My Lockdown Escape: Sparking Self-Empathy in the Context of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract: During the Covid-19 pandemic, research communities focused on collecting and understanding people's behaviours and feelings to study and tackle the pandemic indirect effects. Despite its consequences are slowly starting to fade away, such an interest is still alive. In this article, we propose a hybrid, gamified, story-driven data collection approach to spark self-empathy, hence resurfacing people's past feelings. The game is designed to include a physical board, decks of cards, and a digital application. As the player plays through the game, they customize and escape from their lockdown room by completing statements and answering a series of questions that define their story. The decoration of the lockdown room and the storytelling-driven approach are targeted at sparking people's emotions and self-empathy towards their past selves. Ultimately, the proposed approach was proven effective in sparking and collecting feelings, while a few improvements are still necessary.