The Misinformation Game: The Effectiveness of Analogue Serious Games as an Inoculation Against Misinformation

Henderson, Niklas (2025) The Misinformation Game: The Effectiveness of Analogue Serious Games as an Inoculation Against Misinformation. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Misinformation poses a serious risk to societies, and its rapid spread particularly through online platforms has negatively impacted democratic processes, public health campaigns, and more. Game-based inoculation theory has been proposed as an engaging individual-level communication strategy to improve misinformation resilience in individuals, but much remains unknown of the approach’s effectiveness over time and the underlying mechanisms conferring resistance in this context. In response to these research gaps, this thesis uses the collaborative card game Fake News (Roozenbeek & van der Linden, 2018) to explore how players learn about misinformation from game-based interventions and how intervention design features shape these outcomes. This thesis also more deeply interrogates inoculation theory itself, assessing the theory’s present application in game-based contexts and exploring how the theory’s mechanisms may be most effectively elicited through serious games, culminating in the development of a new collaborative card game against digital social engineering, The disPHISHinformation Game. As well as a within-subjects study design using quantitative measures to assess intervention effectiveness (N = 118), this thesis takes the novel step of integrating qualitative methods, namely participant observation and semi-structured interviews, to more effectively explore how players experience game-based interventions both individually and collaboratively.

Quantitative findings from the first study showed no significant improvements in participants’ resilience to ‘fake news’ after playing Fake News, a result that contrasts with previous findings using the same intervention. Conversely, qualitative insights showed how the intervention’s tangible, embodied, and analogue design provided a platform for collaborative and experiential learning as players completed the intervention together. These findings indicate the need for a wider consideration of learning outcomes from game-based interventions and highlight the value of mixed-method research design in this context. An integrative narrative review of inoculation theory’s application in game-based contexts also supported auxiliary findings from research with Fake News. The review shows that despite being a core foundational theory of many game-based interventions, how inoculation theory has informed intervention design, and in particular how inoculation’s mechanisms are elicited, is often superficially defined. Informed by these findings, this thesis culminates in the design and testing of the new collaborative card game The disPHISHinformation Game, showcasing a design approach that more carefully considers inoculation theory’s role in the game design process. This thesis demonstrates the importance and value of mixed-method approaches, gives insights into the broad effects of these game-based interventions, and explores both the limitations of inoculation theory’s current interpretation in game-based interventions, and how it may be more fully incorporated in this context.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Computing Sciences
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	18 Feb 2026 13:03
Last Modified:	18 Feb 2026 13:03
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/101976
DOI:

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