[Published: June 9, 2022]  On June 14 we will be launching The Euphorigen Investigation, our first escape room game! Both online and in-person versions of the game are now available, free of charge, for libraries, schools and organizations with an educational mission.  WebJunction will be hosting a webinar to mark the launch and introduce people to Euphorigen. The webinar will include the motivation behind the project, the game’s goals, and how to get started as a game host. One of our partner librarians will also provide her experience piloting the game. The webinar will be archived with additional resources. Applications are now being accepted to become a game host and use Euphorigen. Thanks to all the librarians, students and collaborators who contributed to

[Published: March 18, 2022] On March 15 the UW Center for an Informed Public, together with Washington State University’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, held the annual MisinfoDay. The purpose of MisinfoDay is to teach high school students, teachers and librarians how to identify and combat online misinformation and disinformation. Students take away knowledge and skills they can use in their everyday lives and educators are introduced to resources that will help them continue this learning in their own classrooms. The Euphorigen Investigation was one of several activities, and from what we’ve been told was the overwhelming favorite activity 🙂 The Seattle Times thought so too.

[Published: March 2, 2022] We received a pilot grant from the UW Population Health Initiative to explore the development of an escape room in the public health arena. The grant gives us an opportunity to connect and collaborate with experts in other areas. At the UW, the project includes health informatics expert Julie Kientz (Professor and Chair, Human Centered Design & Engineering) and Rachel Moran (Postdoctoral Scholar, Center for an Informed Public), a specialist in trust. In the practitioner world we’ll engage with numerous experts in public health information, and community members through a partnership with Seattle Public Library. We are particularly interested in health misinformation that targets BIPOC and vulnerable populations. This will be a short, 8-month project that concludes at the end of 2022.

[Published: December 12, 2021] The nice thing about an online game is that it is easy to run the game anywhere in the world. And since so many conferences moved online during COVID-19, this gave us more opportunities to share the experience and get feedback. Below is a list of some of the places we ran Euphorigen in 2021 for groups ranging from under 10 to over 50 participants (thank you breakout room functionality!). MozFest Lie Detectors Next Library Festival Media & Learning Association (article) Washington Library Association Annual Conference Association of Small and Rural Libraries Annual Conference New York Public Library (Media Literacy Week)

[Published: November 19, 2021] The Loki’s Loop project received a National Leadership Grant from IMLS. Now the prototype can be turned into something more robust and extend the project into new areas. There are many students involved in the project through our “directed research group,” a type of class that allows students to enroll over multiple quarters and be part of a research project from beginning to end. Their energy and creativity have been key to our success! Moving forward, the project has four parts: #1: To conduct a large-scale evaluation of Euphorigen, building on the results we obtained in our exploratory study. For this we selected 10 libraries from among nearly 100 applications to host 6 sessions each. We thank

[Published: August 20, 2021] The pandemic has turned everything upside down…including the order in which we developed the Euphorigen Investigation escape room. Since we had the opportunity to host a number of foreign visitors on campus, we created a pop-up version of the escape room for in-person play. Four teams competed and escaped in times ranging from 45-60 minutes. We also had a great discussion about misinformation in their countries and the applicability of our escape room or other games for addressing misinformation. Subsequently one player from Latvia secured a grant to localize the game in Latvian, and many others expressed an interest as well. We’re now working to make sure our materials can be easily modified.

[Published: March 21, 2021] In Winter 2021, we enlisted a number of libraries from across Washington State as partners for piloting the Euphorigen Investigation. We designed this as an exploratory study to learn about the game experience and to make improvements. We were interested in both the players (members of the general public) and librarians as gamehosts. Our library partners were King County Library System, Spokane Public Library, Spokane County Library District, and Fort Vancouver Regional Libraries. These libraries offered Euphorigen 17 times involving 80 people. Our research questions were: We video-recorded the gameplay and post-game debrief discussion, administered participant surveys, and conducted a focus group discussion with the librarians at the conclusion of the study. Students in our Directed

[Published: November 13, 2020] Our first escape room – The Euphorigen Investigation – came to shape during Summer and Fall of 2020. We interviewed several librarians with experience implementing escape rooms, drew on research from CIP and elsewhere, and produced and tested several iterations, making design decisions along the way. Online: Due to COVID-19, we decided to work on an online escape room first. Many commercial escape room companies also experimented with various online models. Some strapped a go-pro to an employee and players would tell the person to interact in the actual escape room physical space. Others created fully autonomous online games that people could play on their own. We landed in the middle. We maintain the traditional,in-person format

[Published: June 10, 2020] At the end of 2019 we launched the Center for an Informed Public (CIP), a university-wide center to study misinformation and translate research into policy, technology design, curriculum development, and public engagement. The University of Washington is one of five recipients of start-up funding from the Knight Foundation. One of our focus areas is information (and media) literacy and exploring the role of public libraries in helping the public become better equipped in identifying and resisting mis- and disinformation. As CIP co-founder Chris Coward dug into the literature on information literacy and misinformation, the number of questions grew. Overall, it didn’t appear that research on how misinformation flows and individuals come to believe false information was making its way into