Video Games: A Double-Edged Sword in the Fight Against Disinformation
MADRID — Video games have evolved from a niche hobby into one of the largest and most influential media systems in human history. The industry now earns more revenue than film and music combined, and billions of people across the world spend substantial portions of their lives inside digital worlds. In many countries, playing a video game is no longer a pastime reserved for children and teenagers; it is a common cultural practice for adults, families, and even public institutions. Yet in public debates about disinformation, video games are still too often treated as a separate universe, a space of entertainment that has little to do with news, politics, and civic life. That assumption is dangerously outdated, according to Salvador Gómez García, a professor and researcher of Journalism, New Media and Game Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). In a conversation that explores both aspects of the gaming world, Gómez García confronts a central paradox: digital gaming environments can be a breeding ground for disinformation, but video games can also be used to combat so-called “fake news.” It is not simply that games are good or bad. It is that they are powerful. They are powerful because they are immersive, interactive, emotional, social and deeply engaging. The same features that allow a game to hold the attention of millions of players for hours can be exploited by those who wish to spread falsehoods, and the same features can be redirected by educators and journalists to build resilience against those falsehoods. Understanding this double-edged nature is the first step toward addressing the information crisis of the twenty-first century.
The disinformation side of the argument begins with the social and technical architecture of modern gaming. Multiplayer games such as Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, Call of Duty, League of Legends, and Counter-Strike are not isolated fantasies; they are always-on social networks. Players communicate through voice chat, text messages, in-game gestures, custom skins, and user-generated maps. Around these games are external platforms—especially Discord, Twitch, YouTube, and TikTok—where gaming culture overflows into the rest of the Internet. This ecosystem is fast, emotional, and largely unmoderated. A false story can travel through a gaming community with the speed of a stream and the authority of a trusted clanmate. Radicalization researchers have documented how hate groups recruit in gaming spaces, using jokes, memes, and multiplayer competition to normalize ideas that would be rejected in other contexts. Extremists can insert propaganda into custom game modes or use game-like simulations to stage propaganda scenarios. Historical disinformation can be smuggled into user-created mods that rewrite wars, genocides, colonial crimes, or national histories. In the commercial gaming industry itself, fake leaks, manipulated screenshots, and conspiracy theories about developers and gamers are common; they spread because audiences are hungry for insider information and are used to a culture where rumors become part of the game. Players learn to trust their clans, their favorite streamers, and their in-game allies. That trust is necessary for teamwork and fun, but it becomes a vulnerability when a deceptive message arrives in the form of a helpful tip, a political video, or a leaked document. In such an environment, the distinction between verified fact and entertaining fiction can become dangerously blurred.
Yet the same mechanics that make games vulnerable to disinformation can also be turned into remedies. Over the past two decades, media researchers and game designers have created a growing family of educational games based on psychological inoculation. One of the best-known examples is Bad News, a browser-based game in which players are asked to become the creator of a fake news empire. They choose a persona, manufacture a conspiracy theory, trigger outrage, collect followers, and learn to use the emotional triggers that real manipulators deploy. The game does not tell players that disinformation is bad; it makes them practice disinformation in a controlled environment so that they can recognize its patterns when they appear in the real world. Another game, Harmony Square, puts players in the role of a “chief disinformation officer” responsible for polarizing a peaceful town. Go Viral! was developed during the Covid-19 pandemic to teach people how health misinformation spreads and why fear and anger make false claims so effective. Factitious invites players to swipe left or right on a stream of real and fake headlines, training them to make quick judgments about source reliability. Fake It to Make It asks players to run a content farm and discover how clickbait, advertising revenue, and political polarization are connected. These games are not just digital quizzes; they are exercises in procedural literacy. Instead of reading about manipulation techniques, the player uses them. Instead of being warned that disinformation is dangerous, the player sees how it is manufactured from the inside. Research has shown that well-designed games of this kind can improve players’ ability to detect manipulative techniques immediately after play, and they are increasingly used in schools, newsrooms, and civic organizations as part of media literacy programs.
