Wildfire UCSC
The UCSC Wildfire Games are an Award-Winning collection of minigames about wildfire preparedness. The game collection was selected for the Students' Choice Award at the 2025 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge in Orlando Florida.
About our project: We are developing this collection of minigames to help raise awareness, improve preparedness, and create resilience in the face of disasters from wildfire. Our approach is community-driven design, and we are working directly with residents and local experts in communities that have been recently disrupted by wildfires, to ensure that the games reflect the lived experiences of people in wildfire-prone areas. The main game collection is the Wildfire Minigames Collection below, but you can also try out our other prototypes.
Are you interested in using these games with a class or at an event? Check out our Facilitator's Guide to help you get started!
Thank you for joining us on this journey and we would love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to MJ Johns (mljohns@ucsc.edu) for more information about our project and how you can get involved.
Our project is funded by a generous grant from the NSF and is part of Smart and Connected Communities. We have published our findings from the design workshops and several user studies: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3650735 and https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3706599.3720171 and won a Best Paper award at CHI Play for https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3748601
