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World School·Game·Honor-system

Harmony Square

An inoculation game against political misinformation — play the villain, learn the trick.

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Characterization

Harmony Square is a short, free-to-play browser game developed in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, DROG, the U.S. Department of State's Global Engagement Center, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The player assumes the role of Chief Disinformation Officer in an idyllic neighbourhood and is tasked with sowing discord: creating misleading content, exploiting societal tensions, trolling, and deploying conspiracy theories to polarise the residents. The premise is deliberately transgressive — the player succeeds by spreading disinformation — but the pedagogical purpose is precisely the opposite. The game is grounded in inoculation theory, a psychological framework that posits that exposure to weakened forms of manipulative argumentation builds cognitive resistance, much as a vaccine builds immunity. A randomised controlled study published in the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review found that playing the game improves players' ability to spot manipulation techniques, increases their confidence in doing so, and reduces their stated willingness to share manipulative content. Harmony Square belongs to a family of inoculation games that includes Bad News and Go Viral!, each targeting a different vector of misinformation. The Academy hosts it in the World School because its central exercise is the modelling of an information ecosystem: the player learns the grammar of manipulation by constructing it, and leaves the game better equipped to read it in the wild.

Lineage

Developed by DROG and the University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab (Sander van der Linden, Jon Roozenbeek). Supported by the U.S. Department of State Global Engagement Center and CISA. Published 2020. Grounded in inoculation theory (William McGuire, 1961) and the "pre-bunking" approach to misinformation resilience. Efficacy validated in Roozenbeek and van der Linden, "Breaking Harmony Square: A Game That 'Inoculates' Against Political Misinformation" (Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, 2020). Sister games: Bad News (2018), studied in Journal of Cognition and Palgrave Communications; Go Viral! (2020), developed with the WHO and UK Cabinet Office for COVID-19 misinformation. Broader context: the "technocognition" framework and lateral reading strategies promoted by the Stanford History Education Group.

From the Library

All Library entries for Harmony Square

Quests

Three quests — one for each archetype. Choose the one that fits your way of taking up the discipline.

  • Design a game mechanic — digital, tabletop, or paper prototype — that inoculates players against a specific form of manipulation, drawing on the "pre-bunking" model of Harmony Square and its sister games. Choose a domain of misinformation (health, financial, environmental, or another) and specify the manipulative techniques the player will learn by enacting them, the feedback system that reveals the techniques' effectiveness, and the mechanism by which the experience is intended to build cognitive resistance. If possible, pilot the mechanic with at least one participant.

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  • The Adventurer

    A Square Disrupted

    Play Harmony Square from beginning to end — all four levels. Attend to the disinformation techniques the game asks you to deploy: trolling, exploiting divisions, amplifying outrage, constructing conspiracy theories. Record the moment in which you first recognised a technique you had encountered in real-world media — the moment the game's inoculation began to take hold. Then play Bad News or Go Viral! and note what the second game added to your understanding.

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  • Place Harmony Square in its scientific and ludic lineage. Cite at least three sources: one on inoculation theory as a psychological framework (McGuire's original formulation or a contemporary review), one on the empirical validation of Harmony Square or its sister games (the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review study, the Journal of Cognition study of Bad News, or another peer-reviewed publication), and one on the broader challenge of misinformation in democratic societies. Explain what it means for a game to be empirically validated as a cognitive intervention, and what that achievement implies about the relationship between play and resilience.

    No attestations yetOpen →