(86) Unease

By Onno Hansen-Staszyński | Last Updated: 11 December 2025

This blog post will be another raw observation from the classroom (see also blog post eighty-five). The observation concerns information manipulation. The general context is a day-long workshop for adolescents. The concrete context is our students playing the Bad News game.

Bad news

It is more than seven years ago that University Cambridge scientists and DROG released the Bad News game. The essence of the game:[i] “In Bad News, you take on the role of fake news-monger. Drop all pretense of ethics and choose a path that builds your persona as an unscrupulous media magnate.” The idea is that individuals playing the game get inoculated against the virus of manipulated information. Co-initiator Sander van der Linden explains: “The idea is that once you’ve seen the tactics, and used them in the game, you build up resistance. /…/ We want the public to learn what these people are doing by walking in their [fake news tycoons’] shoes.”[ii]

Expectation of unease

Because the topic of information manipulation has only become more important since the game was released, my wife and I thought it was a good idea to include the game in the workshop we had prepared for our students. As the game requires that “all pretense of ethics” is dropped, we suspected that our students might feel uneasy from time to time when playing the game. So, we asked them to make notes while playing about the moments they would feel this unease. We had planned to follow-up on that after the game.

Student answers

After the students finished playing the game, we asked them to write down their moments of unease. This is what they answered:

Nothing was uncomfortable for me because I like talking about every topic and more or less knew what to do.
Nothing was uncomfortable for me because we see false information on our phones every day.
Sometimes it was hard to choose which news item to select because each one was unrealistic.
Nothing was uncomfortable for me because every topic suited me.
The only uncomfortable element of the game was using techniques that provoked fear or anger, because it shows how easily negative emotions spread online.
_S_ome answers were unrealistic and it was hard to choose the right one.
I didn’t have a problem; after a moment of thought, I saw what I had to do.
All the elements were comfortable and I knew what to do.
It’s hard for me to answer that, maybe it’s that sometimes I didn’t know what to click because nothing seemed like a good choice.
I didn’t have such a moment; I knew what I had to do.
There was no uncomfortable thing and the whole thing was generally comfortable.

Unease

It turned out it was us who were feeling uneasy – with the answers given by the students. The students’ answers show that the game maybe did not totally fit their current lived reality, but nine out of ten felt perfectly at ease in the game universe of information manipulation.

Reflection

My reflection is not that our students have no sense of right and wrong. They show that they do in their behavior in the classroom. Rather, we adults have thrown them into an ocean full of sharks and they have made it their habitat. They seem to have become desensitized to information manipulation. Naturally, they do not seem to have a choice. But it does make me wonder: what relevance can we, the people who look into the shark tank but do not naturally swim with the sharks, have for them?

Notes

[i] https://www.getbadnews.com/en

[ii] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/20/bad-news-the-game-researchers-hope-will-vaccinate-public-against-fake-news

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