Purpose: Identifying sources of asthma-inducing pollution
Year: 2011
Description:
This project focuses on viable approaches to developing a simulation game that addresses the prevalence of asthma attacks due to three distinct triggering mechanisms: agricultural, industrial and carbon fuel pollution. By working with High Schools in Fresno, the scientists are studying numerous factors that play a part in asthma’s increasing frequency: limited access to education, health information, and new media, and a reluctance to participate in community action and local policy development.
The seed grant is being used to study while kinds of mobile games can address these challenges. The team, which is multi-disciplinary and includes researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Merced, is combining multiple strategies: climate modeling, visualization, data mining, anthropological field work, and dramatization through game design. The game design will cast players as researchers in a Central Valley health mystery by interpreting spatial maps of public records and scenarios of future climate change. The object will be for the players to develop effective strategies in a simulated game environment to manage asthma triggers and optimize their health outcomes.
Although this app clearly has a public health focus, like all Social Apps Lab games, it also strives to give democratic voice to people typically under-represented in civic discussions. If, through Pwning Asthma, young people can track the causes of their asthma, and if demonstrating the political and economic significance of this map is part of the game, they may become much more involved.
Method:
In collaboration with researchers at UC Merced and the Berkeley Institute of the Environment, the Social Apps Lab is also developing Pwning Asthma Triggers. Like DengueTorpedo, Pwning Asthma will recruit local residents to play a cell-phone-based game to promote public health. In this case, users will identify sources of asthma-inducing industrial pollution in Oakland and agricultural pollution in the Central Valley.
Holston and Niemeyer are especially interested in helping disenfranchised members of society to become more engaged participants. “So many productive Californians are excluded from political participation in the communities in which they live and work because they are not U.S. citizens or because they are ‘undocumented’. People tend to focus on the costs of those residents; I think it would be better to ask what American democracy is losing by not engaging them,” says Holston.
Researchers and Contributors:
Principle Investigator: Greg Niemeyer
Co-Principle Investigator: James Holston
Co-Principle Investigator: Inez Fung
Co-Principle Investigator: Qinghua Guo
Producer: Susan Miller
Executive Producer: Alenda Chang
Lead Game Designer: Jesse Fulton
Climate Modeling Director: Jacob Flanagan
Lead artist: Dru Anderson
3D Modeling Artist: Michael Bergman
Field Research Director & Product Manager: Courtney Chan
Video Producer: Chistine Chia
Narrative: Spreeha Debchaudhury
Researcher and Spokeswoman: Ariana Schindler