The authors present a serious game designed for educational purposes, especially educating decision makers to handle flooding-related problems. Compared to traditional education methodology, game-based education is generally considered to motivate students better and to deliver a better experience.

The paper describes a tower defense game where players use different engineering approaches to address multiple areas that are flooding. Players are in the role of decision maker, such as the mayor of a city. The game’s “design principles include a predefined goal and performance feedback on players’ desire to achieve [the] goal.” The game is designed to be “novel and surprising while remaining comprehensible.” For example, a random variety of tools reliability is used to trigger players’ curiosity.

A very interesting discovery from disaster relief research shows that the challenge in disaster handling is not disaster relief theory or conceptual knowledge, but inappropriate resource allocation and distribution. This game also addresses difficult social and economic considerations in a water-related disaster, such as deciding what to save with insufficient resources, using resources for pre-construction or relief afterwards.

Overall, game-based education is considered better than traditional education methodologies in how experiments motivate people, how learning by doing provides more independent thinking, and how games enhance engagement. The experiment design in this paper does not cover a control group that spends the same amount of time on the same material topics in a traditional education setup, but it is still useful in showing how social interaction in games fosters behavioral change. Although the game proposed here focuses on flooding relief, it can be adopted by other disaster relief scenarios with updated domain knowledge.