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Floodsim is a flash-based serious game created by Norwich Union in cooperation with Playgen in 2008 in order to raise awareness of the dangers that flooding present to the United Kingdom. The goal of the game is to protect the people of the United Kingdom from floods that damage the economy and lives of the people through an assortment of realistic means over a time span of three years. [1]
In order to help raise awareness of the problem of flooding, Floodsim highlights:
FloodSim is a turn-based strategy game using a drag and drop interface. A play session is broken into three years, each with different success requirements. Each year ends when either the player has run out of money or chooses to advance the game forward.
The project also has received backing from the then Environment Minister Phil Woolas who said “The floods of 2007 show just how serious flooding can be, and I am glad to see that this project has been developed to enable people to have a greater understanding of the risk of flooding. A number of decisions need to be taken when we look at managing the risk of flooding – including our annual spend on flood defenses, where and how we build new houses, and the emergency response procedures we have in place for times of flood. This game gives the game player the opportunity to make informed decisions about all of these policy areas.” [1]
In 2009 a paper was presented at SIGGRAPH Symposium on Video Games regarding the societal impact of FloodSim. [2]
Risk management is the identification, evaluation, and prioritization of risks followed by coordinated and economical application of resources to minimize, monitor, and control the probability or impact of unfortunate events or to maximize the realization of opportunities.
A strategy game or strategic game is a game in which the players' uncoerced, and often autonomous, decision-making skills have a high significance in determining the outcome. Almost all strategy games require internal decision tree-style thinking, and typically very high situational awareness.
William Ralph Wright is an American video game designer and co-founder of the game development company Maxis, which later became part of Electronic Arts. In April 2009, he left EA to run Stupid Fun Club Camp, an entertainment think tank in which Wright and EA are principal shareholders.
Simulation video games are a diverse super-category of video games, generally designed to closely simulate real world activities. A simulation game attempts to copy various activities from real life in the form of a game for various purposes such as training, analysis, prediction, or entertainment. Usually there are no strictly defined goals in the game, and the player is allowed to control a character or environment freely. Well-known examples are war games, business games, and role play simulation. From three basic types of strategic, planning, and learning exercises: games, simulations, and case studies, a number of hybrids may be considered, including simulation games that are used as case studies. Comparisons of the merits of simulation games versus other teaching techniques have been carried out by many researchers and a number of comprehensive reviews have been published.
The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) is a British child protection charity founded as the Liverpool Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (LSPCC) by Thomas Agnew on 19 April 1883. The NSPCC lobbies the government on issues relating to child welfare, and creates child abuse public awareness campaigns. Since the 1980s, the charity has had statutory powers allowing it to apply for help on behalf of children at risk. In the 1990s, the charity's publication, Satanic Indicators, fueled panic in social workers who went and accused parents and removed children from homes when they should not have. It operates a help line. The Paddington Bear character has partnered with the charity to raise funds for the charity. NSPCC operates telephone helplines.
The Environment Agency (EA) is a non-departmental public body, established in 1996 and sponsored by the United Kingdom government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, with responsibilities relating to the protection and enhancement of the environment in England.
Development communication refers to the use of communication to facilitate social development. Development communication engages stakeholders and policy makers, establishes conducive environments, assesses risks and opportunities and promotes information exchange to create positive social change via sustainable development. Development communication techniques include information dissemination and education, behavior change, social marketing, social mobilization, media advocacy, communication for social change, and community participation.
The European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) is a decentralised agency of the European Union with the task of collecting, analysing and disseminating relevant information that can serve the needs of people involved in safety and health at work. Set up in 1994 by Council Regulation (EC) No 2062/94 of 18 July 1994, EU-OSHA is based in Bilbao, Spain, where it has a staff of occupational safety and health, communication and administrative specialists. William Cockburn Salazar is the current Executive Director of EU-OSHA. Council Regulation (EC) No 2062/94 was replaced by Regulation (EU) 2019/126 on the 20 February 2019.
Suicide intervention is a direct effort to prevent a person or persons from attempting to take their own life or lives intentionally.
Business simulation or corporate simulation is simulation used for business training, education or analysis. It can be scenario-based or numeric-based.
The Re-Mission games for young cancer patients were conceived by Pam Omidyar and designed based research by the nonprofit HopeLab Foundation, with direct input from young cancer patients and oncology doctors and nurses, and game developer Realtime Associates, among others. The games engage young cancer patients through entertaining game play while impacting specific psychological and behavioral outcomes associated with successful cancer treatment. HopeLab has made Re-Mission games available at no charge to young people with cancer and their families, as well as oncology healthcare workers and institutions around the world.
The prevention paradox describes the seemingly contradictory situation where the majority of cases of a disease come from a population at low or moderate risk of that disease, and only a minority of cases come from the high risk population. This is because the number of people at high risk is small. The prevention paradox was first formally described in 1981 by the epidemiologist Geoffrey Rose.
An educational video game is a video game that provides learning or training value to the player. Edutainment describes an intentional merger of video games and educational software into a single product. In the narrower sense used here, the term describes educational software which is primarily about entertainment, but tends to educate as well and sells itself partly under the educational umbrella. Normally software of this kind is not structured towards school curricula and does not involve educational advisors.
Risk communication is a complex cross-disciplinary academic field that is part of risk management and related to fields like crisis communication. The goal is to make sure that targeted audiences understand how risks affect them or their communities by appealing to their values.
Diabetes Australia is the third oldest diabetes association in the world, after the United Kingdom and Portugal. Originally established in the state of New South Wales (NSW) in 1937, the organisation's head office is now in the nation's capital, Canberra. In 2021 the members of Diabetes NSW & ACT, Diabetes Queensland and Diabetes Tasmania voted to unify with Diabetes Australia. The Australian Diabetes Society and the Australian Diabetes Educators Association are also members.
Youth suicide is when a young person, generally categorized as someone below the legal age of majority, deliberately ends their own life. Rates of youth suicide and attempted youth suicide in Western societies and other countries are high. Youth suicide attempts are more common among girls, but adolescent males are the ones who usually carry out suicide. Suicide rates in youths have nearly tripled between the 1960s and 1980s. For example, in Australia suicide is second only to motor vehicle accidents as its leading cause of death for people aged 15 to 25.
Population ethics is the philosophical study of the ethical problems arising when our actions affect who is born and how many people are born in the future. An important area within population ethics is population axiology, which is "the study of the conditions under which one state of affairs is better than another, when the states of affairs in question may differ over the numbers and the identities of the persons who ever live."
A serious game or applied game is a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. The "serious" adjective is generally prepended to refer to video games used by industries like defense, education, scientific exploration, health care, emergency management, city planning, engineering, politics and art. Serious games are a subgenre of serious storytelling, where storytelling is applied "outside the context of entertainment, where the narration progresses as a sequence of patterns impressive in quality ... and is part of a thoughtful progress". The idea shares aspects with simulation generally, including flight simulation and medical simulation, but explicitly emphasizes the added pedagogical value of fun and competition.
Health communication is the study and practice of communicating promotional health information, such as in public health campaigns, health education, and between doctor and patient. The purpose of disseminating health information is to influence personal health choices by improving health literacy. Health communication is a unique niche in healthcare that allows professionals to use communication strategies to inform and influence decisions and actions of the public to improve health.
Hannah Louise Cloke is a British hydrologist who is Professor of Hydrology at the University of Reading. She was awarded the European Geosciences Union Plinius Medal in 2018 and appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2019 Birthday Honours.