According to a new report from Aftermath, the United States Department of Defense began accepting applications for a grant in April million dollars to help a nonprofit develop “an evergreen game in a sandbox platform, with an existing fan base, in which participants play a game that builds cognitive resilience to authoritarianism and promotes democratic norms and values.”
Furthermore, in the same period the American body offered $250,000 for a Ukraine-based nonprofit esports program in which “athletes will receive counter-disinformation/conflict resolution training to address foreign propaganda and disinformation in competitive online gaming spaces.”
Calls were open until May 22, but the US government is still offering $800,000 for a game jam in Ukraine, with the aim of creating games that will increase “players’ skepticism towards foreign propaganda and disinformation”.
Other video game-themed programs from the United States
These proposals are by no means the first US-led. The American programs include research into the “scope and extent of foreign propaganda and disinformation occurring in games and game-adjacent platforms in Eastern Europe” and an experiential learning program in Turkmenistan that, among other things, aims to organize a competition”Farmcraft” from the Network of Academic and Scholastic Esports Federations (NASEF) for students ages 10 to 18. This program “uses the popular game Minecraft to introduce the basics of agricultural science, food security and climate change.”
The spokesperson who spoke to Aftermath revealed that these are not the first video game-related grants managed by the United States of America government, but it is certainly the largest investment made so far in the sector of games and media literacy digital” by the Global Engagement Center, a State Department agency that aims to “recognize, understand, expose, and counter propaganda and disinformation from foreign states intended to undermine or influence the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.
Recent US government initiatives regarding disinformation gaming are based on science of “prebunking” (i.e. understanding that a piece of news is false since its discovery), which according to researchers such as Sander van der Linden, professor of social psychology at the University of Cambridge, can inoculate people against disinformation, unlike debunking (discovering that a piece of news is false after having discovered and assimilated it), which often doesn’t work.
Two games have been created in the past Cat Park and Harmony Square, dedicated to foreign audiences, which put you in the shoes of an agent who spreads disinformation. Studies conducted by the University of Cambridge on Harmony Square and Cat Park found that players were more likely to spot misinformation after playing.
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