By Anastasia Deligianni, Meghna Mukherjee, and Jeroen Warner
Whether it’s a sudden flood or a prolonged drought – when disaster strikes, every minute matters. But how do we ensure that early warnings reach everyone, especially the most vulnerable? And how can we design disaster response systems that truly reflect the lived realities of the communities they serve? These are the questions at the heart of the LODESTAR project, a NWO-DST funded project where parties from India and the Netherlands collaborate to building Low-cost Disaster & Emergency Services for Communities At Risk.
What is LODESTAR?
LODESTAR brings together experts, citizens, and city authorities to reimagine disaster management for the 21st century. By blending cutting-edge satellite technology and artificial intelligence with local knowledge, the project aims to create an easy-to-use dashboard accessible both on mobile phones and the web that provides timely, actionable instructions during floods and droughts. But LODESTAR is about much more than technology. It’s about people, participation, and co-creation: the social processes that make the technology work.
Living Labs: Spaces for Co-creation and Dialogue
A cornerstone of LODESTAR’s approach is the creation of Living Labs – physical and social spaces in India and the Netherlands where people come together to discuss, share, and explore disaster preparedness and response. Living Labs are not just about gathering data; they are about building trust, surfacing local knowledge, hearing each other’s views and interests, and experimenting with new tools to make early warning systems (EWS) more effective and inclusive.
Why Games? Turning Dialogue into Action
One of the most powerful tools we use in the Living Labs is the serious game – an interactive simulation that creates a safe, playful environment for stakeholders to experience the challenges of disaster preparedness and response first-hand. Throughout the LODESTAR project, we developed a series of serious games, each designed to support a different Living Lab objective and spark dialogue around a specific question.
Rather than using the same game in every workshop, each game was tailored to the discussion we wanted to initiate. Some focused on how early warning messages flow through communities and how people prefer to receive alerts. Others explored which stakeholders should be involved in designing inclusive early warning systems, while others invited participants to identify where sensors should be installed to collect real-time flood data by combining technical expertise with local knowledge.
Immersive games like these help break down barriers between stakeholder groups, facilitate honest discussion, and support better decision-making. They also create space for local knowledge and lived experience to inform the design of early warning systems, ensuring these systems serve everyone – especially the most vulnerable.
Spotlight: “Rising Tides of Navira City” at ECMN26
Over the course of the two-year LODESTAR project, the Living Labs generated valuable insights into how people experience disasters, receive and interpret early warnings, and make decisions under pressure. Building on these experiences, we designed Rising Tides of Navira City – a comprehensive serious game that brings together many of the lessons, questions, and perspectives explored throughout the project.
We introduced the game at the Environmental & Climate Mobilities Network Conference (ECMN26), inviting participants to step into the roles of residents and decision-makers in Navira City, a fictional but realistic coastal city facing recurring flood risks. Each participant represents a different stakeholder – such as a shopkeeper, schoolteacher, community health worker, municipal officer, elderly resident, refugee household member, or water engineer each with their own priorities, vulnerabilities, resources, and influence.
Working in neighbourhood groups, participants navigate a series of flood-related scenarios in time-bound challenges. In Round 1, they develop a preparedness plan before any flooding occurs. In Round 2, each group is assigned one of three scenarios: a one-day early warning before a flood, an urgent one-hour warning, or a post-flood situation focused on recovery. Across all scenarios, participants also face additional disruptions such as power outages, fuel shortages, or internet connectivity loss, reflecting the cascading challenges that often occur during real flood events. With limited budgets, incomplete information, and diverse community needs, they must work together to decide the most appropriate actions for their situation. Success depends not on finding a single “right” answer, but on listening, negotiating, balancing competing priorities, and ensuring that no one is left behind.
The game reflects many of the key themes that emerged throughout LODESTAR: the importance of inclusive communication, the value of local knowledge, the need to involve diverse stakeholders in early warning systems, and the difficult trade-offs that accompany disaster preparedness and response under constraints of limited time and budget. By creating a safe and interactive space for discussion, the game encourages participants to experience the complexities of disaster management from different perspectives and to reflect on how more inclusive and people-centred early warning systems can be designed.
