Client: Deutsche Hygiene Museum Dresden in cooperation with Stopfer Haus & intolight

Task: Media center for old and new news

Redesign and further development of the gameplay of an interactive game for identifying truth and fake news.

Fake news, fake profiles, fake products - in many areas of life, we are confronted with forgeries and disinformation of all kinds today. Athletes use performance-enhancing drugs, business leaders cheat, and not only one prominent politician relies on "alternative facts". It is high time, therefore, to devote an entire exhibition to the dazzling phenomenon of "fake"!

The scenography and dramaturgy of the exhibition played with the metaphor of an authority - the so-called "Office for the Whole Truth". Visitors went through an interactive course on which the interplay of lies and truth was examined from ever-changing perspectives. To keep their bearings in the confusing corridors of the authority, visitors stamped themselves with an ID card in each of the nine departments of the office.

One department was the media center for old and new fake news, where visitors playfully jumped into the role of a media editor on two touch interfaces and had to distinguish whether the depicted online news was true or false before further publication. This included two game modes. One was staged as an explorative scenario, and the other was in team player mode, where the goal was to uncover as many fake news as possible against time. After completing the game, the quantitatively determined performances appear on a third screen on the wall as a ranking. This screen visualizes all uploads to Wikipedia in real-time with their associated publication location, slightly modified in design through an API. The entire project was developed in the game engine Unity.