The Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) has developed an educative interactive game called Murgame, which gives a player the feeling of debris-flow risk in mountainous environments.
The game can be played online in several languages (English, German, French) – the link is given here.
There are instruction available for a player in each language, for Murgame v2.0 in English the link to documentation is given here. For those that need some game ideas, they are also available, the link is given here.
The idea is that a player test different mitigation countermeasures and see online their effectiveness and evaluate their cost-benefit ratio.
The starting point of the game is that a player builds his/her own village following the given framework: number of buildings to host the given number of inhabitants and supporting infrastructure, such as a school or s shop. The position of a village can be on either side of a torrential channel conveying debris flows.
Murgame is based on the simulation models for debris flows called RAMMS-DF to simulate the debris flow behavior and its impact on the village. The extreme debris flow is visualized on the computer screen and the game player sees then the cost data of this simulated event to the virtual village.
After a virtual village is constructed, the player selects to simulate a small or a large extreme event – i. e. a debris flow. When simulation results are visualized, the player can select non-structural measures (early warning system for evacuation – sirens) or structural measures (dikes, levees). Their impact can be seen by re-running the model in order to see the acceptability of the proposed countermeasures
The simulation model RAMMS-DF was already applied in Slovenia for different real case studies, such as for the 2018 Krvavec Debris Flood, a technical note on this event was published in the journal Landslides by Bezak et al (2020): An extreme May 2018 debris flood case study in northern Slovenia: analysis, modelling, and mitigation.
A review paper on the RAMMS model was also published by Mikoš and Bezak (2021): Debris Flow Modelling Using RAMMS Model in the Alpine Environment With Focus on the Model Parameters and Main Characteristics.