[Principles for] Designing Serious Simulations for Decision-Making
Designing a serious game like Rising Tides of Navira City begins with carefully defining the system being simulated and identifying the essential elements that need to be included. A key challenge is balancing realism with playability: the game should reflect the complexity, uncertainty, and constraints of real disaster situations, but without becoming overwhelming. At the same time, it must remain engaging and enjoyable so that participants can fully immerse themselves in the experience.
Once the system is defined, each game element is designed with a clear purpose. Different stakeholder roles are introduced to reflect the diversity of real communities, ensuring that varying levels of vulnerability, access to information, and decision-making power are represented. Different scenarios allow participants to experience how decisions shift under changing conditions, moving from preparedness (Round 1) to response and recovery (Round 2). Disruption events such as power outages, fuel shortages, or communication breakdowns are added to mirror cascading real-world challenges and to test coordination under pressure.
A central design principle throughout is uncertainty. By limiting information, time, and resources, the game creates space for adaptive decision-making rather than fixed solutions. This encourages participants to think in terms of trade-offs, priorities, and collaboration, rather than predetermined answers or linear planning.
There is no single right or wrong solution. Instead, the focus is on whether decisions work for the community in context, and whether all members feel included, safe, and represented in the outcome. In this way, the game becomes not only a simulation of disaster response, but also a space for co-creating more inclusive and trusted approaches to early warning systems.
Equally important is the reflection phase after each round. Groups are invited to explain how they arrived at their plans, discuss their decision-making process, and share their main insights. This collective reflection is often where the most meaningful learning takes place, as participants compare approaches and uncover different assumptions, priorities, and perspectives.
Once the conceptual design is established, the process moves into the development of game materials. Each component is carefully designed to support understanding and engagement. Stakeholder cards represent different actors within a city, highlighting differences in vulnerability, resources, and influence. Scenario cards form the core of the gameplay by introducing different flood-related situations across three phases: preparedness, early warning and response, and recovery. For each scenario, participants are required to discuss challenges, identify priorities, and develop a plan by selecting and combining appropriate actions. Action cards provide a structured set of possible interventions that participants can select, combine, and physically place onto their group plan.
In Round 2, disruption dice are introduced to simulate the intervention of unexpected cascading events such as power outages, fuel shortages, or communication breakdowns – the roll of the dice decides which. Together, these mechanics(?) ensure that participants must continuously adapt their strategies under changing and uncertain conditions.
The visual and physical design of all materials plays an important role in supporting the experience. Cards, boards, dice, and tokens are developed with clear layouts, consistent colour schemes, and a shared house style. This helps ensure clarity and cohesion, while keeping the materials engaging and intuitive without overwhelming participants.
Serious game design also requires iterative testing. Early versions are used to assess whether the game is understandable, whether materials cover the intended scope, whether timing works in practice, and whether participants can complete the scenarios within the available session time. Feedback from users is essential and is used to refine both game mechanics and material clarity.
Finally, facilitation is a critical component of the overall design. Even well-designed materials depend on clear guidance and structured delivery. Facilitators play an essential role in explaining rules, supporting participants in understanding their roles, keeping the process on track, and ensuring that assignments and objectives are clearly communicated.
In this way, serious game design becomes a layered and iterative process that combines system definition, conceptual design, material development, testing, and facilitation. When carefully integrated, these elements create a structured yet flexible space where participants can meaningfully engage with complex disaster challenges and explore more inclusive approaches to decision-making under uncertain conditions.
From Play to Progress
The experience of “Rising Tides of Navira City” at ECMN26 engaged experts on migration in an animated discussion on how serious games and Living Labs can transform disaster planning from a top-down process into a truly collaborative, inclusive effort. By turning dialogue into action, and action into learning, LODESTAR is helping cities design early warning systems that are not only technically robust but also socially just.
LODESTAR is led by Wageningen University & Research and Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Assam, with partners including Earth Systems and Global Change, Sociology of Development and Change, , MetaMeta Research, Indian Institute of Science, and Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati.
