“Long COVID Mode”: Seeing the crisis through games

Games are surprisingly useful communication tools in a world in denial about COVID-19 and Long COVID.

Since January 2024, Steve Wilcox has kicked off his game design classes at Canada’s Wilfred Laurier University with a short game of chance he designed called “The Haunted Woods.” 

Wilcox asks his classes of about 30 undergraduates to envision that they’re living in a village in a faraway land, surrounded by a foreboding forest. Villagers have no choice but to make a pilgrimage through these woods each year to reach sacred fruit on the other side. But the forest curses them when they do — and for some, that curse becomes permanent.

To pass through, each student generates a random number between 1 and 10. Those who roll a 2 or less are cursed permanently. When the group journeys into the forest again, the rule changes: now, a 3 or less leads to the curse. 

“Once again, the harvest sustains the villagers, but in time, those who have been cursed twice before must make the pilgrimage again,” he warns his players at the beginning of the third round. Then, he offers a talisman that can ward off the curse. 

“Every year, I’m like, ‘Someone’s going to see the twist coming, and they’re going to blurt it out,’” he laughed, while describing the game in an interview. 

No one has — though, when Wilcox revealed to this winter’s class that the haunted woods were an allegory for their odds of contracting Long COVID, one student gasped, “That is really fucking cool.” The game’s impact has been, too: approximately 95 to 100% of students who’ve played the game now wear masks in his classroom, Wilcox said.

Games uniquely incorporate emotional and social factors that influence how we take in information — making them surprisingly useful communication tools in a world in denial about the ongoing threats of COVID-19 and Long COVID. Whether through the cathartic storytelling in indie designers’ interactive theater projects or learning opportunities woven into popular video games, playing games can help people make informed decisions amid the Long COVID crisis. They can also bring us together in an absence of public health support. 

“The Haunted Woods” takes only about five minutes to play. It’s one of the simplest games Wilcox, a cognition and play researcher, has devised. He designs games to tackle social issues from family violence to the bullying faced by kids with allergies. Like those projects, “The Haunted Woods” seeks to bridge the divide between scientific research and how people actually navigate their daily lives.

Putting data into practice

Letícia Soares, an evolutionary epidemiologist and co-lead of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative (PLRC), has lived with Long COVID since 2020 and co-authored several papers characterizing the condition. Soares laments that many people still don’t know about the disease. 

“It really shatters me to hear over and over again … ‘Nobody told me,’” she said. “I think that truly reflects the general failure of public health efforts everywhere.”

While public health organizations like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still share information on Long COVID and strategies for preventing SARS-CoV-2 infections, their guidance advises “good hygiene” before high-quality masks, despite the known risks of airborne transmission.

Government-provided data on Long COVID have also never given the whole picture, as PLRC has documented and worked against for its organizational life — and now those data are increasingly being erased. Even under the best circumstances, it would be hard for numbers alone to convey the potential gravity of a Long COVID diagnosis.

Games and gamification can help us actively think through our individual risk and choices — gaining not just theoretical knowledge but simulated experience. As Wilcox put it, “Games are really effective at changing what makes sense to us.”

Wilcox used data from a 2023 Statistics Canada survey to inform the probability of being permanently cursed in “The Haunted Woods.” Based on self-reported responses from about 25,500 Canadians, the agency found that 15% of those who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 one time reported Long COVID symptoms. That percentage increased to 25% after two infections, then to 38% after three or more infections. While the survey report was not peer-reviewed and the risks of reinfection are underresearched, further studies have also found that long-term health risks increase with more SARS-CoV-2 infections.

The talisman that “Haunted Woods” players can accept to avoid being cursed mimics an N95 mask’s 98% success rate at reducing transmission of viral particles (according to one 2024 study). After play, Wilcox breaks down these statistics and shows his students a video about how N95s work. He also offers them free masks. 

His game’s world-building is deliberate, harnessing the memories of venturing into the social world at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Wilcox chose ominous forest imagery in part to capture the fear and uncertainty associated with the possibility of contracting the virus. He wanted to play, too, with how much the average person actually understands about respirators: “In a lot of ways, sophisticated engineering is not that different from magic.” 

Wilcox also speaks with students about the cognitive effects Long COVID could have on them and their goals, backed up by studies on Long COVID’s impact on memory and brain age.

“The Haunted Woods” gives Wilcox’s students a “vicarious connection” with the perils of contracting COVID-19 — and outlines simple steps they can take to minimize their risk. “I try to come at this compassionately and meet people where they’re at,” he said.

In a lot of ways, sophisticated engineering is not that different from magic.

Steve Wilcox

Speaking a game’s language

Chantal Britt — who co-chairs the patient network and policy advocacy group Long COVID Europe — has sometimes struggled to share her symptoms not only with doctors but also policymakers and friends. A fascinating opportunity to do so came in 2023, when a marketing agency called St. Elmo’s approached Long COVID Europe with the idea to create Long COVID Mode.

This collaboration hinged on the common practice by fans and players, rather than developers, of modifying elements of video games — like their visuals, mechanics, or length — to create new versions. The goal was to use the canvas of a popular video game world to illustrate the experience of living with Long COVID.

