Summary
Agents of Influence has a unique mission: teaching young people how to combat misinformation. The internet has allowed for misinformation to spread quicker than ever before, so it is all the more important that we teach the next generation how to identify and debunk it. Taking the role of a freshman at Virginia Hall High, players will learn that grandpa Teddy isn’t just their new social studies teacher - he’s also a retired super spy from a defunct Cold War-era espionage agency called O.O.P.S. When Teddy’s old nemesis begins turning students into misinformation-spewing puppets called Sleepwalkers, the player and their new friends form the Agents of Influence, a youth-led spy organization dedicated to stopping misinformation from destroying Virginia Hall High.
My Role
As a game designer, I was tasked with ensuring that each of the game’s four minigames - Conversation, Analysis, Research, and Duels - achieved their educational objectives while still being as engaging as possible. The Analysis game in particular had received low scores in testing, so I reworked it into something completely different. The Analysis game’s educational objective is to teach kids how to understand the meaning and intent behind what they are reading, which was previously done with basic true or false questions. I added an additional layer of difficulty by requiring players to use specific pieces of evidence from the text to back up their answers, which resulted in testers finding the game both more educational and enjoyable at the same time.
For the Research game, I also created a new segment within the Research game known as “link-diving”, where players would be given a web page filled with several clickable links, and would have to click from link to link in order to gain the information needed to uncover a Sleepwalker’s identity or escape a trap. These segments teach kids how to efficiently do research on the internet, while also making them feel like a super spy as they dive deeper down the rabbit hole of various online mysteries. Both of these segments were very well-received by students and educators alike, bringing the Research game up from receiving middling scores to very high ones.
Finally, as a narrative designer, I was a major voice in determining the direction of the story’s first two episodes, and I single-handedly crafted several Conversation, Analysis, and Research games for both the game’s main story and its optional side content. I also created two new characters, Barron Kaiser and Misinfo Man, the latter of which has produced many laughing fits amongst teen and adult testers alike.