Harmony Square is a text-based adventure game about fake news. You live in idyllic Harmony Square and are hired as Chief Disinformation Officer whose job is to disturb the square’s peace and quiet by fomenting internal divisions and pitting its residents against each other.

You choose a persona and make decisions on how best to subvert the community. As you post on social media you steadily work to cause conflict and arguments. You play on the side of people using media to scare and control, but the goal of the game is to expose the tactics and manipulation techniques that are used to mislead people, build up a following, or exploit societal tensions for political purposes.

As you use various techniques to cause divisions they get a first hand understanding of how to spot manipulation techniques in social media posts. The game responds to you choices through the headline ticker and number of likes you have accumulated.

This game was created as part of a study with results published in the journal Harvard Misinformation Review. The research behind the game suggests that this reduces their willingness to share manipulative content with people in their network. Over the course of 4 levels, players learn about 5 manipulation techniques commonly used in the spread of political media content: trolling, using emotional language, polarizing audiences, spreading conspiracy theories, and artificially amplifying the reach of their content through bots and fake likes.