SurviveCovid-19 -- An Educational Game to Facilitate Habituation of Social Distancing and Other Health Measures for Covid-19 Pandemic

Covid-19 has been causing severe loss to the human race. Considering the mode of spread and severity, it is essential to make it a habit to follow various safety precautions such as using sanitizers and masks and maintaining social distancing to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Individuals are widely educated about the safety measures against the disease through various modes such as announcements through online or physical awareness campaigns, advertisements in the media and so on. The younger generations today spend considerably more time on mobile phones and games. However, there are very few applications or games aimed to help in practicing safety measures against a pandemic, which is much lesser in the case of Covid-19. Hence, we propose a 2D survival-based game, SurviveCovid-19, aimed to educate people about safety precautions to be taken for Covid-19 outside their homes by incorporating social distancing and usage of masks and sanitizers in the game. SurviveCovid-19 has been designed as an Android-based mobile game, along with a desktop (browser) version, and has been evaluated through a remote quantitative user survey, with 30 volunteers using the questionnaire based on the MEEGA+ model. The survey results are promising, with all the survey questions having a mean value greater than 3.5. The game's quality factor was 69.3, indicating that the game could be classified as excellent quality, according to the MEEGA+ model.
Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures and 2 tables