So you want to make a game about fake news? I've got to ask, what do you mean by that? There are various ways we can think about games and fake news, it could be something that teaches fact checking skills, or maybe something that shows the dark side of the disinformation industry. Perhaps you are more interested in critical thinking, helping inform people how to think and decipher information alongside themselves. Lots of options, but what works for you?
Unfortunately what we can notice across existing games is that they are pretty simple, made for general audiences, and playable in a handful of minutes.In some settings, this is what you need, but their success is contested. If you will allow me - perhaps we can make something a bit more robust?
I don’t mean something complex, but something that gets to the core challenges and premises when we think about false information. You see words like disinformation, misinformation, and fake news are all loaded. It is why academics have come up with a bunch of different terms because it helps us denote types of information, but for the game designer it becomes important to recognize what we want to teach.
To usher us along this process I will share how I was thinking about game design at the start of this Fulbright Design Project. This is an ongoing process, and functions also as an archive for me, as I am writing these posts from my personal developer notes making this both archival and (hopefully) informative.
Step 1: Understand Your Topic:
I have found Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakshan to offer one of the earlier but oft cited definitions. They talked about misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation discussing each as:
Misinformation is unintentionally false information spread but can cause harm.
Disinformation is intentionally false information spread to cause harm or garner particular benefits like money or power.
Malinformation is harmful information intentionally spread to hurt individuals (i.e. hate speech).
I tried to bold it, but the difference is around intent and effect. Disinformation is about garnering power / control. Often in conversations on politics we see this around public opinion to support certain candidates. Malinformation is less common for the fake news games out there, but if you want to talk about hate speech, digital toxicity, or racism, it can helpful to think about. Of course, we need to pause and wonder what is meant by false information. It leads to a whole can of worms on what is truth, but generally it is information that is not fact-checked, confirmed, or presented without information to further defend its claim. As a designer, we need to consider how truth and fiction play into our goals.
Step 2: Conceptualize Your goals:
This is why I encourage you to focus less on content and more on actions. To think about the impact of false information, not just the opinions that people are saying. Think about how information shapes how we might see the world, and make a game that lets us reflect on our media diets and comprehension.
For my design I broke it down into 5 core things I wanted my players to understand:
That disinformation is not a single thing. It is not just content, but how that content is taken up, manipulated, and engaged with.
That we, as citizens, are responsible for helping maintain our digital spaces. While the larger onus should not be on us, we have a role in this.
That truth is not what we are being told to think, but rationalizing an understanding that recognizes our own and other’s bias.
That false content targets particular people or groups.
That it is a mix of human and non-human actions involved in spreading false information
These are my goals, and ones that my work will be returning to as I reflect on them during design, but depending on your audience and intent yours might be different. If we want to make a game, we have to keep these in mind the whole way through.
If you are an educator, perhaps look at the curriculum goals and see which ones are good fits for a game. For a designer, take some time to be realistic about what a game can offer for this.
Step 3: Determine Why a Game
Perhaps I jumped the gun. I assumed you might want to make a game, but forgot to explain why I think making a game in this space can be critical. It’s great to know about a topic and our goals, but we have to make sure a game is a good fit. Since I am already studying disinformation as playful (i.e. think about how memes use humour to spread false ideas), games became a natural response. I also chose to work on analog or non-digital games which might seem odd but I have 4 main reasons for this:
First, games can help us look at the system.
Perhaps you have heard, but social media algorithms are really hard to understand - they are black-boxed. We know somewhat of what they do, but the specificity of how they promote and spread content is still being studied. However, if you play a game you learn a system pretty fast. Game scholars have referred to this as game literacies or the knowledge needed to play and understand how a game works. By playing a game we learn about the game. What is a good play, what is a bad play, and what doesn’t work.
Boardgames are super open. They ask us to manage the rules, to follow the rules as we play cards and move tokens. They are not automated like computer games and, because of that, they can show us how a system works. This brings me to my second point.
Games Make Issues Tangible
Games typically have a narrative, story, or setting that grounds what we do. Settlers of Catan has this abstract presentation of settlement, videogames like Minecraft build entire worlds and ecosystems to explore. As we play in these systems they can become real. Boardgames have us physically moving pieces, building up resources, and watching as a board dynamically changes.
It is more than moving pieces. Games are emotional experiences. Have you ever wanted to flip a table while playing Monopoly or perhaps felt like you might cry during a videogame? Games are known to be spaces that evoke feelings, and when it comes to something like disinformation, which many of us have feelings about, we can align ourselves with them.
