Catalogue record
Erin Mullin; Ashlea Bennett Milburn
You play an emergency dispatcher in the hours after a disaster. One vehicle is available, and more people need help than you can reach. You start with the calls that came through the emergency line, and you plan a route. Part way through, new requests arrive from social media. Some may be false. You choose whether to go after them or stay with the calls you trust. Later you learn which ones were real, and you plan again with the time you have left. Then you play a second round where every stop is final the moment you choose it. At the end you see how many lives you saved.
Our review
A narrow but honest teaching game about acting on unverified information, designed for school students rather than humanitarian practitioners.
We could not play this game. The review below is based on official materials, other reviews and studies.
Logistics to the Rescue is a spreadsheet game about routing a single rescue vehicle after a disaster. It was written by Erin Mullin and Ashlea Bennett Milburn at the Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Arkansas, and published in 2021 in INFORMS Transactions on Education, which is an open-access journal. The game grew out of Mullin's master's thesis, which is also free to read and which describes both this game and a companion version for emergency managers called Dispatch to the Rescue.
You play alone. The map is a 20 by 20 grid with a depot in the centre and 22 locations that need help. There are two rounds. The authors say the activity is ideally taught as a 1.5 to 2 hour lesson, including a short presentation, the game and guided instruction. A standalone play time is not given.
The playable files, the spreadsheet and other notes are kept on a restricted page open only to verified instructors. We contacted the authors without success.
The stated aim is not humanitarian training. The authors want to attract school students, and girls in particular, towards engineering careers, by showing engineering as creative and cooperative rather than technical and unsocial. The second aim is to show that routes which use social media posts as well as emergency calls save at least as many lives as routes built only from emergency calls, even when many of the posts turn out to be false. The authors point to a 2012 survey of emergency agencies in the United States. About three quarters of them were already watching social media, but more than three quarters would not send anyone to a request until a trusted source had confirmed it. Roughly one in ten said they would act without waiting. The game is an argument aimed at the gap between those two numbers. It does not attempt needs assessment, coordination between agencies, supply chains, or anything about international response.
Round one runs in three stages. In stage one you see only the emergency calls, and you plan a route within a fixed time budget. At minute twenty you are interrupted: the social media locations appear, and you re-plan the remainder. About 45% of all locations come from social media, and 60% of those are real. At minute fifty you are interrupted again and told which posts were true. You re-plan once more. Each time, the part of the route you have already driven is frozen. Round two removes the planning. Locations are revealed as time passes, and every stop you choose is permanent the moment you choose it.
Two numbers are reported at the end: lives saved, and average distance driven per accurate visit. The second number is the better teaching device, because it prices the wrong decision. Driving to a false request is not free — it is time taken from a real one, and the game shows you exactly how much.
It is not really a standalone spreadsheet exercise. The authors designed it as a layered classroom activity: instructions are revealed step by step, the game is accompanied by a preliminary lesson, and they recommend at least two instructors. That makes the teaching context part of the game rather than an optional extra.
The mechanics do deliver the claim, and the claim is not invented for the classroom. It rests on a 2018 study by Emre Kirac and Ashlea Bennett Milburn, which tested five ways of handling unverified requests across 120 scenarios built from the 2010 Haiti earthquake, using real crisis messages, real building damage records and a real road network. Refusing social data left the most people unreached, at about 56 per cent of accurate demand unserved. Treating social and official requests alike left the fewest, at about 36 per cent. That is a serious result, and it is what the game is built to convey.
The game simplifies away the condition the result depends on. The study found the advantage comes from spare capacity: when only two vehicles were available, the cautious approaches did no better than refusing social data outright, because there was no slack left to spend on an uncertain address. The game gives you one vehicle and a tight clock, and still presents the lesson as a flat rule. The researchers also say their findings may not carry to other kinds of disaster, and that counting people served ignores urgency and fairness. A facilitator should say all of this out loud. Without it, players learn a slogan rather than a trade-off.
The classroom evidence is thinner, and it answers a different question. Thirty-five girls aged eleven and twelve played the game at engineering summer camps in 2018 and 2019. The survey asked players whether their understanding had improved, which measures opinion rather than learning. The routing data is better, because it records what players did: they averaged 11.14 lives saved when restricted to emergency calls and 12.97 once they could act on confirmed social media requests, and the few who kept ignoring social media beat neither average. The participants also reported improved understanding of disaster response and the use of social data, and the authors found the challenge appropriate for their age and skill level. This tells you that the game was playable for the intended age group and that participants felt they understood the topic better afterwards. It does not show that they actually learned more than they would have from another lesson, or that the game changed how they would make decisions later. The Haiti study tests the underlying logistics question more directly, but not the educational effect of the game.
The limits matter for this catalogue. The setting is search and rescue in a US-style emergency response system, not the wider humanitarian response environment. The game draws on disaster-response and humanitarian-logistics research, but simplifies the problem dramatically: one vehicle, a small number of locations, one life per successful visit, and no competing humanitarian priorities. It is useful for introducing uncertainty and routing, but not for representing the institutional or ethical complexity of humanitarian response. Every location is worth exactly one life, so the game cannot represent vulnerability, priority, or the most marginalised — the optimal route is the efficient one, and efficiency is never in tension with fairness. Nobody is consulted, nobody is told anything, and no one can complain. The requests arrive as data points. Finally, the access problem is real: a facilitator who cannot obtain the file cannot run the game at all.
As a short opener on information from affected people, yes, if you can get the file. It makes one argument concretely that is usually made in the abstract. Do not use it to teach logistics, prioritisation, or field decision-making. It was not built for that and does not pretend to be.
Use fair, impartial and transparent criteria to define programmes and the people or groups supported by the organisation.
The player must decide which requests one vehicle serves in limited time, so a selection criterion is unavoidable — though the game only rewards efficiency and never raises impartiality, so a facilitator has to introduce that question.
Regularly monitor and adjust programmes to ensure actions are timely, accessible and address the priority needs of people and communities.
The game is built around two forced response plans: new requests arrive mid-route and the player must revise the remaining plan around what has changed, which is monitoring and adjustment made into the core mechanic.
Identify, prevent, mitigate and address potential and actual negative impacts of programmes on people and communities.
Every journey to a false request is time taken from someone who genuinely needed help, and the game measures that cost directly as distance driven per person actually reached.
Collect disaggregated data for decision making that reflects the diversity of people and communities and in ways that minimise demands on them.
The whole game turns on whether to use an unofficial channel that people in crisis actually reach for, which is the practical form of the question about which data sources are admitted into decisions.
Manage and use resources to achieve their intended purpose, minimising waste and the impact on the environment.
With one vehicle and a fixed time budget, every wasted trip is visible in the final score, making the stewardship of a scarce response asset something the player feels rather than reads about.
Social media can improve disaster response by quickly identifying needs, but the accuracy of user-generated information may be uncertain. This study examines the tradeoff between timeliness and accuracy by proposing a framework for deciding whether to act on social media data before it is fully verified. Using real social data from the 2010 Haiti earthquake and a mobile delivery case study, the research demonstrates how the framework can support disaster logistics planning and decision-making.
Traditional disaster response methods can be too slow, while social media provides faster but less reliable information. This research develops two role-playing games to explore how social media can support emergency response decisions. The games also promote STEM education and provide insights into real-world disaster management.
By Erin Mullin and Ashlea Bennett Milbur in INFORMS Transactions on Education (2021)