Unified Effort: Developing a Mixed Reality Serious Game for Collaborative Crisis Management Training

Abstract: Crises and disasters include both predictable and unpredictable events. In a turbulent world that has recently experienced a pandemic and wars, and is increasingly affected by climate change, there is a growing need to develop effective public crisis management capabilities. Emergency preparedness is a critical foundation for crisis management. Training and exercises are essential components of preparedness and are becoming increasingly relevant for a wide range of organisations in society. To achieve a unified response to threatening events, a wide range of actors - with different backgrounds, objectives, competencies and organisational frameworks - must overcome the challenges of working together. To address this complex situation, forums for knowledge sharing and learning are required. Serious games in mixed reality can be used as a platform for collaborative training and serve as such a forum. Mixed reality systems connect virtual and physical reality, providing users with a sense of immersion, engagement and interaction in both environments. The aim of this paper is to design a short, serious game for collaboration training with two command levels in a mixed reality. Theories of crisis management, along with related research on serious games design, create the framework for the game. The game content was further developed in a co-design process with selected professionals. This paper describes the development of the “Unified Effort” game. The serious game is designed for basic training of municipalities and county offices in soft skills such as communication, situational awareness and group decision making. The game is not intended to replace hard skills such as procedural training and field drills, but can be used as a supplement to this type of training.