When we designed the phone version of the Factitious fake news game, we aimed for the general public. Little did we know, we had created a vital educational app adopted by thousands of teachers across the United States.
This article tells the stories of teachers who have incorporated Factitious into their media literacy and writing classes. And how their surprising and enthusiastic response has inspired the Factitious team to design a new proposed version tailored for classroom use.
The emergence of the hidden audience
The Factitious news game went viral on its first two days, July 3rd-4th, 2017 with 104,000 games played! When the dust settled at the end of July, players had tried to spot fake stories from real ones in more than 250,000 games.
As with most viral flashes, the traffic died off quickly in early August. Then the game found a thriving second life as an educational game used in high school and college classes around the country. Since September 2017, over 410,000 games have been played during school hours (Mon-Fri, 8a-4p, when school is in session). Tens of thousands of players have signed on within moments of each other in condensed bursts of activity. It’s very likely those are students launching the game as an in-class activity. We’ve also been contacted by more than 250 teachers who’ve explained how they use the game in their courses. Here are two of their stories.
Spotting Fake News
“Ok, ok, settle down,” Mary Ann Akers calls to the students in her Writing for Communication class at American University. “We’re going to play a game today that challenges you to spot fake news.”
Murmurs of delight bubble up from the diverse class of mostly 1st and 2nd year students in this required writing class. “I’ll project the game on the big screen. It shows a series of articles and you have to decide … is it real or is it fake?”
Akers organizes the students into four groups of four students each. “Each group needs to have a spokesperson who will announce what your group has decided: real or fake,” Akers explains. A flurry of voices builds as the groups select their spokespersons. “Ok, everyone ready? Here’s the first article.”
The room falls silent as students fixate on the article projected on the screen (on left). After a minute, Akers scrolls down the article so students can read all of it. When she gets to the bottom, there is a button “Show Source”
“How many think we should click the Show Source button?” Akers asks. Only a few hands go up. So Akers skips the button (this hint shows the name of the website that posted the article).
She gives the students another minute to read. “Ok, discuss with your team and decide, real or fake.”
The students start to talk quietly in their groups. After a minute or so, Mary Ann calls out, “ok, have you made up your minds?”
After murmurs of agreement, Akers polls the groups:
Team 1? … We think it’s fake
Team 2? … It’s real
Team 3? … We feel it’s real
Team 4? … It’s fake
(spoiler alert: can you figure it out before getting the answer? Decide: real or fake … and no, you can’t view the source … you’ll have to play the game itself for that :)
ANSWER COMING ….
“Okay, a split decision,” Akers announces.
“The game requires a choice so I’ll vote real to split the tie.” Akers clicks and drags the article to the right.
The triumphant sound from the game is met with cheers and groans from the different teams in the class.
When I asked Akers later why she didn’t click the Source Button to reveal the source of the article, she said “well, with the source information it would be easy for them to tell whether it’s fake or not. The game wouldn’t be as challenging if they saw that information.”
Akers brought up ‘challenge’ again when I asked why she thought her students were so engaged in the game, “It’s tough to tell with some of these articles, so that’s why they were so focused on the game, it was challenging.” See the section below about how “Tuning in Challenge” was a key part of our game design process.
As the Co-Designer and Producer of Factitious, I’d been quietly observing the class from the back of the room until Akers revealed that I helped create the game and asked me to take questions from the students.
“Why did you create the game?” asked a young woman who was active in the discussions. “The co-designer, Maggie Farley, pitched the idea to me during a break in a workshop we were both attending back in 2015:”
‘What if we create a game that challenged players to tell whether an online article is real or fake?’
“As a journalist and game designer, I immediately sensed the possibilities of challenging players to separate real and fake and how that could help people spot fake news,” I continued. “In the days after the Maggie planted the seed, I wrote out 3 pages of concepts that helped form the original game design. Maggie and I then quickly built a ‘paper-prototype’ of the game to test it out.”
“How do you figure out if a story is real or fake?” posed another woman in the class. “The same way you’re learning how to fact-check your sources of information,” I replied. “For articles we think are real: we check the source and even if it’s a reputable source, we check their sources.”
“With stories we think are fake,” I explained, “we check those sources and see if they seem to have a lack of journalistic rigor: few or no quoted sources, inflammatory adjectives or adverbs, blatantly inaccurate facts, among other ‘tells.’ We also look at the rest of the website to get a sense of the company behind the articles.”
In our follow up phone call, Akers mentioned another factor that made the game a hit in her class. “Having the students form groups created a lot of discussion between the students. They had to back up their opinions, fake or real. There was also this subtle competition between the teams, which probably helped as well.”
Groundswell of Teacher Approval
Akers is one of the more than 250 teachers who have contacted the Factitious team at the AU Game Lab through either email or the latest version of the game, Factitious2018, which was released on October 1st, 2018. Here’s a sample of some of their enthusiastic responses (I’ve replaced the teachers’ names to protect their privacy).
Teacher@oacsd.com: We love playing Factitious on the smartboard. Students vote by raising their hands and we take the highest vote for Real or Fake.
Teacher@southingtonschools.org: I am a high school teacher teaching a Society and Media class to seniors. I very much like this game, because most of them think that they know what is real and what is fake.
Teacher@tps501.org: I discovered this last year and really liked it. Thank you for the wonderful relevant and entertaining articles. This is an important tool.
Teacher@desertsands.us: I love this game. I teach an AP class that requires students to evaluate the credibility of sources. This is definitely the most fun way to practice that crucial foundational skill.
