A quote shared by that old high school friend which isn’t quite accurate. A social media post with a photo taken out of context. Misinformation, and disinformation*, comes for everybody. Yes, that means you, too. It can be difficult to develop the skills and habits strong enough to fend off the constant flood of bad information these days.
Have you tried Dungeons & Dragons?
This story comes from an episode of KUOW’s “Meet Me Here” podcast. Listen on the KUOW app or wherever you get podcasts. Also, check out two panels at PAX West 2025 featuring Professor Jin Ha Lee and Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, both featured in this story.
As a professor with the University of Washington’s Information School, Jin Ha Lee thinks about bad information a lot — how it weaves into daily life, how it spreads online. It’s an ongoing problem, and with the rise of AI, it’s only getting worse.
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“There was this somewhat naive belief that, ‘ Oh if we’re able to just teach people how to figure out what the current information is, the problem will get better,” Lee said. “But now we know that it didn’t get better. And if anything, it got worse. And that’s largely because of how our information ecosystem is created. So learning about how to discern the accuracy of information is important, but it’s just not enough to protect us from this overwhelming amount of and flow of misinformation that we face every day.”
As an avid gamer, Professor Lee has found a solution in games. She has created escape rooms and other games that incorporate issues of misinformation and disinformation. One such game is “Euphorigen Investigation.” It not only works within the issue, a primary goal of the game is to teach how to discuss the problem.
“If you try to just talk about misinformation in real life, people will often tell you that, ‘Oh, no no, I just go and watch cat videos, I don’t share any of these things. I am not contributing to this mess.’ Or, ‘I don’t fall for this kind of information, I can’t believe someone falls for this kind of information.’ It’s really easy for the conversation to go that way. So we use the game to create the experience where we can all fall for it so at the end, you are in this mindset, ‘OK, anybody can fall for this.’”
Professor Lee will be on a panel at PAX West 2025 called “Dungeons and Disinformation: Games as Learning Environments for Disinformation Literacy” featuring other educators and game designers. The panel’s title is a pun drawn from Dungeons & Dragons, the classic role-playing game. If you ask Happy Tracker Meow Meow, the game is apt for teaching lessons. He also goes by the title of Washington’s Secretary of State Steve Hobbs when he’s not playing D&D.
“You can use it as a teaching tool,” he said.
“Playing Dungeons and Dragons is collaborative storytelling,” Hobbs said. “So you can run scenarios in your adventure that can teach players a lesson. If they didn’t do some more insight checks — which is a thing you can do in D&D where you roll dice to check if somebody is lying or not — or maybe you do an intelligence check, to check out a fact, if you don’t do those things, then maybe the result is something the players didn’t want.”
The role-playing game features a dungeon master, who is basically an author of an adventure story that the players navigate. How this story unfolds is determined by players’ actions, creativity, and the randomness of a dice roll. It has been a part of Hobbs’s life since he was in elementary school. In his role as Secretary of State, he has worked to get copies of the game into libraries and schools.
Dungeons & Dragons and lessons in disinformation
Lean into collaborative storytelling
Dungeons & Dragons adventures usually involve a party of characters (humans, elves, dwarves, etc.). Having a variety of characters increases your chances of success. Each person brings their own unique skills, experiences, and knowledge.
Professor Lee notes that bogus information often succeeds because it is reinforced by repetition, having a lot of the same with nothing to keep it in check.
“You go into a particular space, maybe you’ve come across some information and you didn’t think much of it, but it continues to come at you because social media is so good at algorithmic targeting. So you click on something, it’s gonna feed you more of that information and it tends to get more and more extreme. You fall into this misinformation rabbit hole.”
In other words, having a lot of the same can hamper success. In D&D, no one person could handle the challenges ahead alone. But together, with their powers combined, perhaps they can triumph.
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Intelligence check
In Dungeons & Dragons, players may have an option to make intelligence checks. This means they roll a die to use their smarts. It can mean a player investigates further to uncover more information, instead of acting right away based on what is in front of them. It can mean that facts are checked.
Insight checks
Another move in D&D is an insight check. If using intelligence was all about facts, insight is about wisdom — how to best use those facts to reason through a situation. It can mean considering if there are elements of nuance or context.
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Incorporate common ground
Professor Lee argues that countering misinformation isn’t always about correcting a person or proving people wrong. Instead, more progress can be made by finding common ground and working through problems together.
“So instead of trying to make your point, really focus on listening to what the other person is saying and trying your best to understand where they’re coming from … If you focus too much on proving them wrong or correcting the information then they feel attacked and the conversation shuts down. Then you go home and go to the chat and start blocking that uncle. That’s not what we want.”
This is also good advice for having conversations with people you disagree with, especially when it comes to the quality of information.
“Now, is this easy in real life? No,” Lee said. “Especially as a gamer, you always go in with this idea that ‘I need to win, win the argument.’ But the reality is the win position is not winning the argument. The win position is the long game. You want to figure things out together.”
While you’re at PAX West 2025, check out:
- “Dungeons and Disinformation: Games as Learning Environments for Disinformation Literacy”. A panel with researchers, educators, and game designers, including UW Professor Jin Ha Lee. Saturday, Aug. 30, 10:30 a.m., Summit building, level 3.
- “Selling Your Game Internationally – Japan: One Year Later”. A panel with Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs talking about his efforts to connect Washington’s game makers with oversea markets in Japan and Europe. Sunday, Aug. 31, 10:30 a.m. in the Summit building, level 3.
- The Secretary of State’s Office also has a booth at PAX. Arch building, booth 134.
*Something worth noting — or else some word nerd will email me, complaining that I’m conflating disinformation and misinformation. There is a difference between these two terms, though the end result is often the same: We don’t operate with the best, most accurate information.
Misinformation: This is simply bad information on par with rumors or mistaken statements. It can often be on accident. For generations, folks repeated that everybody in Europe believed the world was flat before Columbus sailed to the New World. That, of course, is not true, and Columbus never proved the world was round. But folks kept saying it. It was misinformation.
Disinformation: This is information that is intentionally crafted to mislead you, even manipulate you. Ahead of the January 2024 presidential primary in New Hampshire, voters in that state got a phone call from then President Joe Biden urging them not to vote in the primary and to save their vote for the November election, when their vote would actually matter. However, the voice was not actually President Biden and the information was false. It was produced by an AI program. It was intended to mislead people, ultimately suppressing votes. This was disinformation.
Both misinformation and disinformation spread easily online, especially through social media where falsehoods travel faster that reason.
