1 McGill Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
2 Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
3 Culture and Mental Health Research Unit, Lady Davis Institute, Jewish General Hospital, Montreal, QC, Canada.
4 Technoculture, Arts and Game Centre, Milieux Institute for Art, Culture and Technology, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
5 Patient Partner, Montreal, QC, Canada.
6 Department of Psychology, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
7 Department of Computer Science, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
8 PERFORM Centre, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
9 Department of Creative Art Therapies, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
10 Department of Anesthesiology, Leiden University Medical Centre, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands.
11 Faculty of Dentistry, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
12 Department of Sociology, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada.

The value of understanding patients' illness experience and social contexts for advancing medicine and clinical care is widely acknowledged. However, methodologies for rigorous and inclusive data gathering and integrative analysis of biomedical, cultural, and social factors are limited. In this paper, we propose a digital strategy for large-scale qualitative health research, using play (as a state of being, a communication mode or context, and a set of imaginative, expressive, and game-like...