Dungeons & Dragons and disinformation: How gaming can fight the misinformation age

A quote shared by that outdated highschool good friend which is not fairly correct. A social media publish with a photograph taken out of context. Misinformation, and disinformation*, comes for everyone. Yes, meaning you, too. It could be tough to develop the abilities and habits sturdy sufficient to fend off the fixed flood of dangerous info lately.

Have you tried Dungeons & Dragons?

This story comes from an episode of KUOW’s “Meet Me Here” podcast. Listen on the KUOW app or wherever you get podcasts. Also, try two panels at PAX West 2025 that includes Professor Jin Ha Lee and Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, each featured on this story.

As a professor with the University of Washington’s Information School, Jin Ha Lee thinks about dangerous info loads — the way it weaves into every day life, the way it spreads on-line. It’s an ongoing drawback, and with the rise of AI, it’s only getting worse.

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“There was this somewhat naive belief that, ‘ Oh if we’re able to just teach people how to figure out what the current information is, the problem will get better,” Lee said. “But now we know that it didn’t get better. And if anything, it got worse. And that’s largely because of how our information ecosystem is created. So learning about how to discern the accuracy of information is important, but it’s just not enough to protect us from this overwhelming amount of and flow of misinformation that we face every day.”

As an avid gamer, Professor Lee has discovered an answer in video games. She has created escape rooms and different video games that incorporate problems with misinformation and disinformation. One such sport is “Euphorigen Investigation.” It not solely works inside the problem, a major objective of the sport is to show how you can focus on the issue.

“If you try to just talk about misinformation in real life, people will often tell you that, ‘Oh, no no, I just go and watch cat videos, I don’t share any of these things. I am not contributing to this mess.’ Or, ‘I don’t fall for this kind of information, I can’t believe someone falls for this kind of information.’ It’s really easy for the conversation to go that way. So we use the game to create the experience where we can all fall for it so at the end, you are in this mindset, ‘OK, anybody can fall for this.’”

Professor Lee will likely be on a panel at PAX West 2025 known as “Dungeons and Disinformation: Games as Learning Environments for Disinformation Literacy” that includes different educators and sport designers. The panel’s title is a pun drawn from Dungeons & Dragons, the traditional role-playing sport. If you ask Happy Tracker Meow Meow, the sport is apt for educating classes. He additionally goes by the title of Washington’s Secretary of State Steve Hobbs when he is not enjoying D&D.

“You can use it as a teaching tool,” he stated.

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“Playing Dungeons and Dragons is collaborative storytelling,” Hobbs said. “So you can run scenarios in your adventure that can teach players a lesson. If they didn’t do some more insight checks — which is a thing you can do in D&D where you roll dice to check if somebody is lying or not — or maybe you do an intelligence check, to check out a fact, if you don’t do those things, then maybe the result is something the players didn’t want.”

The role-playing sport encompasses a dungeon grasp, who’s mainly an creator of an journey story that the gamers navigate. How this story unfolds is decided by gamers’ actions, creativity, and the randomness of a cube roll. It has been part of Hobbs’s life since he was in elementary college. In his position as Secretary of State, he has labored to get copies of the sport into libraries and colleges.

Dungeons & Dragons and classes in disinformation

Lean into collaborative storytelling

Dungeons & Dragons adventures normally contain a celebration of characters (people, elves, dwarves, and so on.). Having a wide range of characters will increase your probabilities of success. Each individual brings their very own distinctive abilities, experiences, and information.

Professor Lee notes that bogus info typically succeeds as a result of it’s bolstered by repetition, having a variety of the identical with nothing to maintain it in test.

“You go into a particular space, maybe you’ve come across some information and you didn’t think much of it, but it continues to come at you because social media is so good at algorithmic targeting. So you click on something, it’s gonna feed you more of that information and it tends to get more and more extreme. You fall into this misinformation rabbit hole.”

In different phrases, having a variety of the identical can hamper success. In D&D, nobody individual may deal with the challenges forward alone. But collectively, with their powers mixed, maybe they’ll triumph.

RELATED: Washington college students primed on media literacy, however marvel why adults do not get the identical schooling

Intelligence test

In Dungeons & Dragons, gamers could have an choice to make intelligence checks. This means they roll a die to make use of their smarts. It can imply a participant investigates additional to uncover extra info, as an alternative of appearing straight away primarily based on what’s in entrance of them. It can imply that info are checked.

Insight checks

Another transfer in D&D is an perception test. If utilizing intelligence was all about info, perception is about knowledge — how you can finest use these info to motive via a scenario. It can imply contemplating if there are parts of nuance or context.

RELATED: How do you counter misinformation? Critical considering is the 1st step

Incorporate widespread floor

Professor Lee argues that countering misinformation is not all the time about correcting an individual or proving folks incorrect. Instead, extra progress could be made by discovering widespread floor and dealing via issues collectively.

“So as an alternative of making an attempt to make your level, actually give attention to listening to what the opposite individual is saying and making an attempt your finest to know the place they’re coming from … If you focus an excessive amount of on proving them incorrect or correcting the knowledge then they really feel attacked and the dialog shuts down. Then you go residence and go to the chat and begin blocking that uncle. That’s not what we would like.”

This can be good recommendation for having conversations with folks you disagree with, particularly in terms of the standard of data.

“Now, is this easy in real life? No,” Lee stated. “Especially as a gamer, you all the time go in with this concept that ‘I need to win, win the argument.’ But the truth is the win place just isn’t profitable the argument. The win place is the lengthy sport. You wish to determine issues out collectively.”

While you are at PAX West 2025, try:

• “Dungeons and Disinformation: Games as Learning Environments for Disinformation Literacy”. A panel with researchers, educators, and sport designers, together with UW Professor Jin Ha Lee. Saturday, Aug. 30, 10:30 a.m., Summit constructing, stage 3.
• “Selling Your Game Internationally – Japan: One Year Later”. A panel with Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs speaking about his efforts to attach Washington’s sport makers with oversea markets in Japan and Europe. Sunday, Aug. 31, 10:30 a.m. within the Summit constructing, stage 3.
• The Secretary of State’s Office additionally has a sales space at PAX. Arch building, booth 134.

*Something value noting — or else some phrase nerd will e-mail me, complaining that I’m conflating disinformation and misinformation. There is a distinction between these two phrases, although the tip result’s typically the identical: We do not function with the perfect, most correct info.

Misinformation: This is just dangerous info on par with rumors or mistaken statements. It can typically be on accident. For generations, of us repeated that everyone in Europe believed the world was flat earlier than Columbus sailed to the New World. That, in fact, just isn’t true, and Columbus by no means proved the world was spherical. But of us stored saying it. It was misinformation.

Disinformation: This is info that’s deliberately crafted to mislead you, even manipulate you. Ahead of the January 2024 presidential major in New Hampshire, voters in that state received a cellphone name from then President Joe Biden urging them to not vote within the major and to avoid wasting their vote for the November election, when their vote would really matter. However, the voice was not really President Biden and the knowledge was false. It was produced by an AI program. It was meant to mislead folks, in the end suppressing votes. This was disinformation.

Both misinformation and disinformation unfold simply on-line, particularly via social media the place falsehoods journey sooner that motive.