Motivated by observations of emergency road-maintenance crews in coastal settings, DOZER is a video game in which the player uses a bulldozer to clear sand from a beachfront road during a storm. DOZER is also a toy model in a formal sense: a heuristic tool for insight into the dynamics of real-time intervention in the physical processes of a natural hazard. Here, I introduce DOZER as both a game and a numerical model, and demonstrate its utility for exploring divergence between a human-altered environmental system and its natural counterpart. I also situate the mechanics of DOZER in the broader context of game design principles and philosophy. For models of systems in which adaptation is an important dynamic, ceding control of adaptive behaviours to a human player can enable novel model outcomes that random, probabilistic, deterministic, or genetic-programming approaches may not produce.