Creative Commons

Digital Citizens throughout the world currently face a significant and enormous problem regarding fake news, misinformation, and disinformation. Research has shown that false information rise exponentially day by day, primarily through digital media channels. Serious Games can be a beneficial and profitable asset to enrich the educational process of digital citizens through different sectors. This master thesis investigates the usefulness of the implementation and marketing of a serious game and aims to develop a serious indie game in order to teach News Literacy skills and to act as a doctrine against fake news, misinformation, and disinformation. An alpha phase of the serious game was developed, and questionnaires were handed to 45 participants in order to evaluate the effectiveness of a serious game regarding the improvement of News Literacy skills. The analysis conducted showed a substantial increase in News Literacy skills for the participants before and after playing the serious game developed and that there is a great potential in marketing a serious game with the game theme “News Literacy.” In this context, it is recommended that digital citizens should use serious games as a critical factor in order to educate themselves, especially for News Literacy skills. Further research is needed to identify other factors that will be needed to fully develop the serious game in order to be able to define the complete marketing process as well as the publishing of the final state of the game.