Playing With Fire: ETC Alum MJ Johns Teaches Wildfire Preparedness Through Games

Earlier this year, the Los Angeles area was swept by devastating wildfires that resulted in lost lives and the destruction of close to 16,000 structures. California isn’t alone in this; extreme wildfire activity has more than doubled worldwide in recent years, including in regions where fires aren’t typically common. 

Educating communities about how to be prepared for these fires is more important now than ever. That’s where MJ Johns, 2013 graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center, comes in. For the past few years, Johns has been working on transformational games that teach wildfire resilience and preparedness. Recently, their work was featured in a segment on NBC’s Bay Area affiliate.

After graduating from the ETC, Johns worked in game studios for a long time before beginning to teach programming at UT Austin — first as an adjunct, and then as full-time faculty. It’s how they discovered their passion for research, collaborating with other faculty on various projects. “The ETC’s project structure … translated really well to the type of research projects I did at UT Austin,” Johns said. “That experience opened a lot of doors for me.”

One of those doors was a PhD. Johns started in UCSC’s Human-Computer Interaction program in 2023, and was assigned to an initiative focused on community-centered wildfire resilience. When the other researchers expressed interest in making a game to engage the community, Johns’s background in game design made them the perfect candidate to take charge. They quickly ended up leading a small team working on game design and development and mentoring a new group of undergraduate and master’s students each quarter.

Their approach to creating these games blends meticulous research with the kind of rapid prototyping Johns honed at the ETC. “The ETC made me really value rapid prototyping as a core part of my research process, and so it has really shaped the way I approach research projects and the kinds of projects I am drawn to,” Johns said. 

What makes the games Johns is creating unique isn’t just their purpose — it’s also how they’re made. Johns utilizes a method called co-design, where affected communities get a chance to shape the project before it even begins. It’s an approach to game development that integrates the kinds of insights gained through playtesting — where external testers try out in-progress versions of a game — but from the very start of a project.

All these minigames are built in partnership with wildfire-impacted communities; this is the heart of the project’s success. The experiences and needs of those affected by fires — farmers, first responders, families, local leaders — dictate the game from concept to development to final product. “We start by going to the communities and doing interviews and co-design workshops before making anything so we can get a clear picture of what they are experiencing at a local level, and what things they are already doing to try to solve the problem,” Johns said.

The games were also rigorously playtested — not just by the community members who took part in the co-design process, but also by experts in wildfire mitigation, emergency planning, and transformational games. Johns documented the entire process in a development log, something they made a habit of doing at the ETC.

As a result, these games teach players what they actually would need to know when confronted with a wildfire, helping them internalize key concepts like defensible space, evacuation planning, and fuel reduction through real-world scenarios. “To start by talking to the people impacted without bringing in my own assumptions, and then to design around their lived experience … this has been a really enlightening process for me,” said Johns.

Johns is also developing a framework to help other developers use game design to tackle climate-related challenges. “I hope my work helps more people and communities develop resilience to wildfire, and to climate change more broadly,” they said.

The wildfire resilience games are now publicly available, and already being used in outreach and education efforts throughout California. For Johns, that visibility is rewarding — but it’s only the beginning. Having recently advanced to Ph.D. candidacy, they are now preparing their dissertation and gearing up to present their work at multiple conferences this year. 

“I’m excited for my next chapter and where life takes me after I finish the PhD – hopefully a fascinating research job either in academia or at a big tech company,” Johns said. “The ETC taught me to keep an open mind and an eye out for opportunity, and that’s what I plan to do.”

Play through Johns’s wildfire resilience games at this link.

---