Playing with Fake News: State of Fake News Video Games

This study examines 22 video games that center fake news in their play or design, collected in November 2020 through keyword searches, app stores, and the gamesforchange.org repository, and playtested for up to 15 minutes each. Drawing on established definitions of misinformation and disinformation, the author treats fake news as a politically contested term and assesses how these games engage with it. The sample comprises 16 browser-based games and six mobile games, with most titles developed in the United States and release dates spread fairly evenly across 2017 to 2020.

The central finding is a divide between the two platforms. Browser games consistently carry awareness-raising or educational intent and typically teach critical thinking and fact-checking, usually through quizzes and text adventures. Mobile games, by contrast, rarely have explicit educational objectives and in six cases teach no literacy skills at all. Most titles can be completed in five minutes or less, and reward systems appear in roughly 73 percent of games, though only three include leaderboards, indicating that these are designed as individual rather than competitive experiences.

A broader pattern runs across the sample: fake news is framed primarily as an individual problem to be solved through personal vigilance. None of the games address policy, platform regulation, or collective responses such as content flagging. The author attributes these gaps largely to the small budgets and brief playtimes characteristic of the games, while acknowledging that the study did not gather player demographics or evidence of actual learning outcomes. The conclusions therefore describe the games' intentions and design choices rather than their effectiveness in changing how players evaluate news.