Game Design

Games have a long history as sites for learning through play.
Games have several features that make them uniquely suited for our fractured information environment:

Immersive

Games enable people to directly experience deceptive technologies and tactics that have become increasingly sophisticated and difficult to comprehend. The immersive and interactive quality of games makes the experience visceral and memorable.

Fictional

Games with fictional settings enable people to participate freely without triggering pre-existing beliefs around real world issues.

Failure

In games, failure is not only permitted, it is an integral part of the medium (winners and losers). Since most people do not acknowledge their vulnerabilities to deceptive information — believing only “other” people fall for such stories — games offer an opportunity to make mistakes and be fooled in a low-stakes environment.

Social

Most games (except for single-player games) are social activities, thereby fostering conversation in a light and fun environment. Many experts have suggested the need for social solutions to what’s been a largely social media driven challenge. Games can facilitate collective sensemaking and responses for creating healthier online communities.

Principles & Priorities

Based on our experiences with designing and evaluating games since 2020, as well as research into other games focused on misinformation and MIL more broadly, we have refined a set of principles that undergird our game development process.

Agency over Skills:

Research shows that there are many factors that influence a person’s belief in certain information. Psychological drivers (e.g. confirmation bias and emotional triggers), personal identity (including one’s worldview and sense of self), and social factors (the tendency to align one’s beliefs with the communities one belongs to) among others are arguably more influential in driving belief than lacking the skills to tell truth from fiction — the focus of most MIL approaches, including games. Our focus is on developing games that foster critical awareness, reflection, and agency when encountering questionable information. We believe this is a gap that complements skills-building approaches.

Group over Individual

MIL programs, including games, tend to focus on the individual acquisition of skills. The appeal of a standard set of measurable achievements is understandable. Our games have a different aim — to foster collective sensemaking, peer learning, and group discussion as a way to share and generate solutions to information challenges.

Diverse over Uniform

People inhabit diverse information ecosystems aligned with their particular interests and needs. Information challenges, too, manifest differently across domains (e.g. health, popular culture), communities (e.g. minority group, country) and other dimensions. In contrast to the vast majority of MIL programs which adopt a universal skills orientation, we design games for diverse contexts.

Co-Design

We use co-design where we involve members of a community in the entire development process. This approach allows us to develop games that reflect and meet the needs of particular audiences. sensemaking and responses for creating healthier online communities.