Since the COVID-19 pandemic has led to nation-wide school closures, the transition to remote teaching has caused profound disruption to classroom instruction. In this article, I share the impact that this forced transition has had on the redesign of the second half of a French course entitled "Gaming culture and culture of games," to meet the pedagogical challenge posed by the pandemic, retain the integrity of the course, and provide useful tools to mitigate the circumstances. In particular, I examine how the situation was an opportunity to combine language and culture pedagogy with game design to enable students to think critically about the course content and contribute meaningful solutions to learning languages in the age of social distancing.