Journalist Maggie Farley has created an online game to test people’s ability to detect fake news. In each round of Facticious, stories are posted, initially, without the source and you are asked to swipe or check a box to whether you think the story is true or not.
The stories tend to be odd stories and sometimes local stories which means that your knowledge of current affairs won’t help that much. Many of them also seem like they’d be right at home in Ripley’s Believe it Or Not, your knee-jerk reaction in many cases will be to click “fake” but if you play that way you won’t do very well.
The best cheat for the game is to check the source. At the end of each story, a button will give you the option to show the source. Unsurprisingly, stories from reputable sources tend to be true (which is what led me to create this site and the search engines in the first place).
According to NPR the game is open source and will soon be available for teachers, newsrooms, and other organizations to use for their own purposes.
“Teachers can ask students to select news stories to input into the game as a way to challenge their classmates. Or, a newspaper might use it to gather data on readers’ perceptions of truthful content. The game also provides a way for players to suggest content they think should be included.”
More information is available at factitious.augamestudio.com