We all know how polarizing the 2016 Presidential Election was and 3 months into President Trump’s presidency, it’s still polarizing between liberals and conservatives. The United States of America has become obsessed with fake news, spearheaded by President Trump calling every news organization critical of his ongoing presidency fake news. Poking fun at this obsession is the video game Fake It to Make It.
Fake It to Make It puts you in charge of an online publication that focuses on publishing and spreading fictional or highly sensational articles. The game was put together by someone who knows about the creation of online news articles.
Her name is Amanda Warner, who says Fake It to Make It is based on “the Macedonian teenagers who profited from fake news leading up to the 2016 election in the United States.”
Fake It to Make It is based entirely in the confines of publisher who writes or copies/plagiarizes sensational news pieces, putting them out onto the internet to make money, or rather lack thereof.
The platform looks as real as it can be. There are tools for maximizing your audience through the use of keywords and the most common platform for sharing articles: Twitter. Warner admits that the reality of Fake It to Make It could be taken literally, even possibly being used as a training simulation.
I’m willing to take the risk, because I think the potential for positive change in players is worth it.
My hope is that by making players more aware of how and why fake news is written and distributed, that they will be more skeptical of what they encounter in the future. In general, I think that better understanding how and why we are manipulated by others, for profit or power, is worthwhile knowledge to have.
Ideally, these are the actions, attitudes, and beliefs I would like to see in players of this game.
Images below are some of what you will see while playing Fake It to Make It.
Please make sure that President Trump doesn’t see this game, which can be played on its official website.