Media Literacy: Games

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• Bad News: “[Y]ou take on the role of fake news-monger. Drop all pretense of ethics and choose a path that builds your persona as an unscrupulous media magnate. But keep an eye on your ‘followers’ and ‘credibility’ meters. Your task is to get as many followers as you can while slowly building up fake credibility as a news site. But watch out: you lose if you tell obvious lies or disappoint your supporters!”
• Cat Park: Your job is to turn public opinion against a new cat park in town using common disinformation techniques.
• Conspiracy Test: “Conspiracies are real, but it’s hard to know which conspiracy theories are truly likely to be true – what if spreading false conspiracy theories is itself a real conspiracy? The purpose of this website is to see whether a particular conspiracy theory can pass the test of your own critical thinking evaluation.”
• Cranky Uncle: “[B]uilds resilience against misinformation. It does this through inoculation – building immunity against science denial by explaining the rhetorical techniques and fallacies used to mislead.”
• Doubt It or Trust It?: “Can you spot the fakes on your feed? Test yourself on these stories — some are the real deal, and some are misleading, questionable, or just plain false. So pick your favorite eyebrow and get ready to raise it.”
• Fake It To Make It: Set a financial goal and write fake news stories to make it as an influencer.
• Fakey: “This game aims to teach media literacy and study how people interact with misinformation. The goal is to support a healthy social media experience by promoting information from reliable sources and not from low credibility sources.”
• Find the Fake: “Can you find the fake online? Select an age-appropriate quiz to play as a family (parents versus children) to learn and test your knowledge on what fake news, disinformation and misinformation is and how to stop it from spreading.”
• Harmony Square: “[A] game about fake news. The game’s setting is the idyllic Harmony Square, a small neighborhood mildly obsessed with democracy. You, the player, are hired as Chief Disinformation Officer. Over the course of 4 short levels, your job is to disturb the square’s peace and quiet by fomenting internal divisions and pitting its residents against each other.”
• Libertas Veritas: “This game is an interactive narrative. It is designed to get you thinking about misinformation and propaganda, what they mean and the impact they can have. You will be presented with many choices, and the impact they have may not be clear at the time of choosing. That’s life. Your goal is not to “win” per se. There are fifteen or so possible endings. This is a game of discovery.”
• NewsFeed Defenders: “[T]eaches players how to detect and disregard disinformation and misinformation in today’s chaotic environment.”
• Reality Check: “[Y]ou’ll learn how to find clues like finding where a story originally came from and comparing it to other sources, as well as how to use tools like fact-checking sites and reverse image searches. In each mission, you’ll be presented with a story on your social network feed that might be entirely true, entirely false, or somewhere in between.”
• Troll Factory: “It’s your first week at the new job at Troll Factory. Your task is to grow your influence on social media — by whatever means necessary. How many people can you reel in?”