A second relevant issue concerning the presentation of emergency preparedness instructions as a game is the theoretical grounding for their design and evaluation, which is lacking in the literature. For this reason, a second goal of our work is to start exploring psychological models that explain how people are motivated to protect themselves from dangers. In designing serious games for emergency preparedness, such models could provide design guidance about the organization of the game elements as well as the in-game presentation of the content and recommendations.Moreover, they could provide guidance about which users’ psychological variables are predictors of the motivation to protect themselves from threat and assess the effect of the gaming experience on such variables. In particular, we follow Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) (Rogers, 1975, 1983), a leading theory that models protection motivation on the basis of threat appraisal and coping appraisal processes