Training for the next crisis with serious games

Published: April 24, 2024, 10:04 a.m.

Imagine you’re a national security official tasked with monitoring activity off the coast of your fictitious country. Suddenly, a large tanker ship in your area goes silent. Its location sensor is offline, and it’s not responding to radio communication. What do you do? It’s a question Francesca de Rosa, chief scientist for gaming at the Center for Advanced Preparedness and Threat Response Simulation, poses in the Reliability Game, which she designed. It’s part of a genre known as “serious games.” De Rosa told Marketplace\u2019s Lily Jamali that while serious games can be fun, they’re really meant to prepare people to handle all kinds of situations.