Tackling disinformation and radicalization through play
“Mission Ganymede” introduces young people to the structures, mechanisms and dangers of conspiracy narratives in a playful way and helps them to develop an attitude when dealing with people caught up in conspiracy ideologies. What are conspiracy narratives and how do I recognize them? How can I check the content? What can I do if people around me believe in conspiracy narratives? The digital serious game addresses these and other questions.
In small groups of up to three people, the players immerse themselves in a narrative chat game that confronts them directly with a fictional conspiracy and at the same time provides them with tools to question and deconstruct it. The players take on the role of members of a YouTube group at a fictitious school, who are planning and researching their next video. But during the research a member of the AG is drawn deeper and deeper into an alleged conspiracy: a secret elite, according to the group “The Readers”, is planning to relocate to Jupiter's moon Ganymede in order to escape the imminent climate collapse on Earth. In order to make life on Ganymede possible, they are exploiting the last of Earth's resources and using them to build a colony on Jupiter's moon Ganymede. The participants deconstruct this narrative and decide how to argue with a classmate who believes the conspiracy narrative.
