Healthcare Gamification – Serious Game About COVID-19; Stay at home

Serious games are games whose primary aspirations go beyond pure entertainment. With a distinct learning agenda, they encourage learning through interaction with real-world issues. This research of this thesis was aimed at evaluating serious games as an effective educational tool to teach young adults about prevention measures that could mitigate the spread of CO- VID-19. The design process combines game research methods with qualitative and quantitative means to evaluate people’s attitudes and knowledge gain towards the problem domain. The result of this design process, is Stay at Home, a serious game containing different microgames that teach the target group about guidelines and recommended prevention and hygiene measu- res against the virus. Playtesting the game revealed a small gain and slight change in player’s attitudes. The game requires further adjustments to enhance playability and player engage- ment, but offers a promising approach to educate an age-group through a highly interactive medium.Serious games are games whose primary aspirations go beyond pure entertainment. With a distinct learning agenda, they encourage learning through interaction with real-world issues. This research of this thesis was aimed at evaluating serious games as an effective educational tool to teach young adults about prevention measures that could mitigate the spread of CO- VID-19. The design process combines game research methods with qualitative and quantitative means to evaluate people’s attitudes and knowledge gain towards the problem domain. The result of this design process, is Stay at Home, a serious game containing different microgames that teach the target group about guidelines and recommended prevention and hygiene measu- res against the virus. Playtesting the game revealed a small gain and slight change in player’s attitudes. The game requires further adjustments to enhance playability and player engage- ment, but offers a promising approach to educate an age-group through a highly interactive medium