The C3C Game: Serious Games and Community-Centered Design for Improved Pandemic Decision Making

Serious games have long been used in domains like defense, management, finance, and environmental protection to improve plans and procedures. In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health and emergency management organizations are beginning to use such games to enhance their preparedness and readiness activities. In this paper, we present a Knowledge Acquisition Analytical Game (K2AG) focused on understanding and providing training for command, control, coordination, and communication (C3C) functions during an infectious disease outbreak. Unlike traditional game-based exercises, which target strategic, operational and tactical decision making, the K2AG games focus on the cognitive level at which decision-making under uncertainty takes place. Specifically, the C3C Game collects data reflecting the cognitive processes by which players gain situational awareness, make decisions, and take actions. The C3C Game was created through a community-centered design process and leverages methods from human factor engineering, including hierarchical task analysis. This paper describes the game, presents results from a pilot exercise conducting with public health and emergency response decision makers from a large US metropolitan area, and discusses the potential for such games to improve pandemic preparedness and resilience.