“All Work and all play: COBACORE platform research and evaluation through serious gaming”

25th September 2014

In the year since the COBACORE kick-off meeting, the COBACORE team has succeeded in engaging with many researchers, practitioners and developers in the field of disaster response, recovery and management. These stakeholders agree that community-driven disaster recovery is a ‘game changer’ for many end-user groups, including responding professionals and unbound* volunteers, with significant potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of both short and long-term recovery operations.

However, the challenge is how to best harness or leverage this potential. For example, how do we connect to people who are by definition not (formally) organised? How do we direct their efforts to where their help is needed most? How do we integrate and link formal response with their resources and skills? In trying to answers these questions, the COBACORE team has conducted a series of research activities including stakeholder discussions and evaluation sessions, case-study analysis and best-practice research, which have highlighted the need to develop a central collaboration system to facilitate and optimise community-based recovery. The ideas and feedback that were collected via stakeholder engagement and other research activities enabled the development of a concept and the transition from concept to platform system was facilitated through a design process (concept, systems, interfaces and information model), which led to the development of the COBACORE platform.

Testing and evaluation is always a key aspect in developing new systems, but opportunities to test systems and ideas in a disaster context are fortunately, limited. We opted to test our ideas, assumptions, solutions and development efforts in a ‘serious’ game, dubbed the COBAGAME. We did not focus on the COBACORE platform in this game, but instead ‘created’ the circumstances in which the platform would be used, immersing participants in a respective ‘role’ rather than acting as an end-user test of the platform.

Introducing COBAGAME

The COBAGAME is designed around the needs posed by the affected community which can be addressed by ‘undertaking’ an action in that neighborhood. For each action various resources are required, which will, over the course of the game, be harder to come by. In order to provide the affected community with the right relief, all communities will have to pool their resources and jointly determine what actions are to be taken where. This requires the players to assess what the needs are, establish what actions can be undertaken and who has the resources to make that happen. Most importantly, it requires the players to look beyond their own capabilities and establish collaborations rather than only undertake actions that they are able to carry out on their own. This aligns closely with the process that COBACORE aims to facilitate.

The COBAGAME provided both the end-users and the COBACORE team with an interactive and engaging environment that provided valuable feedback on the platform system. It enabled the players to understand the COBACORE concept in a very tangible setting and allowed them to not only get hands-on experience with the platform, but in general a feeling for the challenges potentially faced when collaborating with various organisations and volunteer-groups. For the COBACORE team, the game facilitated valuable stakeholder feedback, where we obtained points for improvement of the platforms, as well as new ideas to improve the integration and adoption of COBACORE for professionals and communities.
We will continue to expand and explore the possibilities of the COBAGAME, both as a test and evaluation environment and as a training tool for collaboration and coordination in general and COBACORE specifically. We look forward to welcoming and challenging you in one of our game-sessions in the future!
(*not affiliated with an organisation)

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Please note that the COBAGAME has been developed by Kenny Meesters, a PhD student in the Department of Management at Tilburg University. Kenny, who is supervised by Dr. Bartel Van der Walle, uses serious game simulations to understand and improve the impact of technologies on disaster and crisis management.