Misinformation has become a significant issue in today's society, with the proliferation of false information through various mediums such as social media and traditional news sources. The rapid spread of misinformation has made it increasingly difficult for people to separate truth from fiction, and this has the potential to cause significant harm to individuals and society as a whole. In addition, there currently exists an information gap with regard to internet education, with many schools across America not having the teaching personnel nor resources to adequately educate their students about the dangers of the internet, specifically with regard to misinformation in the political sphere. To address the dangers of misinformation, some game developers have created video games that aim to educate players on the issue and help them develop critical thinking skills. These games can be used to raise awareness about the importance of verifying information before sharing it. By doing so, they can help reduce the spread of misinformation and promote a more informed and discerning public. They can also provide players with a safe and controlled environment to practice these skills and build confidence in their ability to evaluate information. However, these existing games often suffer from various shortcomings such as failing to adequately address how misinformation specifically exploits the biases within people to be effective and rarely covering how evolving modern technologies like sophisticated chatbots and deep fakes have made individuals even more vulnerable to misinformation. The purpose of this study is to create an educational misinformation game to address this information gap and investigate its efficacy as an educational tool while also iterating on the designs for previous games in the space.

翻译：虚假信息已成为当今社会的重大问题，虚假信息通过社交媒体和传统新闻来源等各种渠道泛滥。虚假信息的快速传播使人们越来越难以分辨真相与虚构，这可能对个人和社会整体造成严重危害。此外，目前在互联网教育方面存在信息缺口，美国许多学校缺乏足够的教学人员和资源来充分教育学生认识互联网的危险，尤其是在政治领域的虚假信息方面。为应对虚假信息的危害，一些游戏开发者创作了旨在教育玩家并帮助他们培养批判性思维技能的视频游戏。这些游戏可用于提高人们对分享信息前验证其重要性的认识，从而有助于减少虚假信息的传播，促进公众更加知情和具有辨别力。它们还能为玩家提供安全受控的环境，以练习这些技能并增强其评估信息能力的信心。然而，这些现有游戏往往存在各种缺陷，例如未能充分说明虚假信息如何专门利用人们的偏见来产生影响，且很少涉及诸如先进聊天机器人和深度伪造等现代技术的发展如何使个体更容易受到虚假信息的影响。本研究旨在创作一款教育类虚假信息游戏以填补这一信息缺口，并探讨其作为教育工具的有效性，同时对该领域先前游戏的设计进行迭代改进。