This interactive workshop draws on my Games for Creative Health framework developed through a decade of community-informed, arts-based research with adults experiencing mental health challenges and recovering from opioid addiction. The workshop explores how maze metaphors can be mobilised in autobiographical game design to convey lived experiences with addiction treatment and recovery, mental health challenges, and navigating the healthcare system. The maze is a network of passageways, obstacles, and puzzles that can express confusion and complexity, but also capture the constraints and possibilities of creative decision-making and problem-solving. Just as literary illness narratives are compared to quests or adventure stories overcoming or succumbing to illness, game-based storytelling can transform healthcare experiences into immersive game worlds: impassable walls that signify systemic, societal, and personal barriers to care; collectible items that represent incentives to heal, coping strategies, or rewards such as insight, empathy, or restored identity; and exits that embody recovery or self-transformation. Through a brief guided exercise using Bitsy—a free, easy-to-use, browser-based game engine for creating small pixel-art games—I illustrate how maze structures can be used to gamify healthcare narratives, drawing on autobiographical maze games from my research. Attendees will also be provided with a two-page handout to design a simple Bitsy maze game informed by their healthcare experiences—no coding required. This workshop demonstrates the potential of game design as an expressive method for health humanities education among healthcare professionals, health educators, caregivers, and people with lived experiences of health and illness, cultivating creativity, discovery, and wisdom.

Sandra Danilovic, PhD is associate professor in Game Design and Development in the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences at Wilfrid Laurier University. She also supervises graduate students in Laurier’s Community Psychology program. Her game-based, health humanities research focuses on autobiographical game design as a creative tool for supporting mental health and addiction recovery in disenfranchised communities. Her first book, “Arts for Health: Games” is published with Emerald. Her forthcoming book, “Game Design Therapoetics” will be published with the University of California Health Humanities Press.

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations