Blog #7 – The Great Educational Technology Debate and End of ECDI 337 Class Wrap-up

Screen capture your score at the end of the Badnews game and explain your overall experience

For our last blog post, I decided to play Badnews and elaborate on my overall experience. I found the game quite interesting as it places the user in the position of creating bad information online. First, I would like to mention that the game is developed well, with a very appealing user interface (UI). The game overall does a fantastic job interacting with the user by asking a series of questions. The game more importantly, highlights the process of how bad information is delivered online.

I’d first like to discuss aspects of bad information the game decided to include. The six include: Impersonation, Emotion, Polarization, Conspiracy, Discredit, and Trolling. While playing the game, once I received a badge a took a moment to read the description of each one and understand how it works in mainstream media. For this section, I would like to primarily focus on two: Conspiracy and Discredit. As of recently, it feels that conspiracies have exploded. While playing, I was trying to determine the likeability of them, and what creates such traction for some conspiracies. Some prevalent ones today include: 5G is causing COVID-19, the virus was created in a lab, or even the US military imported COVID into China. All are very out there, but I find it intriguing how they gain such popularity, I admit, I find some of these comical. Today, I get excited to hear the next “possibility” on a story. Badnews does a very good job in illustrating an individual creating a conspiracy, and the subsequent result is people believing immediately. The next point I’d like to discuss is discredit, and its prevalence in the media. I notice this frequently on Twitter when a fact-checker corrects a story, and the response become hostile. The game did a fantastic job of portraying this, the example used was a fact-checker who debunks a conspiracy created by the player. The game then allows the player to respond from three options: “Apologize”, “Do nothing” or “Take revenge”. I feel that most people’s reaction to being fact-checked would be to take revenge, which leads to accusations and pretending the problem is on the other side. I really enjoyed how the game displayed these two aspects in bad information.

Here is a screenshot of my results:

As you can see, I finished my bad information spree with 11,156 followers. One major takeaway is how easy it is for anyone to spread bad information online. I also appreciate the clear distinction made between misinformation and disinformation. From experience, I feel that disinformation is way more apparent in mainstream media. Unfortunately, as the world evolves, humans become more divided and push an agenda and to the point of attempting to deceive the other side. This is effective because it can be quite hard to find the difference between real and fake news. My results also show me that it doesn’t take much to hit all the aspects discussed, which is concerning. Being able to spread bad information has proven to be easy for anyone to perform. With that said, Badnews was a fun, short game that did a great job in explaining the aspects of bad information in mainstream media, as well as force me to conduct further analysis on my perspective on the issue.

I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you for the great semester! Wishing all the best in everyones future endeavours.