For this blog assignment, I decided to play the games Bad News and Factitious. In Bad News, you play as a fake news site attempting to grow its reach through the spread of misinformation. You have to be careful to not spread obvious lies or your follower count and credibility meter will decrease. The game is designed to give players an understanding of the manipulative habits those who spread false or misleading information engage in. The idea is players will become more versed in spotting misinformation from playing as someone who’d be spreading it.
The game begins by taking the player through a series of text-based prompts, with a couple of responses for the player to choose from. We’re asked to impersonate a public figure, create a news site or blog and act as a faux Editor-in-Chief.
These initial stages of the game are rather engaging and it gives us a good baseline for the remainder of the educational tactics the game uses. The graphics are visually enticing and made me want to continue playing; when I got to collecting my first “technique” of spreading mis/disinformation, I found myself wanting to click on to learn more about how misleading or false information permeates online.
When we got to the “emotion” section of the game, the game gives me the ability to exploit either fear or anger and see tweet reactions from fake profiles that reflect the nature of the article posted on my site. This is a straightforward way to detail how misinformation spreads in its early stages. Research has shown that the more emotionally intelligent an individual is, the less likely they are to fall for false information they see online.
Bad News does a good job of educating players on the various techniques used to spread misinformation online. Putting the player in the position of the one spreading false information allows players to see how false information is deliberately published and generally widespread. I think this game does a good job of educating people about the techniques of spreading misinformation in an entertaining way.
Factitious is a game that’s designed for improving media literacy. The game provides players with a variety of news articles and the player is tasked with discerning what's real and what's fake. Factitious allows players to see the original source of the article, which makes it incredibly easy to discern whether the article is true or not.
The game focuses a lot on satirical sites, which do fall under the category of misinformation, but I would have liked to see more articles from websites masquerading as legitimate sources of news. While I may find it easy to determine if an article is satirical, it’s not simple for everyone. Research from Nieman Lab that focused on satire sites The Babylon Bee and The Onion showed that people across partisan lines repeatedly fall for satire.
While this game does offer players useful information on what to look out for when reading news articles, I think it would have been more effective if the scope of the game went beyond satire. I think the ability to view the source of the written material does a disservice to players, as it’s almost always obvious whether the article is factual or not based on where it originated from. You would have to be very easy to fool if you’d say an article from The Washington Post was fake or untrue within the structure of the game.
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