Serious games for the human behaviour analysis in emergency evacuation scenarios

Abstract

This paper describes an experiment designed to elicit human behaviour when facing the urgent need of exiting an unknown building. This work is part of a larger effort to devise the methodological approach underlying the implementation of simulation of pedestrians and elicitation of their emergent dynamics, an experimental framework coined SPEED. To validate our experimental setup, a group of 16 experts on fire safety, emergency planning and building evacuation were consulted. The experts were solicited to answer a questionnaire, rating their gaming experiences and validating the questions in the form to be presented to subjects. Their comments were valuable inputs used in the development of the experiment described in this paper. A sample of 62 subjects was then used to test our approach, which consists in having the subjects answering a questionnaire and later on playing a Serious Game resorting to the Unity3D game engine. Some specific scenarios were carefully designed and presented to subjects, both in the questionnaire and in the game environment to maintain consistency of answers. Preliminary results are promising, showing that the challenge made players think about the various situations that might happen when facing an emergency. They are also implied to reason on their stream of decisions, such as which direction to take considering the environment and some adverse situations, such as smoke, fire and people running on the opposite direction of the emergency signage.

Virtual Fire Evacuation Drills through a Web-Based Serious Game

“…Ruffino et al [23] developed a serious game to train people to evacuate on a floor during a fire, through which people better understand the location of fire exits and firefighting equipment. Almeida et al [24] revealed the evacuation behaviors of people in unknown buildings in different emergency situations through serious games.…”

“…To resolve Challenge (1), some existing serious games [22][23][24][25][26] provide good references. For instance, Xu et al [27,28] developed a stand-alone serious game of a fire evacuation training system for people trapped in fires and firefighters engaged in rescue efforts.…”

Simulation based optimal evacuation plan in vertical ship lift: a case study

“…The evacuation plan directly influences the evacuation performance, which considers the measurable variables such as stair geometry, age distribution of dispersal population, EC 37,5 evacuation speed and population density (Almeida et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2016aWang et al, , 2016bWu and Huang, 2015). Work on determining the efficient evacuation plan in different emergency situations is complicated since it is impossible to expose people to dangerous environments.…”

Serious games to study the influence of wildlife devaluation strategies on hunter behaviour

“…Serious games are defined as games that are used for purposes other than entertainment (Vermillion et al, 2017). They can be used for education, training, social change, simulation, and advertising (Almeida et al, 2017;Susi, Johannesson, & Backlund, 2007a). For these applications, serious games have been applied to many different fields including medicine, military and defence, sports (e.g.…”

“…For these applications, serious games have been applied to many different fields including medicine, military and defence, sports (e.g. Formula 1) and aerospace (Almeida et al, 2017). The definition of serious games is often limited to digital games, but for this research and thesis, the definition is extended to include any game format.…”