disciplines to ensure a holistic approach. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, emergency management organizations are increasingly incorporating serious games to enhance their preparedness and readiness activities. While some serious games have been used within wider transdisciplinary studies, literature reviews show that the games themselves do not exhibit a sufficient degree of transdisciplinarity. In this paper we present the theoretical approach we introduced to support the integration of transdisciplinary knowledge into the design and development of SGs looking at socially relevant problems (i.e., decision-making during epidemic outbreaks) and we describe how we applied the proposed framework to design the Command, Control, Coordination, and Communication (C3C) Game. Finally, we describe the positive results from a pilot exercise conducted using the C3C Game with public health, healthcare coalition and emergency response decision makers from a large US metropolitan area.