Wildfire Minigames

Project Title: Wildfire Minigames
Role: Creative Director
Team Size: 14
Platform: Mobile & Web Browser
Project Timeline: July 2023 - August 2026

Project Details:
This project is part of Smart and Connected Communities and is funded by a grant from the NSF. We are developing a collection of game-like simulations to help people understand the complex challenges relating to wildfire and to improve community-level resilience.

Play: Itch.io

Research and Publications:
Research Website

M.J. Johns et al. "Participatory Design of a Serious Game to Improve Wildfire Preparedness with Community Residents and Experts." Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2024. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3650735

[Best Paper Award] M.J. Johns, Mário Escarce Junior, Alison Crosby, Yiyang Lu, Magy Seif El-Nasr, Edward F. Melcer, and Katherine Isbister. 2025. Wildfire Games: A Community Approach to Designing Serious Games as Interventions for Wildfire Preparedness. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 9, 6, Article GAMES006 (October 2025), 31 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3748601

M.J. Johns, Linda Hirsch, Yiyang Lu, Bridget Ho, Anna Toledo, Tristyn Lai, Krithik Dhandapani, Edward F. Melcer, and Katherine Isbister. 2025. A Playful Wildfire Simulation System in Two Minigames. In Companion Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY Companion '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 245–252. https://doi.org/10.1145/3744736.3749192

Video: