Bad News: A Game About The ‘Success’ Of Fake News

by Terry Heick

Need to assist college students study to assume critically about ‘pretend information’? A easy, browser-based recreation may assist.

What’s Dangerous Information? Bad News is an easy software to assist college students perceive ‘pretend information,’ the (fashionable?) phenomenon of misinformation and ‘content material as information’ propagated, a minimum of partly, by the rise of digital and social media.

(You’ll be able to download an info sheet about made for educators.)

As an interactive expertise, Dangerous Information helps college students perceive how pretend information works, why it turns into in style, and its central mechanics and developments. It then permits gamers to decide on sure pretend information methods, together with emotional appeals, sarcasm, pink herrings, private assaults, and conspiracy theories.

It additionally introduces the ideas of content material types by permitting gamers to decide on between pretend information memes, photoshopped pictures, or precise ‘content material’ (information tales and articles, and so on.), with some methods (private assaults) and types (memes) working higher than others relying on the pretend information subject.

Couple this with our The Cognitive Bias Codex: A Visual Of 180+ Cognitive Biases and you would have the beginnings of a crash course in vital considering on-line.

Taking part in Dangerous Information: Strengths And Weaknesses

Whereas I extremely advocate the sport as a instructing software, I gave Dangerous Information a few play-throughs and bumped into a number of areas the expertise may very well be improved–at first, the ‘score’ mechanic that asks customers to price the reliability of sure social media posts.

Whereas it is smart in idea, in observe, it’s unclear precisely what you’re evaluating the reliability of: the social media publish, the consumer who shared the publish, or the framing of the content material within the publish.

It’s additionally not meant to be a full-on learning-about-fake-news simulation, so it’s pretty skinny by way of what you’re capable of truly do from a mechanics standpoint–which limits a number of the utility and may depart it feeling a bit like a drawn-out finger wag at social media use on the whole.

That stated, when the sport is at its finest–letting you select between heinous disinformation ways with a purpose to achieve ‘credibility’–it’s arduous to not shake your head in disbelief at how little vital considering we observe each day in our lives. And pretend information and social media are perhaps only a microcosm.

The sport is easy sufficient that you simply don’t want directions and if gamers make a mistake, it’s brief sufficient to only begin over. As a type of simulation, it’s harking back to Plague, Inc., a sense strengthened by Dangerous Information builders said mission of ‘vaccinat(ing) the world in opposition to disinformation.”

If you wish to introduce college students to the thought of faux information and the ways utilized by media publishers to vary consumer’s perceptions about information–and in flip, actuality itself–it’s an excellent little software to get began.