STOP DISASTERS!

Stop Disasters! is a free browser game from the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction that drops you onto a grid-based map with a budget, a countdown and an incoming hazard, and asks how many people you can keep alive. It is probably the best known game our sector has ever produced, which says as much about the sector as about the game.

It was built in 2007 by the London studio Playerthree for what was then UNISDR, as part of the World Disaster Reduction Campaign "Disaster Risk Reduction Begins at School". Originally a Flash game, it was rebuilt in HTML5 once Flash was retired, and UNDRR has kept commissioning translations since — seventeen languages at the last count, plus mobile support and an offline install. Most agency games quietly disappeared with Flash, thus nineteen years of continuous maintenance on a communications product is not something we do often.

What is it for?

The audience is 9–17-year-olds, as well as classrooms, workshops and professional training settings. The learning outcomes are intentionally modest and specific: where you build, and how you build, can change the impact of a hazard; and early warning systems, evacuation plans and education can save lives. Underpinning these lessons is the campaign line the agency has repeated for two decades: there is no such thing as a natural disaster — disasters occur when hazards meet human decisions.

How do you play it?

Five scenarios — flood, earthquake, tsunami, wildfire, hurricane — each at three difficulty levels, each ten to twenty minutes. Everything is point and click. You house a set number of people, put up a school or a hospital, sometimes build hotels to keep the local economy going, and spend what is left on defences, warning systems and training. Then the hazard arrives and you get a damage report telling you how many people you killed.

Two mechanics carry the teaching. Clicking objects surfaces short factual tooltips, and collecting them earns points. Better are the advisers, who appear mid-game with suggestions that are sometimes sound and sometimes exactly what a hotel developer would tell you. Working out which voice to trust is the closest the game gets to real decision making.

Is it any good?

Some say yes, but others are a bit more skeptical. An ISCRAM experiment with children in Rio de Janeiro found most could explain what a risk map is afterwards, and a comparative study in NHESS credits the budget constraint with pushing players into genuinely evaluative thinking. More recent research with preservice geography teachers found moderate-to-high engagement and strong recognition of the game's value for teaching preparedness, but much lower ratings for realism and regional relevance. While a design analysis at WPI, of the older Flash build, calls it a good idea poorly executed: the useful information appears only after you have acted, and the game rarely tells you when you got something wrong. A Humanitarian Futures case study makes a different point, that the game is rigid about which choices count as correct, and that players might come away thinking a community is safe once the right list of measures has been bought. Residual risk is a hard idea to teach and the game does not really try. The newer research makes the wider problem clearer: the game's simplification of hazard mechanisms, geography and regional context can limit what players actually learn from it.

Personally, what we didn’t really like is that there’s no trade-off for building essential infrastructure, like schools and hospitals, at remote, high-elevation locations. You can keep building anything on high terrain without facing any real penalty or downside. That is not just a minor game-design quirk: it is an example of the wider problem with the simulation, where a simplified map can make a risk-reduction decision look more straightforward than it would be in a real community.

The game seems to work better with a discussion built around it than on its own. The same case study suggests giving each player a role — town planner, head teacher, doctor, fisherman, hotel owner — so that the disagreements about what to spend the budget on happen out loud, and then setting aside twenty minutes or so at the end to go through what people chose and why. More recent research reaches much the same conclusion: the game's strongest educational use depends on teacher scaffolding, contextualisation and guided reflection rather than treating the simulation as a complete lesson.

As a classroom tool it holds up. As professional training it works as an icebreaker rather than a curriculum. As a game you will probably see the ceiling within three scenarios, which is still more than can be said for most of what the sector has produced.