Harmony Square [Game]

Harmony Square is a free, web browser-based game about fake news designed and developed by Gusmanson, in collaboration by the Dutch studio Tilt, the University of Cambridge and funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

Summary:

The idyllic Harmony Square is a small neighborhood mildly obsessed with democracy. As the “Chief Disinformation Officer,” your job is to disturb the square’s peace and quiet by fomenting internal divisions and pitting its residents against each other.

The goal of the game is to expose the tactics and manipulation techniques that are used to mislead people, build up a following, or exploit societal tensions for political purposes.

Scientists who worked with on the development of this game found that playing Harmony Square 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. The results of this study were published in the journal Harvard Misinformation Review, and can be found here.

The game also has a supplemental educator toolkit designed to help to improve media
literacy and to build citizen resilience to false information.

Language: This game is playable in English, French, Dutch, Bahasa Indonesian, Czech, Arabic, German, Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Hungarian, Slovenian, Tagalog, Spanish, Portuguese, Latvian, Romanian, Ukrainian and Kiswahili/Swahili.