Misinformation Escape Room: Building a research agenda for a gamified approach to combating health misinformation

This project aims to develop a research agenda for a gamified approach to building resilience to public health misinformation. Building on a promising pilot project, we will (1) develop a research agenda that incorporates expertise on misinformation, games, and health informatics, (2) co-design a proof-of-concept public health escape room, and (3) run a pilot study to generate data for grant proposals and publications. With conventional information literacy approaches for helping people detect and resist misinformation proving inadequate, escape rooms offer an immersive learning experience to focus on the cognitive biases, emotional triggers, and other affective attributes that make misinformation so pernicious. We will conduct design sprints, interview subject matter experts, and run a codesign workshop in partnership with the Seattle Public Library to create the prototype, which will also offer multiple escape room sessions to collect research data. This project enables a group of faculty and postdoctoral scholars to merge their disciplinary expertise and build the foundation for future work.