University of Debrecen

Spatiality and the Power of Simulation in Covideo Games

This paper examines how video games engaged with the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that the medium helped people make sense of a nascent cultural trauma and map possible courses of action.

• The paper argues that pandemic-era video games helped people make sense of an emerging cultural trauma by modelling systems and conveying meaning procedurally, going beyond mere distraction or social connection.
• The analysis draws on a corpus of 49 entries from IndieCade's 2020 "Jamming the Curve" design competition, where teams had two weeks to build serious games grounded in real epidemiological data.
• Using procedural rhetoric analysis, the author selected games that treated spatiality as a gameplay feature, used real-world data meaningfully, and generated procedural knowledge otherwise unavailable; spatiality and agency emerge as the central dimensions of how these games model the crisis.