Project

Sentinelles du vivant

Chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgery, immunotherapy, targeted therapy. These words often arrive together, at the moment treatment is discussed, and they name very different ways of acting on a cancer.

Sentinelles du vivant offers a way to understand them by playing. Tumour cells advance towards living tissue that needs protecting. You place treatments around their path, and set their dose while watching the toxicity they produce.

One episode per treatment

The game opens with five short episodes. Each offers a single treatment, with the rule that belongs to it.

• Chemotherapy acts throughout the body. You set its dose, and let the toxicity gauge come down between two cycles.
• Radiation therapy treats an area, session after session, while sparing the neighbouring organs.
• Surgery removes the tumour with a safety margin, after a work-up. It does not remove cells that have already spread.
• Immunotherapy does not target the tumour: it releases the brake that some cells put on the body’s defences.
• A targeted therapy is only prescribed if a molecular test finds its target in the tumour.

Each episode ends on what the treatment does not do. That is what opens the next one.

Then the human body

Then come the missions, organ by organ, and the first one is played in the lung. It offers three situations, depending on how far the disease has spread at diagnosis, and the treatments adapt to each: removing the tumour and the lymph nodes when it is localised, combining radiation therapy and chemotherapy when nearby nodes are involved, moving to treatments that act on the whole body when cells have spread further away. The other organs on the map are still to be built.

What is true, and what remains a game

The mechanics draw on real concepts of oncology. A codex of 28 entries adds to them between waves, written from the pages of the French National Cancer Institute (INCa) and the US National Cancer Institute, each with its source.

Towers, waves, numbers and gauges remain game rules, never doses or recommendations. The game simulates neither a treatment nor a protocol: these change with research and are adapted to each person. It does not replace medical advice.

Why a game

I designed it first so that people would want to come back to it. Its rules do the work. You understand why the dose is adjusted when toxicity rises, or why a successful operation is not always enough, because you have just lived it on screen.

Nobody needs to be ill to play it.

It is meant for everyone, and perhaps a little more for those who want to picture what treatments do: patients, their loved ones, caregivers looking for a way to explain.

In practice

• Free, in the browser, with no sign-up and no download.
• In French.
• On computers and phones; a computer remains more comfortable.
• No personal data collected: your progress stays in your browser.