Wildfire preparedness is a deeply social challenge that depends on shared understanding, coordinated action, and community-level decision-making. Serious games have emerged as promising tools for supporting preparedness learning, yet their evaluation often relies on individual outcomes or surveys, leaving interactional learning processes underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing how players from wildfire-affected communities collaboratively constructed preparedness knowledge while playing Firesafe Friends, a two-player serious game. Using a Discourse Acts approach, we analyzed dialogue from onsite and remote sessions (n = 20) and triangulated the findings with pre/post surveys and observational notes. Our analysis reveals distinct phases of collaborative learning – orientation, strategy formation, collaboration, and reflection – marked by shifts in cognitive, social, and integrated discourse acts. Budget constraints prompted negotiation, contested upgrades supported collective reasoning, and reflective dialogue helped players connect in-game decisions to real-world preparedness. We contribute (1) an empirical analysis of discourse as a mechanism for resilience learning, (2) a discourse-centered triangulated evaluation method, and (3) design implications for resilience games that scaffold negotiation and reflection to strengthen community preparedness.

lives severely, requiring everyone living in risk areas to become

Figure 1: Example of the VR game with the time remaining to evacuate.

As wildfires increasingly threaten communities worldwide, those at risk can benefit from community-centric approaches to designing interventions. A multi-layered approach can make members of the community powerful co-designers by incorporating their ideas alongside insights from experts and designers to successfully create and deploy an intervention. We took a community-centered Research through Design approach to develop a Serious Game to promote wildfire preparedness in two communities. Participatory Design workshops, interviews, and targeted user studies allowed us to leverage local knowledge of residents and expertise of stakeholders at distinct stages where their insight could be best utilized. Based on this work, we propose a process for designing Serious Games as interventions for complex societal challenges by utilizing community and expert involvement throughout iteration. Our findings suggest that the games we designed following this process lead to concrete learning and opportunities for discussion, and offer flexibility for integration with other community initiatives.

This demo presents a virtual reality simulation of a wildfire evacuation. Players are tasked with going through a home environment and collecting items they believe they would need and want to take if they were under an evacuation notice. The experience is playable on the Meta Quest 2 headset.