Lives Saved, Not Revenue

When you play the Disaster Draw game, you will notice that it does not name the ski resort. That is deliberate.

The geography is real. Route 410, Greenwater, the White River, and the surrounding forests are public places. The elevation and terrain come from public data. A commercial resort is different. It is a brand, and I do not want to imply a relationship that does not exist.

The corridor still needs to feel real. If you have driven 410, you should recognize the distance, the bottlenecks, the river, and the way the road narrows as it climbs. The game is about a real place where several systems share one road.

I also changed how the game measures success.

At first I considered tracking the economic value of the corridor: visitors, resort revenue, and the money flowing through the towns along 410. That would have put the emphasis in the wrong place.

A disaster-response game should not reward you for maximizing traffic through a dangerous place. It should ask whether you protected people and used the available resources well.

So the main measure is lives saved. The game also tracks risk, preparedness, public trust, and the cost of the response. Revenue is not the objective. It is part of the pressure. Businesses lose money when roads close, but reopening the road is not automatically the right decision.

If the road is unsafe, keeping it open because the weekend is busy is a bad strategy, even if it looks good on a spreadsheet.

The point is not to make one side of the land-use debate win. The point is to give the player the problem the real corridor creates: people want access, businesses depend on access, and the people responsible for safety have to decide when access is no longer worth the risk.

That is the game.

Disaster Draw is at disasterdraw.com.