Abstract
This case study describes a game designed to serve as new literacy education tool, playful polling system for research audience perceptions. The game underwent two primary designer iterations. As a result of design changes and renewed political chatter about fake news, the game's second iteration gathered more than 500,000 plays. The data collected reveals useful patterns in understanding news literacy and the perception of play experiences. This data of more than 45,000 players, indicates that the older the person the better they are at identifying fake news, until the approximate age of 70. It also indicates that higher education correlates to better performance at identifying real news from fake, although the time it takes to do so varies. This case study demonstrates the potential for such game designs to collect data useful to non-game contexts.
