VigiFlood: evaluating the impact of a change of perspective on flood vigilance

TL;DR

VigiFlood is a serious game designed to train citizens in understanding flood risk communication and uncertainty, aiming to improve their awareness and response to flood alerts by adopting the perspective of emergency communicators.

Contribution

The paper introduces VigiFlood, a novel serious game that simulates flood risk communication from the perspective of emergency managers to enhance public understanding.

Findings

Players showed increased flood risk awareness after playing the game

The game improved trust in emergency communication despite forecast uncertainties

Participants' behavioral intentions towards flood vigilance became more informed

Abstract

Emergency managers receive communication training about the importance of being 'first, right and credible', and taking into account the psychology of their audience and their particular reasoning under stress and risk. But we believe that citizens should be similarly trained about how to deal with risk communication. In particular, such messages necessarily carry a part of uncertainty since most natural risks are difficult to accurately forecast ahead of time. Yet, citizens should keep trusting the emergency communicators even after they made forecasting errors in the past. We have designed a serious game called Vigiflood, based on a real case study of flash floods hitting the South West of France in October 2018. In this game, the user changes perspective by taking the role of an emergency communicator, having to set the level of vigilance to alert the population, based on uncertain clues. Our hypothesis is that this change of perspective can improve the player's awareness and response to future flood vigilance announcements. We evaluated this game through an online survey where people were asked to answer a questionnaire about flood risk awareness and behavioural intentions before and after playing the game, in order to assess its impact.