Headquartered in Lansing, Michigan, Auto-Owners Insurance is a Fortune 500 company that is represented by over 47,000 licensed insurance agents across 26 states. Auto-Owners provides automotive, home, life and business insurance to nearly 3 million policyholders.

Insurance is a complicated topic, with many terms and concepts that can be a struggle to learn. Auto-Owners is innovating new methods to teach associates and third parties about insurance to enable them to learn insurance concepts in an engaging manner.

Our software, Coverage Crisis: Covering Your Assets, is a role-playing game that presents the player with opportunities to learn about insurance. The goal of the game is to earn as many coins as possible as well as maintain the happiness of the player character.

Players select their level of education and career, determining their salary and student loans. They can use coins to purchase assets such as vehicles and homes, which can increase happiness. When purchasing assets, insurance policies are offered to protect against damage that may occur randomly throughout the game. A large component of gameplay is choosing whether or not to buy insurance, thereby selecting which risks to take with one’s property.

When the game ends, the player’s score is calculated based on their current coins, the value of their assets and any achievements they have earned. This score is posted to a leaderboard, allowing the player to compare their scores and decisions to those of high scoring players. Administrator users can access a secured website to see more detailed information about the decisions a player made during the game.

Our game is made in Unity, written in C#, and is playable through WebGL. Leaderboard and logging data are communicated to and from a MySQL database using PHP server-side scripts. The administrator tool also uses PHP and runs on the same server.