Britt and her Long COVID Europe colleagues talked with game moderators to create these “mods,” which enable users to play “The Witcher,” “Minecraft,” and “Elden Ring” on “a whole new level of difficulty.” At first, Britt was concerned that inserting symptoms into a video game meant the effort wouldn’t be taken seriously. But she’d also struggled with Long COVID feeling “invisible” to those who hadn’t lived through it.

“You have to be more open and more creative if you have the challenge of a disease like that,” she said. 

Commercial video games might not seem like obvious sites for learning, but those who play them develop “a constellation of literacies” in their worlds: they cultivate complex understanding of in-game storylines, lore, and social dynamics. To translate Long COVID’s most common symptoms into these gaming contexts, Britt and her colleagues didn’t compromise on their specificity. She talked mod developers through rendering post-exertional malaise, demonstrated through characters’ energy crashing or other symptoms, like cognitive impairment, intensifying a while after overextending themselves.

As a small volunteer organization, Long COVID Europe hasn’t been able to assess how many people have played these game mods. But St. Elmo’s estimates that the project has reached millions of viewers in at least 45 countries. As someone who’s worked with children with Long COVID, Britt reflected that games can help them share their symptoms and struggles with friends. 

People with a favorite game “really live in that world,” Britt reflected. Expressed in that familiar language, the impact of Long COVID becomes “much more real.”

People with a favorite game “really live in that world,” Britt reflected. Expressed in that familiar language, the impact of Long COVID becomes “much more real.”

Making better worlds

For Zoyander Street, an artist and designer based in the United Kingdom, it’s not only science that can be translated into the language of a game — familiarity with game logic can help people understand science. They observed that, at least earlier in the pandemic, gamers grasped the importance of COVID-19 prevention because of their experience making choices in play. 

“If a bad outcome will only happen if you roll a one, that doesn’t mean it’s not gonna happen,” they quipped.

Street has multiple sclerosis, and their first known SARS-CoV-2 infection last October made them unable to work for a month and continued to affect their capacity for longer. They’ve built a career creating worlds through art installations and narrative game design. In recent years, they’ve pivoted their practice to reach comrades who face barriers to accessing in-person venues, embracing what they call “at-home culture.” 

Street’s current project, “Intrapology,” is a piece of digital theater shaped by real-time audience responses, fusing their interests in theater and indie games. The science fiction episodes follow queer, neurodivergent characters who discover they are, in fact, alien anthropologists doing fieldwork on Earth, to explore “the pain of living in a world that works against your survival.” As the actors perform, the audience votes on different directions for the dialogue and are even prompted to write in and shape it. 

Projects like this can move against mainstream discourse in part because neither “Intrapology” nor “The Haunted Woods” nor Long COVID Mode was designed for profit. Their designers work primarily from compassion, curiosity, and a desire to imagine better worlds. 

When you speak about the enduring reality of COVID-19, though, you’re also confronted with people’s unaddressed trauma around the most intense periods of the pandemic. Where Soares lives in Brazil, for example, roughly 12 million jobs disappeared in a few short months — to say nothing of the more than 7.1 million people confirmed to have died from COVID-19 to date, globally, or the estimated worldwide excess deaths of over 25 million. 

“If you mask, if you even consider that COVID-19 is still around, you are triggering all of those feelings,” Soares said. 

If you mask, if you even consider that COVID-19 is still around, you are triggering all of those feelings.

Letícia Soares

Given this landscape, she’s excited about the potential for games and other creative narratives to offer a new entry point to greater COVID-19 consciousness. Soares would like to see tools like “The Haunted Woods” becoming part of high school curricula to introduce the concept of making informed decisions around infection-associated chronic illness — at an age when kids begin taking more control of their health. 

“I think it would be transformative, getting a whole generation of people to think differently about this [Long COVID risk],” she said. 

Wilcox suspects that one or two of his students are only masking in class because they know he’d like them to. But he’s glad to have initiated that conversation at this small scale. Making a habit of masking in one class might eventually translate to putting on a mask in other crowded spaces, too. 

As Wilcox sees it, one of education’s biggest hurdles is “confronting things that keep us thinking that the world is the way it has to be.” Game narratives help us contend with our world’s contradictions and consider the logic of our choices. But games are especially valuable tools in communicating about COVID-19 and Long COVID because of a quality that’s both timeless and a little obvious: they can connect us.

---

Kate Fishman is a freelance journalist based in San Diego, California. She writes about climate, art, and ecology.

The next performance dates for “Intrapology” are June 15 and July 5, 2025.

All articles by The Sick Times are available for other outlets to republish free of charge. We request that you credit us and link back to our website.

More arts & culture stories

• 
  Leslie Lee III, culture critic and Long COVID advocate, dies at 43
  by Miles W. Griffis
  December 4, 2025
• 
  Patricia Lockwood explores the depths of Long COVID in the new novel “Will There Ever Be Another You”
  by Morgan Leigh Davies
  September 30, 2025
• 
  Posthumous album of singer Kara Jane released on Severe ME Awareness Day
  by Naomi Whittingham
  August 8, 2025
• 
  ‘Black Swan’ graphic designer, Derrick Kardos, dies at 53 due to complications of Long COVID
  by Miles W. Griffis
  August 8, 2025