Dino-Store is a persuasive game by using gamification as a way to communicate with the public about COVID-19. “Dino” stands for dinosaurs, the appearance of our game’s main characters and NPCs, and “Store” is the background setting where players have the chance to practice how to purchase groceries during a pandemic. In Dino-Store,  “persuasive game” theory is used as a framework to design the whole experience, specifically the idea of “discomfort design”, or the creation of uncomfortable experiences by adding different game elements and parameters to the cognitive load. 

The backend of our game is an epidemiological model created by an epidemiological lab at our university that calculates the chance of infection. The purposes of doing this are 1) to simulate a specific and common scenario to help players relate COVID-19 to their daily lives; 2) to directly show how the player’s different choices will lead to the degree of possible infection and the outcome, letting people directly know the relationship of their behavior and the potential result; 3) to compare and contrast various store policies (e.g., mask required or not, shopper number limited or not, etc.) and how they affect the rate of  infection. By using these strategies, players will understand COVID-19 from a relative microcosmic perspective, such as how individual behaviors and store policy matter, etc.