Cards Against Humanity is playable with two players with some adjustments to the rules although the revisions can change the feel of the game. The official way to play is to introduce a dummy player, but two players can also both provide the answers if they can agree about which one is funniest. Dan Wojciechowski’s variant keeps the original elements and adds in a new angle of outwitting your opponent. Of all the two-player versions of Cards Against Humanity this is easily my favourite as it keeps most of the elements of the game but also manages to add something new. This first set of results from Bad News has its limitations, say researchers. The sample was self-selecting (those who came across the game online and opted to play), and as such was skewed toward younger, male, liberal, and more educated demographics. That way they will always have to try their best to choose the funniest answer as they won’t know what Rando might come up with. With this in mind, however, the study found the game to be almost equally effective across age, education, gender, and political persuasion. Bad News has ideological balance built in: players can choose to create fake news from the left and right of the political spectrum.

An online game in which people play the role of propaganda producers to help them identify real world disinformation has been shown to increase “psychological resistance” to fake news, according to a study of 15,000 participants. Well, although it doesn’t end up as quite the same as the full experience it can be done, and I’ll be giving you some ideas in this article. In-game questions measuring the effects of Bad News were deployed for four of its featured fake news badges. As with many other activities that have potential benefits and harms, moderation is the key. Most of the harms that come from gaming can be improved, if not avoided altogether, by limiting the number of hours spent in front of the screen, and by engaging in healthy activities like exercising, or socializing in the real world instead of the virtual game world.Roozenbeek and van der Linden worked with Dutch media collective DROG and design agency Gusmanson to develop Bad News, and the idea of a game to inoculate against fake news has attracted much attention. There is mixed research that there are some cognitive benefits to gaming, such as better control of one’s attention and improved spatial reasoning, though it isn’t entirely clear how much these benefits extend outside of the video game sphere into the real world. Finally, video games have medical applications, such as training people with degenerative diseases to improve their balance, helping adolescents with ADHD improve their thinking skills, or training surgeons on how to do technically complicated operations.

Repetitive stress injuries, or overuse injuries, are injuries that come from activities that involve repeated use of muscles and tendons, to the point that pain and inflammation develop. If these injuries are allowed to progress, numbness and weakness can develop, and permanent injury can result. Overuse injuries of the hands and arms are rampant among gamers. This is a version of what psychologists call ‘inoculation theory’, with our game working like a psychological vaccination.” The team have also created a “ junior version” for children aged 8-10, available in ten different languages so far. “We want to develop a simple and engaging way to establish media literacy at a relatively early age, then look at how long the effects last,” said Roozenbeek.We find that just fifteen minutes of gameplay has a moderate effect, but a practically meaningful one when scaled across thousands of people worldwide, if we think in terms of building societal resistance to fake news,” said van der Linden. It succeeds in turning this version of Cards Against Humanity into a game of doublethink because rather than assigning points to the answer you think is funniest you instead end up assigning them to the answer you think your opponent is most likely to choose, and that can change from turn to turn. There is an option to add in an imaginary player called Rando Cardrissian to spice things up a little.