A Multi-player Approach in Serious Games: Testing Pedestrian Fire Evacuation Scenarios

Serious Games are being increasingly used as a tool for various applications, including social simulation. One of the domains of application is fire safety training and behaviour elicitation. Injuries and fatal casualties having its origin from fires are a concern for fire safety engineers, building managers, and emergency responders. Training building occupants has been a challenge for quite some time. One approach is by classroom education or a more practical way by performing exercises, called fire drills. The former consists of a method for validating evacuation plans and tests what-if scenarios. Another important issue is the lack of human behaviour data; this aspect is often referred to as a drawback to evacuation simulator developers. The elicitation of behavioural knowledge to feed simulators constitutes a critical aspect for which some researchers have proposed the use of Serious Games. This paper addresses these issues in respect to: i) train escape procedures using Serious Games as an educational tool; ii) acquire valuable knowledge using the concept of participatory simulation. A test-bed using Serious Games, developed on the Unity3D framework, implements a multi-player approach taking advantage of its features. The experimental setup is presented and some test results are discussed. Future work is two-fold: expand and refine the scenarios for a wider set of possibilities; perform massive data collection that will be used to feed existing multi-agent evacuation simulators.