About Risk Roulette

Risk Roulette is a multi-player edutainment game developed for students in the atmospheric sciences who are also interested in forecasting severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. The game is based on convective outlooks issued by the Storm Prediction Center (SPC), an office within the United States National Weather Service that specializes in forecasting tornadoes, thunderstorm straight-line wind damage, and large hail. The SPC uses 5 main categories (marginal, slight, enhanced, moderate, high) to communicate the expected severity of the tornado, wind, and hail threats. Since SPC forecasts tend to be highly accurate, there are often observable patterns that remain consistent with the risk issued by the SPC. In Risk Roulette, players are shown a limited sample of information for a previous severe weather event, and the players must guess the risk level that was issued by the SPC for that severe weather event. For every risk level that a player is off, they earn 1 point, so the objective is to get the lowest score possible. For example, if you were to guess "enhanced risk" on a "marginal risk day", you would get 2 points.

The inspiration for Risk Roulette came from a YouTuber and StarCraft II Professional Gamer named "Harstem" (Kevin de Koning). While on Spring Break in 2022, I stumbled across Harstem's "Rank Roulette" series, which involves guessing a StarCraft player's rank based on a 2-minute clip of a game that they played. A few days later, I got the idea for Risk Roulette, but I also wondered what kind of limited data sources I could use without giving away too much information while also requiring some skill to correctly guess the risks issued by the SPC. With the free time I had, I began coding up a game engine to test the feasibility, and I was pleasantly surprised by the results. Since I was still working and studying at the University of Oklahoma at the time, I contacted the president of a student organization (Bruce Pollock), pitched the idea, and asked if the members would be interested in trying out the game. He thought it was a great idea, and we set up the first Risk Roulette session, which took place on March 29th, 2022 with 14 total participants. Despite a few minor technical issues (writing multi-player networking code is freaking hard), everyone was able to participate on every round, and the game received an overwhelmingly positive reaction.

After further coordination with Bruce, we set up another session one week later (on April 5th, 2022) and many of the same players returned plus a few friends that they brought with them. That ended up being the final session in the Spring 2022 semester, but it would not be the final session of Risk Roulette. After discussing the game with department heads and school administrators, I got approval to host the game as its own event in the following semester (Fall 2022). Hosted every Tuesday (like the Spring 2022 trial sessions), attendance fluctuated throughout the semester, but there were several sessions that had at least 20 players participating. The winner of each week (minus one week when I was sick with COVID-19) was made a finalist in an end of semester tournament, which took place on December 6th, 2022. The finale was more exciting than I could have hoped for. The 11 finalists (1 was unable to attend) had very close scores going into the final rounds. One player, who had been trailing throughout most of the session, managed to achieve a tie for first place on the very last round. This forced a tiebreaker, which involves the game randomly selecting severe weather events and a random data source until the tie is broken, but the rules also allow anyone not involved in the tie to take first place if the frontrunners can't protect their lead. It took only one tiebreaker, but the player who had been trailing for most of the game managed to get the championship win.

The event has been renewed for the Spring 2023 semester, and is being held every Wednesday. 23 students showed up for the first session, which was the highest attendance to date. It also proved to be too much for my webserver to handle (it crashed about 75% of the way into the session). The webserver has since been upgraded, but the event remains popular and has a high retention rate (many of the same people religiously attend almost every week). One of the fans/students (Emily Barbini) graciously took the time to create a giant logo to make the game more immersive.

Risk Roulette teaches prospective meteorology students what sort of patterns they can expect to see during certain risk days. This also gives them a good idea on what the professional meteorologists are looking at when making their forecasts. To top it all off, there is a genuine and rewarding sense of achievement when a player begins nailing multiple risks in a row.

I also sent an email to Harstem thanking him for the inspiration, and he was kind enough to respond and even said he is "looking forward to a fresh batch of high level meteorologists trained with Risk Roulette".