Serious game
Making headlines with a serious game about disinformation.
In Bad News, you take on the role of fake news-monger. Drop all pretence 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!
It is impossible to cover all aspects of disinformation in great detail so for Bad News we chose to cover the most common aspects of it in the game. The game breaks down into 6 badges: impersonation, emotion, polarization, conspiracy, discredit, and trolling. These badges are partially based on the report ‘Digital Hydra’ by NATO’s East Strategic Command (East StratCom), which details the various forms that disinformation can take.
The original version was written in Dutch and launched in November of 2017. Play the Dutch Bad News Game. Are you interested in creating a translation? Send an email to translations@tiltstudio.co and we’ll get back to you!
Play the English version of Bad News.
The content of both the Dutch and the English-language version of Bad News was written by DROG, a Dutch organisation working against the spread of disinformation, in collaboration with researchers at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. The visual and graphic design was done by Gusmanson.
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