A serious gaming framework for decision support on hydrological hazards

With increasing population and human intervention on the natural environment, hazards are a growing threat, coming in many forms, including floods, droughts, soil erosion, and water pollution. A key approach to mitigate hydrological disaster risk at the community level is informed planning with decision support systems. The literature shows emerging efforts on multi-hazard decision support systems for hydrological disasters and demonstrates the need for an engaging, accessible, and collaborative serious game environment facilitating the relationship between the environment and communities. In this study, a web-based decision support tool (DST) was developed for hydrological multi-hazard analysis while employing gamification techniques to introduce a competitive element. The serious gaming environment provides functionalities for intuitive management, visualization, and analysis of geospatial, hydrological, and economic data to help stakeholders in the decision-making process regarding hydrological hazard preparedness and response. Major contributions of the presented DST include involving the community in environmental decision making by reducing the technical complexity required for analysis, increasing community awareness for the environmental and socio-economic consequences of hydrological hazards, and allowing stakeholders to discover and discuss potential trade-offs to hazardous scenarios considering the limitations in budget, regulations, and technicality. The paper describes the software design approaches and system architecture applied for a modular, secure, and scalable software as well as the framework's intuitive web-based user interfaces for real-time and collaborative data analysis and damage assessment. Finally, a case study was conducted to demonstrate the usability of DST in a formal setting and to measure user satisfaction with surveys.