Don’t Force Me to Save the Dance Class When I Have Never Danced in My Life

The flood came at the end of the round.

Until then, I had been making the kinds of decisions the game expected from me: where to live, how much to spend, whether to invest in protection, how much risk to tolerate. Around the table, other students were doing the same. We had different budgets, different houses and different levels of exposure. Then the dice decided whether the water would come.

This was WhereWeMove, a serious game developed to explore how people make housing and adaptation decisions under flood risk. Players take the role of homeowners. They receive financial resources, choose housing, consider protective measures and try to remain financially stable and satisfied while facing uncertain floods. The game turns a complicated reality into something that can be played, observed and discussed.

And that is precisely what makes serious games useful.

It is also what makes them worth questioning.

Because while we were all playing inside the same simulated world, we had not arrived from the same real one.

A student raised in the Netherlands may have grown up in a country where flood protection is deeply institutionalised and where public institutions play an unusually visible role in keeping water out. Another student may come from a place where protection is experienced more as an individual, household or family responsibility. Someone may regard insurance as an ordinary part of owning a home. Someone else may have grown up where insurance is inaccessible, distrusted or simply absent.

Give those students identical houses, identical incomes and identical choices on a game board and they are still not identical players.

They bring their worlds with them.

The player underneath the player

This problem is not unique to WhereWeMove. It sits at the heart of what serious games try to do.

To make reality playable, complexity has to disappear.

Research using WhereWeMove distinguishes players through variables such as wealth, previous flood experience and risk perception. One study also translates the game’s structure into an agent-based model, making characteristics such as wealth and flood experience explicit parts of simulated household behaviour.

These are sensible distinctions.

But there is another variable sitting at the table that is much harder to put on a card: the person playing the role.

Consider something as apparently simple as responsibility.

If my house is at risk of flooding, whose responsibility is it to protect it? Mine? My insurer’s? My municipality’s? The national government’s? My community’s?

There is no context-free answer to that question. When a game asks whether I will spend money protecting my house, my answer may contain much more than my assigned wealth or my stated perception of flood risk. It may contain years of experience with institutions, government, inequality, property and collective responsibility.

What looks like an individual decision inside the game may therefore have a history outside it.

Which building do you save first?

Imagine a flood is coming toward a city.

You have limited time, limited emergency resources and a limited budget. You cannot protect every building equally. You have to decide where temporary barriers should go, where warnings should be prioritised and which places should receive scarce resources first.

On the map are homes, shops, a school, a church and a building used for dance classes.

Which one do you protect first?

The answer may look technical. Count the people exposed. Estimate economic losses. Compare vulnerability. Rank the buildings by risk.

Then put the same decision in an international classroom.

Ask a Muslim student how much priority the church should receive. Ask someone who has never danced whether the dance centre is worth protecting. Put beside them someone for whom that church represents family, community and belonging, or someone who has spent twenty years dancing in that building.

Give all of them the same budget, the same flood map and the same information.

Have you really given them the same decision?

Their backgrounds do not tell us what they will choose. The Muslim student may protect the church first because it matters to the wider community. The non-dancer may fight hardest for the dance centre because hundreds of people depend on it.

That is precisely the point.

The interesting question is not whether identity predicts the decision. It is whether we can understand the experiences through which that decision was made.

A game may eventually record something much simpler: Player A prioritised the church. Player B prioritised the school. Player C prioritised the dance centre.

Those choices are observable. The worlds behind them are not.

Serious games necessarily simplify the city.

But the people playing them arrive carrying cities of their own.

A simulated world produces behaviour too

There is another complication.

A serious game does not merely observe behaviour. It creates the world in which that behaviour becomes possible.

WhereWeMove defines the houses available, the financial conditions players face, the protective measures they can consider, how flood events occur and which consequences become visible. Players make genuine decisions, but they make them among possibilities already defined by the game.

That distinction matters.

If relocation is available, moving becomes thinkable. If insurance is available, risk can be transferred. If housing decisions are represented through income, savings, mortgage capacity and individual protective investments, a particular institutional picture of housing has already entered the room before the first choice is made.

None of this makes the game wrong.

It makes the game situated.

Every simulation has to draw boundaries around reality. The more important question is whether we remain aware of those boundaries when we interpret what players do inside them.

The classroom may know something the game doesn’t

There is an irony here.

Universities often celebrate the international classroom precisely because students bring different perspectives. We put people from different countries around the same table because we expect those differences to produce better conversations.

Then we sometimes design learning exercises in which those differences become noise.

Perhaps we should do the opposite.

Before a serious game begins, we could ask players where they locate responsibility. After it ends, we could ask whether they played according to their assigned character, according to themselves, or somewhere in between. We could ask why two people facing the same simulated conditions made different choices, and whether words such as homeowner, safety, satisfaction or even risk meant the same thing to everyone around the table.

The differences would no longer be inconveniences to control away. They could become part of what the game teaches us.

Because an international classroom offers something extraordinarily difficult to simulate: people carrying different institutional, cultural and personal histories into the same room.