Serious gaming framework to design evacuation facilities / Mohamad Salah Taleb

The building sector struggles from the aspects of safety and security during evacuations,
such as fire evacuation, especially in current times, where usual drills are insufficient.
The situation is further exacerbated as previous evacuations in high-rise buildings show
deficiencies in design procedures because of contempt on code’s minimum requirement
by designers. The popularity of Serious Games has increased widely and proved to be
a very effective training tool in many sectors. Serious Games can assist in preparing
qualified designers, whereby they are able to conduct experiments within the game
safely and in repeatable environments. Developing scenarios play a huge part towards
the development of a serious game. This study has been conducted to propose a serious
game framework in training designers for evacuation requirements. The four objectives
established for this study are as follows: 1) to explore the applications of Serious Game
from construction/building engineering perspective; 2) to define the requirements
evacuation facilities for fire in high rise buildings; 3) to develop serious gaming
scenarios based on real-life fire accidents; 4) to develop a serious game framework that
integrates the design elements in evacuation facilities with different game scenarios.
This exploratory study has adopted various research methods such as systematic review,
open-ended interview, as well as structured interview that enables triangulation of the
findings. The outcome of this study enables the provision of a creatable, safe and
repeatable environment for designers to design for fire evacuation as it allows high
degree of immersion between the designers and the real life-based scenarios in the
game.