Unlock Me: A Real-World Driven Smartphone Game to Stimulate COVID-19 Awareness

Despite having numerous platforms to promote coronavirus awareness, a part of the population is not well informed about the basic knowledge related to the pandemic. This inspired us to design and implement a free-to-play game, Unlock Me, to help people learn about coronavirus easily yet effectively. A user-centric approach to designing the game has helped us understand the challenges people face and eventually to deliver an interactive game. We conducted an evaluation study across multiple age groups to understand the impact of Unlock Me to enhance COVID-19 learning of the player and to evaluate the quality of the game. The results are obtained by studying the player behavior and performing comparative analysis with Model for the Evaluation of Educational Games (MEEGA+), a standard game evaluation model. Our evaluation shows that there has been an increase in the awareness of players by 53% compared to pre-game awareness. 52.40% of the players found the game to be usable with a good player experience and learning.