The Misinformation Game is a social-media simulator built to study how people interact with information on social-media. To achieve this, The Misinformation Game simulates a social-media feed for research participants. Participants are shown fake social-media posts, either one at a time or in a feed format. They may then react to the posts and their comments. The Misinformation Game has been designed to be highly customisable so that a range of tightly controlled experiences can be created for participants. This customisability is a core focus of The Misinformation Game, to facilitate the research of a wide array of social-media related questions.
Paper: The (Mis)Information Game: A social media simulator
Documentation: MisinfoGame.com
If you would like to try a study created using The Misinformation Game, you can access an example game from our example game page. You may enter any ID to access the example game.
- Social media simulator with posts that may be displayed in a feed, or one at a time.
- Participants may react to posts, or comment on them.
- Dynamically updating follower numbers and credibility scores based on participants' interactions with posts (optional).
- Several options for the dynamic selection of sources and posts to show to participants.
- Customisable engagement metric information.
- Configurable prompt to be shown to participants before they begin participating in a study.
- Configurable introduction, game rules, and debriefing screens to be shown to participants before and after they complete a study.
- Ability to generate unique completion codes for participants.
- Rich recording of participants' interactions to allow analysis of their behavior.
- Security to restrict access to the results of studies, and to stop unauthorised users from uploading their own studies.
- Ability to completely delete old studies and their results to ensure privacy of participants is maintained.
Guides to creating studies using the Misinformation Game, information regarding its functionality, and its system architecture can all be found in the documentation for the Misinformation Game. This documentation can be accessed from MisinfoGame.com.
@Article{Butler2023,
title={The (Mis)Information Game: A social media simulator},
url={https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02153-x},
doi={10.3758/s13428-023-02153-x},
journal={Behavior Research Methods},
issn={1554-3528},
year={2023},
month={Jul},
day={11},
author={Butler, Lucy H. and Lamont, Padraig and Wan, Dean Law Yim and Prike, Toby and Nasim, Mehwish and Walker, Bradley and Fay, Nicolas and Ecker, Ullrich K. H.}
}
The Misinformation Game is licensed under the CC BY 4.0 License.