Towards using Serious Games for realistic evaluation of disaster management IT tools

Technological developments, along with political and financial incentives have encouraged an increasing number of developers and researchers to develop tools and systems to aid disaster responders. To ensure adoption of these innovations evaluations are necessary. Evaluations aid in assessing the impact, the fit with the users’ requirements and the identification of improvements. However options for conducting realistic evaluations of tools tailored for use in a disaster context are limited. Real-life evaluations are unfeasible because of the disaster context, while dedicated simulations are costly. This paper proposes the use of serious games as an evaluation method; striking a balance between realism required for valid and useful feedback and the light-weight resource use to ensure multiple iterative evaluations are feasible. In addition to the theoretical outline this evaluation method has been applied to a system for crisis-related data collection, demonstrating the usability of serious games for IT-tool evaluation in a disaster context.