It’s no wonder that the gaming industry with its far-reach into the lives of adolescents for what could conceivably be the last 30 years, would seek to be utilized as an education tool in or outside the classroom. For that matter, online or simply computer educational games have become ubiquitous in the percipitous rise of computers as an everyday tool. The danger comes from the saturation of the market with very little quality control or minimal testing standards to qualify the efficacy of such products.

I think without much question a tool such as Bad News could be useful just for the simple fact of exposing youth to the various types of misinformation out there and the tech used to do it. By equipping youth to be able to define and assess what misinformation is, along with the awareness of how it can shift quickly and covertly to becoming disinformation, will develop for themselves the necessary tools to become better-informed online citizens.

Further assessment of what experts in social psychology refer to as inoculation theory, is found in within the fields of health, science, and politics, amongst others. A theory developed by William McGuire in 1961 of course had its origins very much away from the influence of the internet, but its prevalence today holds strongest there, perhaps due to its anonymous nature, the global reach of the world wide web and its universality, and the mass of both types of information – corroborated and the uncorroborated kind. Within the field of scientific study climate change science, has found useful and creative ways to effectively debunk those pushing common myths onto public discourse platforms. One such study was presented by John Cook and his colleagues, Deconstructing climate misinformation to identify reasoning errors, in countering such attempts of denialism.

Coming at the issue of the internet’s infusion into education from another direction, research clearly shows that the efficacy of online learning lags far behind the influx of an already saturated market of tech toys, gadgets, and educational products promoted as enhancers of student learning. Adding some of my thoughts to the APA’s 2015 Gaming to learn article via the Hypothesis annotation tool was helpful in contextualizing the research with some of my colleagues queries and analyses.

And then, going deeper through Westra’s 2019 piece, Why and How Serious Games can Become Far More Effective: Accommodating Productive Learning Experiences, Learner Motivation and the Monitoring of Learning Gains, demonstrates that the lag is still substantial when implementing sound teaching & learning criteria into online educational games. A not insubstantial finding is that “serious” games, much like any classical commercial game, hype the fun properties (visual, acoustic, narrative qualities) over the more substantive pedagogical necessities.