Background: Lassitude and a rather high degree of mistrust toward the authorities can make regular or overly constraining COVID-19 infection prevention and control campaigns inefficient and even counterproductive. Serious games provide an original, engaging, and potentially effective way of disseminating COVID-19 infection prevention and control guidelines. Escape COVID-19 is a serious game for teaching COVID-19 infection prevention and control practices that has previously been validated in a population of nursing home personnel.

Objective: We aimed to identify factors learned from playing the serious game Escape COVID-19 that facilitate or impede intentions of changing infection prevention and control behavior in a large and heterogeneous Swiss population.