It’s been three days since the shaking stopped. In that time, the world has been remade—houses have slid from their foundations, power lines have tipped over taking the power with them, lawns are strewn with the inner lives of homes. The sirens have finally subsided. So have the rescue efforts by your neighbors to locate missing loved ones amid the ruin left by a 9.0 earthquake.

Now your only objective is survival. That begins with addressing your relentless thirst, which has been building ominously for some time now. To safely gather drinking water from a hot water heater, first you must turn off its power source. Next is the water supply, which must also be off, followed by the relief valve, which should be opened to allow air to enter your water heater. Now the appliance is ready for draining, and you can capture—and treat—your water for drinking. Close to 50 gallons even, if you’re lucky. 

This information is like many disaster-preparedness procedures: irrelevant until it suddenly, swiftly, is absolutely necessary. In the Pacific Northwest, that day may come sooner than we'd hope. According to most experts, there is a 37 percent chance that the region will experience an earthquake of 7.5+ magnitude in the next 50 years, an event we’ve come to know by its nickname, the Big One. If—when—this happens, bridges and major roadways will be churned to rubble. Hospitals, many of which were built without a major earthquake in mind, will collapse, as will hundreds of other buildings in the region. Shortly after the shaking ends, a tsunami will pick up where the quake left off and will sweep all this debris up in a weaponized wave. Pacific Northwesterners can expect to be without medical help, food supplies, or water not for days or weeks and but potentially, months.

It’s hard to rehearse preparedness for an earthquake this size—only 40 have happened in the past 10,000 years—so Liz Safran, a geologist and professor in the Environmental Studies Program at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, created a video game to help Pacific Northwesterners practice. In Cascadia 9.0, players learn survival skills like how to construct a two-bucket toilet system, along with proper sanitation protocols, and how to find safe drinking water sources, like for instance, a hot water heater.

Cascadia’s characters are young, urban dwellers. Take Zelda, for example, the game’s protagonist, whose mermaid-teal bob is held out of her face by a pair of cat-ear headphones, or Tre, whose backward hat and plaid button-up convey his likely taste for PBR. This detail—among most others—is by design: disaster messaging tends to ignore people in their 20s, focusing more on families with small children and homeowners. Cascadia, in part, is an effort to rectify that. In level 1, as the room starts to shake, players press ‘c’ while using the arrow keys to navigate Zelda into a crouch beneath a table on top of which sits a large, loaded pizza.

“One of the problems with something like the Cascadia earthquake is that, unlike California, we don't get practice earthquakes in this region,” says Peter Drake, an associate professor of Computer Sciences at Lewis and Clark, and member of the interdisciplinary team of collaborators working on the game. Despite being located right along the fault line, the Pacific Northwest isn’t actually very quakey, which can lead to a dearth of knowledge of just what to do after one strikes. But after the Big One, communities in Western Washington and Oregon could be without water, medical services, and other essential life necessities for months. The game’s goal is unequivocal: to drill players into memorizing the skills they’ll need in order to minimize human suffering after a massive seismic event. 

The idea for the game came because part of the challenge, according to Safran, is that when it comes to the Big One, we don’t have an earthquake problem, we have a people problem. She believes we are lacking the necessary “earthquake culture” that will minimize the impact of a large quake. “[This threat] should be woven into our everyday lives,” Safran says. “It should be in the things we read, the movies we watch, the games we play. Not just in the parts of our lives we want to avoid, but in the parts we want to enjoy.”

Indeed, playing Cascadia 9.0, which is an isometric 2D adventure game with a top-down perspective, is fun—and surprisingly challenging. An individual player embarks on a four-level journey of survival after a devastating earthquake that knocks out power, crumbles buildings, and buckles roads. Each level features a different player character seeking to stay alive in the aftermath. Tips and clues pop up as you play and advise you to bolt your bookcase to a wall (or it will fall on you and you will die), turn off the gas to your house (or it will explode and you will die), and move barrels to collect rain water to drink (or you will—I will let you guess).

The scenario is stressful, which is why the team worked diligently to add an aspect of levity to the game. There are dad jokes about hot dogs and a storyline about a missing corgi, which gives players an additional objective: to return him to his owner.

“That kind of approach to storytelling was very mindfully done as a way to recognize the power of narrative and character,” says team member Bryan Sebok, a rhetoric and media studies professor. “You have to make the game fun and relatable. Just doing earthquake tasks is not that. [Turning] the gas off, it's not really fun, necessarily.”

Another of the game’s primary objectives is encouraging communicating with neighbors. As Safran explains, connecting with your community is essential. “Professional responders are going to be so busy and so overwhelmed with really high-magnitude stuff,” says Safran. “They're not going to be in the neighborhoods, and so we're going to have to help each other.”

The use of video games to teach is nothing new. Think of classroom classics like Oregon Trail where players forged rivers, fought off dysentery, and bartered for livestock. Or the US military’s development of war games for its members to practice armed-conflict scenarios. The video game industry is robust, with 65 percent of Americans playing some form of them, including nearly 75 percent of people ages 18–24, which also happens to be the same demographic of people who are generally left out of disaster preparedness messaging.

 “The big challenge is in transfer,” says Colleen Macklin, a game maker and professor at Parsons School of Design. “If you read about [something] in a textbook, how well can you apply that to real life? The same goes for a video game. If you play it in a video game, how well are you able to apply that to real life?”

Transfer, or “stickiness” as Erik Nilsen, Cascadia colleague and professor of psychology, calls it, is exactly what the game is testing. Safran’s team, which includes Drake, Sebok, Nilsen, and a variety of students, will be creating three more versions of the game, each with their own corresponding research questions, such as how much a person identifies their lived experiences in a game and whether or not it’s helpful to play cooperatively. But for the initial version, the team wanted to know what prompted players to retain more information: the game or a simple Google search? What they found was promising; evidence that the game was more engaging to participants than the Google search. They also found that participants thought the information they garnered from playing was pertinent to them.

Cascadia’s next version, 9.1, will be launched in 2024. The hope is that over time, playing it will help dissolve some of the anxiety around the Big One and replace it with knowledge. As Safran says, “being prepared for a disaster is a process and something that you can integrate into your life.” Certainly, that is the experience as a player—after consecutive game overs, eventually turning off the gas to your home in the moment will become second nature. And once that gas is off, and the corgi is returned to its owner, you can set out on the real mission after the Big One: rebuilding.