Gómez García’s academic perspective helps explain why games hold such potential. His research sits at the intersection of journalism, new media, and game studies at the Complutense University of Madrid, one of Europe’s most prominent universities for communication research. He is part of a growing generation of scholars who no longer treat games as a trivial subject, but as a central part of how citizens learn to understand the world. Games, in this view, are not only objects of study; they are also a method of persuasion and education. They work through rules and systems, not just images and words. A game that simulates the economics of disinformation can teach a player how false news is funded; a game that places the player in the position of a refugee can generate empathy more effectively than a news article; a game that forces the player to verify sources in order to solve a puzzle can create a lifelong habit of checking facts. For journalism, the implications are enormous. Traditional newsrooms often treat games as competitors or as trivial supplements, but newsgames can be a format for reporting in their own right. Some early experiments, such as September 12th and The Migrant Trail, showed that an interactive simulation could make an editorial argument in a way that print could not. More recent projects have gamified fact-checking, source validation, and lateral reading, teaching audiences to verify manipulated images, identify bot accounts, and understand algorithmic amplification. The challenge, according to Gómez García’s line of work, is not to convince the world that games are important; it is to encourage journalists, educators, and policy makers to use games as seriously as they are using social media, which means investing in research, design, ethics, and evaluation.
There are, however, important limitations and dangers, and the interview with Gómez García is careful not to romanticize games as an automatic cure for disinformation. The first problem is distribution. Many media literacy games are small, free, and produced by universities or civil society groups; they rarely receive the marketing budgets of commercial blockbusters and often remain confined to schools and libraries, while the most vulnerable audiences are spending their time in commercial games and on unmoderated streaming platforms. The second problem is durability. The inoculation effect of a single game session tends to fade over time; without repeated exposure and reinforcement, players may lose the skills they developed. This means that games cannot be a one-off campaign; they need to be integrated into broader educational curricula and public information strategies. The third problem is measurement. While controlled studies show positive short-term results, it is difficult to prove that playing a game changes long-term online behavior, voting choices, or susceptibility to conspiracy theories. More rigorous research is needed across different languages, age groups, and political cultures. The fourth problem is ethical. Games that simulate disinformation can be criticized for teaching the very tactics they claim to expose. A player who learns how to create a viral fake story may be tempted to use that knowledge outside the game. There is also the risk of false balance: in an effort to appear neutral, an educational game might present factual reporting and propaganda as equally valid perspectives, which would confuse rather than inform. And there is the larger problem of the commercial gaming industry, which is built on maximizing attention and may be reluctant to fund critical play that challenges its own business models. These concerns do not mean that games are useless; they mean that games must be designed with care, monitored with evidence, and used as part of a much wider media defense system.
The conversation with Salvador Gómez García ultimately points to a conclusion that is both cautionary and hopeful. Video games will not disappear, and their role in the information ecosystem will only grow as virtual reality, augmented reality, and the metaverse become more integrated into everyday life. The same environments where people meet, work, shop, and play will also be environments where falsehoods are tested, amplified, and normalized. To ignore that reality is to leave one of the most powerful communication tools on earth in the hands of manipulators. But if games can be used to breed disinformation, they can also be used to breed resistance to it. The lesson of the interview is that the fight against fake news must be fought on every front, and the front of play cannot be abandoned. Journalists need to understand the grammar of games; educators need to use game-based learning in schools; game developers need to consider the ethical and political effects of their systems; governments and foundations need to fund research and independent production; and players need to recognize that their virtual worlds are not politically innocent. The game of truth is not something to be left in the hands of platform owners and politicians. It is a game that everyone plays, and it can be won or lost in the hidden corners of the global gaming world. The hope is that, as Gómez García argues, the power of play can be used to teach people not only how to shoot virtual enemies, but how to see through the real-world lies designed to manipulate them. In that sense, video games are not just an escape from reality; they are a rehearsal for the very difficult task of living in it.