What is
Bad Vaxx
about?
In Bad Vaxx, you can learn to build resilience against vaccination misinformation. This game offers two paths. Want to play as a villain? Abandon all ethics and join the four ‘Masters of Manipulation’ to craft your persona as a ruthless misinformation spreader. However, keep an eye on your companions’ frustration meters—you need to stay on good terms with Ali, Forge, Ann, and Mac. Prefer to be a hero? Battle against the Masters of Manipulation. Discredit their tactics and gather as many followers as possible. But be careful not to alienate your followers with lies or confusing information, or you’ll lose the game.
How does
it work?
he goal of the game is to expose the tactics and manipulation techniques that are used to mislead people around the theme of vaccinations and medical misinformation. Bad Vaxx works as a psychological “vaccine” against disinformation: playing it builds cognitive resistance against common forms of manipulation that you may encounter online.
Scientists who worked with us on the development of this game found that playing Bad Vaxx improves people’s ability to spot manipulation techniques in social media posts, increases their confidence in spotting such techniques, and reduces their willingness to share manipulative content with people in their network
Want to know more about the specifics? Each chapter of Bad Vaxx represents a technique or method often used in misinformation or misleading information.
Project Description
Our inoculation games were designed as part of a collaboration between DROG, Gusmanson Design and Cambridge University. We created these games to improve people’s ability to spot common manipulation techniques such as trolling and creating conspiracy theories out of thin air. So far, we’ve launched three different games, each of which covers a different domain of misinformation: Bad News (about online “fake news”), Harmony Square (about political disinformation and intergroup polarization), and Go Viral! (about COVID-19 misinformation). More games are currently in development. This page will be updated as soon as they are publicly available.
All our inoculation intervention games were developed by Bad News, serious gaming development studio, a 100% subsidiary of DROG