Games Invite Communication
Both games and their players are communicating something. Game systems can be designed with intent, where a specific argument or logic are baked into them. When we play a game we are also communicating with it. We are negotiating our thoughts and ideas with the system that is made, leading to a form of conversation. As we make decisions and see the repercussions we are talking to the game. So thinking about that in our design is critical.
We can zoom out a bit more and think about the play space. When we play with others we are talking. We are communicating our intentions (or deceiving others about them) and discussing what is going on with the game. When the game is “serious” or focused on a critical issue, that conversation can talk about it too, making it an extremely powerful space for learning.
Games invite collaboration
This might not be every game, but so many games invite some form of collaboration. In a competitive game, we still collaborate in how the game comes to be. No matter what, how the game ends, is a result of everything we did at the table.
Of course, we also have a whole genre of collaborative games (which are fabulous by the way), that actively ask how we might work together for a common goal. Such genre’s are aligned with how we want to think about dealing with disinformation as a community response, and are perhaps one of the most important reasons to think about games in the context of learning.
Step 4: Be a Realist
Yet, just because games hold immense potential value, we need to be realistic about our goals and what it can do. The line between a game and an activity are loose, and being too focused on making a game might not be perfect for the tool you are designing. A game connotes a certain stringency to the rules, a win or loss state, as well as a certain set of competitive goals. While this is not actually true or definitive for the game, it is what non-game familiar people will probably expect. It is why you get games that are super direct and treat the game as a teacher more than something that we actually play.
I am a firm believer that this disconnect is a prime challenge in making good serious games, where what a designer wants can clash with audience’s expectations. Serious gamers might make an incredible product but without their players understanding the complexity it won’t get played (so is the product actually good?). That being said, assuming our players know nothing might have us make something too simple that will just be reductive. So we must strike a balance. I want to make something that does not beholden itself to what others have done, but thinks about my learning goals and being realistic about our options. I encourage you to ask yourself these questions: What does a game do for me? How does it align or not align with my goals? Is there another way to teach this? If so, what does a game do differently?
Step 5: Know Your Limits
Look, we can have all these grand ideas but we have to be realistic. When I made Lizards and Lies it was not really designed for classrooms and ended up being a 2 hour game that was only playable in specific spaces. While it does a decent job (if I can be a bit braggy), it fails at actually reaching many core audiences.
Knowing who your game is for really matters. If you want something on social media, it is to be super short, playable in a browser, and not hard to pick up. For my work, I am designing for students in schools and libraries, imagining and audience of 10 and up. This meant I needed to consider 4 things:
Playable in under 45 minutes
Since I am making the game for school and library use, it needs to be used quickly within a lesson that takes under an hour. While even shorter might be ideal, I don’t want to overly restrain myself at this point in the process. Since educational audiences are a target, I have to make sure that the limits of that room are being met.
Generates Meaningful Conversation
I don’t want to make a skills teaching game. While I am happy that skills are in the game (i.e. a mechanic that reflects fact checking), I want to reflect on the challenges I have found with media literacy. I don’t want to teach fact checking as research shows it offers less value than ideas like intellectual humility (i.e. recognizing the limits of our knowledge) and critical thinking which requires nuance and discussion.
Requires minimal set up / Expenses
I am making a game I want people to use. That means it needs to be simple in its overall design. Not lots of tokens, not lots of cards, not lots of anything. It needs to be cheap to print, something that allows it to be distributable and able to be mass produced. Even better if it uses objects already found in many of these spaces.
Is Scalable
While I generally design with the idea of 4 people playing, I want to consider how it could be run with larger audiences. I want to reflect on the possibility of not having the game closed, and making room for various audiences. I don’t need to have hundreds play it simultaneously but perhaps up to 30 could be interesting, especially given this is a regular class size.
Take time to consider for yourself what are the boundaries you should be making in. No point making a 12 day mega-game for 50 people, if your audience is 5 people, or library workshops. Be reasonable with yourself, but leave some room for exploration.
The beginning is done?
This is where you start. Building your knowledge, defining your goals, and being realistic in how and why a game. This is translatable for many serious and educational games, but in the context of something like Fake News, this is always where I start.
At this point we haven’t even really designed but built up some scaffolds within which to think about our design. Next I will move into the early parts of design, the conceptualization of these ideas into something we can try to prototype, while also considering how we actually think about disinformation within a game format.
As always, this work is part of a Fulbright research project looking at how games can be interventions for disinformation. If you are interested and want to participate in the design, playtesting, or sharing your thoughts, you can always reach out.
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