If you are a budding or even a serving dike inspector you may be hoping Santa brings you one of Deltares ‘serious gaming’ Levee Patroller training aids for Christmas, its developer recently winning a gaming award.
The term ‘serious gaming’ is worth a mention in itself. We may think of the video game industry when considering development of digital visual technology, but running in parallel is the growth of computer simulation for serious training applications. We can perhaps identify a divide between entertainment and education but serious gaming relates to computer games where entertainment is strictly speaking, not its primary purpose. The principle is not new: Microsoft’s Flight Simulator is sold as a ‘game’ but is based on the professional training equivalent for the airline industry. Levee Patroller was developed in 2006 by Deltares together with five water authorities and Delft University of Technology and follows the approach of tapping into participant’s natural desire to be entertained while at the same time learning serious skills.
Dutch based Deltares is an independent institute for applied research operating in various marine related fields and in Levee Patroller, has produced what they describe as ‘an operational serious game for professional and volunteer dike inspectors’. The probability of flooding with river dikes in the Netherlands is put at once in 1,250 years and once every 10,000 years for sea dikes. While the chances of an inspector experiencing a dike breach may therefore be small, the importance of maintaining a vigilant watch over the system cannot be over-estimated. The game consists of a virtual environment, simulating a range of serious situations relating to dikes. Players can walk along a few kilometres of dikes, set in a realistic Dutch landscape, without restriction and decide for themselves which are the important places that need checking: not only when water levels are high, but also during dry periods. Both these extremes can lead to problems involving the risk of a dike failure. Dike inspectors learn what to focus on during inspections and how to report observations and the procedures for taking timely action.
Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management researcher Casper Harteveld has been involved in development of Levee Patroller from the outset and in Germany recently at the HR EXPO, during the Simulation and Gaming forum, he received the ‘Simulation and Gaming Award’ for his thesis about the application. His main conclusions were that players knew significantly more about identifying dike failure after playing the game and were able to report more effectively. Levee Patroller is also available as a free app for use on Android and Apple devices so we all now have no excuse for not making the most productive use of our free time over the holiday period.
By Peter Barker
