Cat Park

April 23, 2023 1:42 PM

Cat Park. A 15-minute game that boosts your defense against disinformation.

Games are a weapon in the war on disinformation:

The mayor of your city has announced a strange new public project: a lavish park especially for cats. It seems like a waste of money so, with the help of some activists you have met online, you campaign against it on social media. You start with rousing posts—“Breaking News: Outrageous! City prioritises elitist pets over our kids!”—and funny memes. You soon move on to doctoring images to make it look like the mayor is part of “an ultra-secret cat-worshipping cult”. You galvanise your followers to take violent action.

In “Cat Park” players learn to become disinformation warriors. The free 15-minute online game explores the dark art of spreading lies online; players get points for the passion of their posts and shareability of their memes. It is good fun, with a witty script and futuristic cyberpunk style. It is also an educational tool, funded by the Global Engagement Centre (GEC), a branch of the US State Department which aims to “recognise, understand, expose and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts”.

Games such as “Cat Park” are an ingenious response to a widespread problem. Fake news and conspiracy theories are in rich supply; demand for them is high in polarised countries across the world. Many governments are mulling policies to try to limit their spread, since internet users often struggle to discern legitimate sources from nefarious ones. Last year a study by Ofcom, a British regulator, found that 30% of the country’s adults hardly consider the truthfulness of information they read online. About 6% give no thought to the veracity of stories. Around a quarter failed to spot fake social-media accounts.

By Tilt Studio.

posted by russilwvong (18 comments total)

edit: NM. Just an annoying UI.
posted by lkc at 1:53 PM on April 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

I remember when web games would show up here all the time.
posted by JHarris at 1:58 PM on April 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

lkc: were you stuck because controls were hidden by the cookie banner you were ignoring? I was.
posted by Ickster at 2:37 PM on April 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

But I want them to build a cat park.
posted by General Malaise at 3:13 PM on April 23, 2023 [18 favorites]

I'm interested in this cat cult....
posted by Jacen at 3:28 PM on April 23, 2023 [7 favorites]

Forget it kid, it's the internet.

This was cute, thanks for sharing.
posted by the primroses were over at 3:35 PM on April 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

I bailed when it didn't let me stay home. I'm not gonna go to some cat park just because SMS spam and random FB messages tell me to.
Did I pass the test?
posted by donio at 3:48 PM on April 23, 2023 [8 favorites]

> I'm not gonna go to some cat park just because SMS spam and random FB messages tell me to.

But Thou Must!
posted by genpfault at 3:54 PM on April 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

i found Carmen Sandiego

she's in the cat park
posted by Jacqueline at 3:54 PM on April 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

I remember their earlier game, Harmony Square

Still, they should've known better than to ask the average denizen of the Internet to advocate against cats...
posted by cheshyre at 4:42 PM on April 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Ickster: yeah, that was the issue, but it wasn't resizing properly in FF as well. I opened in chrome, but like donio said, it just strong arms you into the narrative, and when I got to the "meme" minigame, it just said my memes were bad.

At that point, I wasn't really interested into whatever the stupid allegory they were making and was still annoyed at the AI, especially swipe actions on a vertical phone interface on a browser.

So, again. Annoying UI.
posted by lkc at 4:45 PM on April 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Someday when I have time I'm going to make cat memes to teach genetics. Hopefully educate people before the Internet teaches them that mRNA is evil.

I shall call it CATTACA.
posted by Soliloquy at 5:47 PM on April 23, 2023 [11 favorites]

I bailed when it didn't let me stay home.

I bailed the first time it forced a fake choice down my throat. Which was pretty early on.
posted by aubilenon at 6:00 PM on April 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

mRNA is evil.

I shall call it CATTACA.


shurely CAUUACA ?
posted by lalochezia at 8:08 PM on April 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

As a role-playing experience, it didn't work well. Better if we were given the character of Melanie and told to play as HER, with her fanatical opposition to cat parks as a starting goal. That would let the player engage with the game of chasing clout and learning how to recognize disinfo by making it ourselves without asking us to volunteer for the position and forcing choices. Bad game design for the stated goal, alas.
posted by Scattercat at 11:03 PM on April 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

It’s something I might use with some of my younger students as were moving into using current events and the students needing to find information and news online.

And I liked it, it was simplistic in parts, but did a good job of pointing out that retractions and later fact checking don’t carry as well as initial outragefilter does. The only thing I didn’t like was the closing “forget it, it’s just the internet” Chinatown reference. It kind of undermines the idea of the importance of things just like this (note the grandmother posting about wanting to burn down the park), all for a reference from the 1970s that would likely sail over the head of most people playing a web game about media literacy in 2023.

Reference language is its own form of verbal cancer (he says, fully aware he’ll be quoting something within five minutes of hitting Post Comment) that let’s us off the hook for putting the work into finishing our thoughts.
posted by Ghidorah at 5:02 AM on April 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

I like how this eccentric team of disinformation warriors is also inclusive of multiple genders and ethnicities.
posted by egypturnash at 9:09 AM on April 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

I dunah know. I feel like reading Reddit about homelessness in Portland is all I have to do to get the picture.
posted by Pembquist at 9:17 AM on April 24, 2023 [1 favorite]