A Preliminary Report on the Design of a Media Literacy Card Game

In this paper we will report on the early research and development process of an educational card game to teach media literacy skills with a special focus on investigative journalism. The final product will be a print-and-play card game freely available online and thus requiring no more than a printer to be played with. Based on the literature on media literacy skills (Jenkins 2009, Buckingham 2003), principles of journalism (Kovach et al. 2001), and playful class activities aiming to teach journalism to K12 students (Mahoney 2015) we defined information-gathering and verification practices, and the difficulties of keeping journalistic integrity in a corrupt environment as the core issues of our game. Following Bogost et al.’s (2010) analysis of digital newsgames; we have reviewed a selection analog games featuring journalistic activities and plots. These include commercial board games such as Penny Press; as well as educational games such as Liars and Verifiers. We compared their design strategies and identified aspects which may help us to address our goals in an engaging way. The paper concludes with the presentation of an early prototype.