What is
Go Viral!
about?
Go Viral! is a 5-minute game about COVID-19 misinformation. Over the course of three levels, you slowly descend into an online echo chamber where misinformation proliferates widely, all the while learning about some of the most common strategies used to spread false and misleading information about the virus.
Go Viral! was developed in collaboration with the Cabinet Office of the United Kingdom. The game is currently available in Brazilian Portuguese, Croatian, English, Estonian, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian; click the button on the top right of the page to change the language.
How does
it work?
In a large multinational randomized controlled study, we found that playing Go Viral! improves people’s ability to spot manipulative social media content about COVID-19, increases their confidence in doing so, and reduces their willingness to share COVID-19 misinformation with others in their network. These findings were robust across three different language versions of the game (English, French and German), and remained significant for at least a week after playing. These findings were published in the journal Big Data & Society and can be read here.
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
