Serious games

A new perspective on learning.

Challenge

A serious game is great at giving a new perspective on difficult topics. They’re interactive stories that put players in various situations, where they have to think up a strategy, experiment and learn from their mistakes to solve all sorts of challenges. They’re more fun and much more effective than reading a textbook.

Our serious games

We created award-winning games that have been translated into dozens of languages and played by millions of people. Games for commercial organizations, but also for the Dutch, British and American governments. For example, check out Bad News, Go Viral! and Cat Park.

Bad News

One of our most successful games is Bad News, which teaches young people about fake news. Players assume the role of a fake news producer, cheered on by a mysterious Narrator. Players figure out how to cause as much damage as possible in the game, all the while learning how fake news works in the real world. This method works much better than theoretical lessons, and is super effective: a scientific study by the University of Cambridge, based on collected game data, shows that players truly build up resistance agains fake news. We made Bad News in collaboration with Tilt.

Cat Park

Cat Park is a free browser-based game developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center and researchers from the University of Cambridge. In this interactive story, you play as an opponent of a fictional “cat park” and use deliberate disinformation—such as clickbait, emotional headlines, meme politics, visual manipulation, and polarization—to influence public opinion. Research shows that after playing, participants are on average 19% better at recognizing disinformation and 15% less likely to share such content. The game takes about 15–20 minutes to complete and serves as a form of “prebunking”—a psychological vaccine against fake news through safe, controlled exposure.

Harmony Square

In Harmony Square, you are hired as the Chief Disinformation Officer of a peaceful fictional neighborhood, and through four short levels, you must deploy deceptive tactics—such as trolling, emotional manipulation, bot amplification, conspiracy theories, and polarization—to create social unrest. Scientific research found that players became significantly better at identifying political disinformation, more confident in their judgments, and less likely to share misleading content after playing.

More Games

Other games we have developed include Go Viral!, about COVID-19 misinformation, and Bad Vaxx, which addresses disinformation related to vaccinations.

What is a good serious game?

A good game respects the subject as well as the player. It should support the learning goals while being fun and allow players the freedom to explore a subject from all sides. We start by defining the learning goals, and writing a good scenario supporting those. Then we look for a suitable visual design and game concept. We have a lot of experience writing narratives and producing illustrations, animations and sound for games. We can help you with this if you have an idea for a game but don’t want to create the content yourself.

Playable on the web

Our games are playable on the web. Anyone can play them on any modern computer, laptop, tablet or phone. Content can be easily adapted and translated. It is also possible to collect (anonymous) playing data for subsequent research.

Insightful design

We kick off the project with a creative session focused on the learning goals. What do we want players to take away after playing? Then we start writing the scenario and design the gameplay. We translate the learning goals into an interactive narrative that’s not only educational, but also fun to play. This is a process of planning, testing and lots of playing!

Realization

We then start technical development and production of graphics, video, soundtrack etc. Game content can be easily managed and translated through a CMS such as WordPress.