In classrooms around the country, more than a half million students have played the Factitious news game to help them learn how to spot fake news. The game challenges players to tell if actual articles pulled from the internet are real or fake. Launched by the American University Game Lab in July 2017, the Factitious game has been played nearly 1.3 million times by students and the general public.
Previous analysis showed that students who sought out the source of the article (through a hint that showed the url of the site where the article appeared) were 13% more accurate than students who didn’t (74% to 61%) on both real and fake stories. Teachers have also commented that students are often initially surprised at their inability to detect fake stories early in the game and tend to be more skeptical and discerning on subsequent articles in the game.
Educational Powerhouse
We first noticed a spike in traffic in late August 2017 after the initial viral phase following the launch had faded. Since then, we’ve seen a steady increase in the number of games played while schools are in session. Traffic has risen each semester with fall 2019 reaching nearly 190,000 games played. The roughly equal December traffic in 2018 and 2019 is due to calendar timing differences.
Part of the continued growth may be due to a massive reorganization executed by producer and co-designer Bob Hone in December 2018. In response to requests from teachers for “grade-appropriate” game levels, Hone used the Factitious Game Platform to create three groups of game levels: easy (middle school), medium (high school), and hard (college). Individual articles were ranked based on reading level (Flesch-Kincaid rating) and article difficulty (% of correct responses).
Prior to the reorganization, most teachers assigned only the first game level to their students. After the reorg, many teachers assigned the game levels appropriate to their particular students.
Educational Version
Encouraged by the enthusiastic responses from teachers, we are currently seeking funding to develop an enhanced educational version that would increase the instructional value of the game and enable teachers to use the game as an informal assessment of media literacy[1].
Article Annotations
During the early stages of design and prototyping in 2016, Maggie Farley suggested adding annotations to the feedback screen that would point out particular “give-aways” or “tells” of fake and real articles. This promising feature was put on the back burner for cost and schedule reasons in the educational prototype and was then infeasible for the phone design due to lack of screen real estate.
Now that 85% of the games are played in landscape view on desktop and tablet computers in classrooms, the feasibility and appeal of an annotation feature make it a central part of the proposed Educational Version of Factitious.
After students make their selection, the game would highlight particularly informative words or phrases that would be annotated in the extra space to the left or right of the article (depending on whether the article was fake or real). We would modify the Factitious game platform to include an annotating tool to streamline the annotation process.
Hybrid Learning/Assessment Game
This feature would utilize the power of the Factitious Game Platform to easily create new game versions by constructing a hybrid learning/assessment game experience.
In this example, the first two game levels would help students learn how to spot fake articles with the annotation feature and the hint button that shows the name of the website where the article appeared.
Level 3, however, would then assess students’ newly developed media literacy skills by removing the hints and annotations. Levels 4 and 5 would again be “learning” levels followed by a second assessment in level 6.
We could also use the game platform to create a longer hybrid learning/assessment game or an assessment-only version.
Game Reporting
Many teachers asked if the game could record and report the students’ performances in the game. Co-designer Bob Hone and Lead Developer Chas Brown have designed and constructed learning management systems on other educational game projects but the limited budget for Factitious (<$45K for all versions including the game platform) have so far precluded the development of this valuable feature. In addition to providing a teacher interface to let them define a list of students in a class, the LMS would also need to protect the privacy of students.
Next Steps
We are actively seeking funding to support development of the Educational Version of the Factitious game. I will update this article with new news when we have it.
[1] Potential funders: please contact Bob Hone (bobhone.designer@gmail.com) to discuss possible collaborations.