Teacher@elmbrooschools.org: I love this idea! Practicing thinking about source validity is a perfect kickoff for our unit on persuasive writing and speaking. Thanks!
Clever Workaround
For Sara Hood, reference librarian at the Santa Fe Community College library, the original Factitious game wasn’t configured to support the information literacy workshops she presents at the college. That game version would pull 15 articles at random from a set of 45 possible articles to allow players to play the game multiple times.
Hood wanted to structure her workshop around a specific set of articles … so she meticulously created screen shots of the articles she wanted to include and printed them out.
“Factitious has been a fun way to get students to make that connection between fake news stories that are actually out there circulating, and their critical thinking skills,” Hood explained in an email. When they actually have to give a verdict ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ as to whether a story is fake, it kind of ups the ante in a fun way,”
After demonstrating the game on a smartboard and everyone voting on the article (as in Aker’s class), Hood would then hand out her set of printed articles to groups of students. Each group would then investigate one article in depth–going to the article’s web site and examining the source of the information.
“A lot of my students would try to guess right away just based off of the headline,” Hood said. “I always tell them, ‘you have to read the story, go to the website and find out who they are. What kind of stuff are they publishing? Is it purely satire, legitimate news, or somewhere in between? You can’t know for sure until you look at the source.”
Once Hood did all the up-front tedious work of getting screenshots and then print outs of her curated article collection, she incorporated the game in all of her workshops–a total of 8 over the fall and spring semesters as well as a summer session. And her efforts went beyond her workshops.
“I always encourage students to take Factitious with them,” Hood told me. “I’d say ‘Hey, tell your friends and family about it. Challenge them to a game!”
Responding to Demand
Inspired by stories like Sara Hood’s and Mary Ann Aker’s adoption of Factitious, along with the many teacher compliments we’ve received, the Factitious team started to think about how we could modify or augment our game to support and extend their efforts. Several teachers provided additional suggestions.
Martha Noone, Head of the English Department at Marshall High School in McLean, VA suggested that organizing the articles by reading level would help teachers align the game to the abilities of their students. And Scott Tuffiash, Journalism and Writing teacher at Avondale High School near Pittsburgh, PA suggested grouping the articles by topic areas such as culture, health, science, economics, politics, and sports to help teachers select the kinds of articles that would be most relevant to their students.
Pooling together what we’ve learned from these discussions, we’ve created the following preliminary set of features for the proposed Factitious: Classroom Edition program:
- 18 custom article modules–each consisting of 15 articles– organized by 3 reading levels and 6 content areas (culture, politics, health, science, economics, and misc.)
- A new Teacher web application that will to allow teachers to preview article modules and then send a customized url to their students to access the teacher’s preferred article module
- An ability for students to save their place in the game between classes
- A customize feature where teachers could select only some of the articles in a module
- A reporting tool that would allow teachers to review students’ scores in the game, article-by-article, or as a group of students
Factitious: Classroom Edition Crowdfunding Campaign
The AU Game Studio (part of the AU Game Lab), recently launched a crowdfunding campaign through American University’s UFund program to raise the funds needed to create the Classroom Edition. Please visit the funding page to view an overview video that describes the proposed co-design project.
We’ve set up the sponsor levels to allow high value sponsors to “donate” the benefits of their sponsorship to a classroom teacher so they can participate in co-design activities. For example, several teachers will be able to test out prototypes of the new version and provide useful feedback and suggestions on these preliminary designs.
Custom Versions of Factitious
One of the coolest parts of the Classroom Edition project will be the testing of an early prototype of the ultimate version of the Factitious game platform: the Factitious Builder. Selected teachers will be able to create their own version of Factitious … with their own collections of stories.
Teachers can guide their students in the process of identifying possible stories and then fact-checking the articles to prove they are real or fake (or teachers can do this themselves). After they import the articles into the Factitious gaming platform, they can then publish their version of Factitious for other students at their school to play.
I will personally work with teachers who have been selected (by sponsors or the Factitious team) to show them how to navigate and use the Factitious Builder prototype.
“Tuning in” Challenge
AU Adjunct Professor Mary Ann Aker commented several times that her students liked playing the because it was challenging. As a game designer, one of my key strategies for getting players focused on a game is to create challenging experiences. Most people enjoy a dramatically close basketball or football game–especially the players who will win or lose. Creating “appropriately difficult” challenges is also a great way to keep players engaged with your game.
With Factitious, the challenge was whether you could easily tell if an article was real or fake. If you could tell right away and you were right, then there was no suspense. After a couple of “too easy” articles, most players would quit. Our job was to make sure none of the articles in the game was obvious — we want players to have to think hard about it.
We also had to watch out for articles where most players failed to spot fake and real news correctly. These articles were “too hard” and after a while, even the most ardent gamer will give up if there’s no hope of winning.
To root out articles that were too hard or too easy, we “pre-tuned” the collection of articles by testing them with some college students and tracked their responses.
If most testers correctly rated article as a fake or real, then we tossed that article out because it was too easy. If more than half of the testers guessed wrong, then we tossed that article out because it was too hard or confusing.
The real proof would come when we released the game to the public. Thankfully, our tuning process worked. The chart below shows how often people successfully choose fake/real for all of the articles in the game (the numbers at the bottom are the articleIDs). They all fall in the “sweet-spot” between too hard and too easy — just as we wanted.
Please see the original Factitious Medium article to learn more about our insane viral growth when we first launched in July 2017, how players get better at spotting fake news with the game, and other key factors in the game’s success besides the “Tuning in Challenge” design strategy.
How the Factitious news game helps people learn to detect fake news.
