Gamification Europe: Project In Brazil, Looking At Fake News And The Pandemic Through D&D Role Play Game

Gamification is a technique that can be applied in many fields of life.Presenting gamified solutions are more affective on people to change their behaviors. During Gamification Europe there was 5 different categories that gamification applied and many participants with their different sight of view to gamification which makes it impossible not to get inspired.

Agnessa Spanellis was one of the participants who presented her project about gamification on critical thinking. My intention is mentioning about details of her project and share the insights upon it. The project, based on people in Brazil, occur in need of improving poor people’s knowledge about fake news. Impact of Covid-19 was higher at poorest people in Brazil since there were lack of information and their limited access to social services. Lack of information caused both they got scared even more than it’s necessary and also they did not know how to protect themselves. At this point, Agnessa pointed the importance of critical thinking skill which learnt through socialization and education.

The focus of their project is making the critical thinking a habit. They started with interviewing with target groups, the interview was mostly about pandemic, source of news and their way of understanding unreliable information. The results showed the fear was more because of the reduced news and their strategies of detecting fake news. They have diverse strategies which are both good and bad. Good ways such as cross checking from different sources and bad ways such as trusting video news more. She gave some game examples which designed to teach how to understand if news are fake or not. Most interesting and cleverest one to me was letting people learn by showing wrong way of it. In the example she mentioned, they designed a game for people to improve their skills of detection of fake news. In the game the participant has to create a fake news, there is no other way. At the end, it was expected the participants to detect a fake news easily since they made one of it by themselves too and know what is needed to create one.

The project that Agnessa and the team created, makes people work together as heroes which are referring to Brazilian cultural folk heroes, to decide if presented information is relevant or irrelevant. All characters have their own abilities and limits, they create card sets to show character’s skills which would be helpful to understand. The game rules are designed to increase critical thinking skills and had connection with it’s steps. They created a journey that triggers excitement and curiosity for players, as long as game continuous, players need to make decisions and collect some ingredients. When the game ended, players felt powerful since they controlled the game and made decisions. Participants came up with great and creative ideas much more then the team excepted. The game helped the participants on their decisions also on serious matters such as pandemic and politics. The project was very inspiring in the way they approach to problem and the journey by connecting players with characters, story, and graphics. Each problem demands it’s own solution. Understanding the real reason of the problem makes it easier to present more effective solutions. At this point gamification helps both to understand the habits of player and changing player’s habits permanently

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