ENDGAME: Fighting Disinformation Through Educational Escape Rooms

How do you teach a teenager to recognize disinformation? Not through lectures — through play.

ENDGAME is an EU-funded Creative Europe project (March 2025 – February 2027) that takes a refreshingly practical approach: educational escape rooms that simulate real-world disinformation scenarios. Players work through puzzles that require them to evaluate sources, spot manipulation techniques, and think critically about the information they consume — all within an engaging, time-pressured game format.

How It Works

The escape rooms put players into narrative scenarios where disinformation is part of the problem they need to solve. The first room, “The Click Trap,” has players infiltrating a fictional influencer agency where misleading health claims about a supplement called “GlowUp+” are being promoted. Players must gather evidence — documents, photos, digital records — before the company deletes them.

The goal is not just to “win” the game, but to internalize real skills: source verification, recognizing economic interests behind content, and understanding how irresponsible content creation fuels misinformation.

The rooms are available in multiple languages (English, Spanish, Finnish, Serbian) and come with teacher’s guides for classroom use.

The Consortium

ENDGAME brings together universities and professional fact-checking organizations:

Universities:

• Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain)
• University of Eastern Finland
• Belgrade Metropolitan University (Serbia)

Fact-checking organizations:

• Maldita.es — one of Spain’s leading fact-checking outlets
• Faktabaari — Finnish fact-checking and media literacy organization
• Fake News Tragač — Serbian fact-checking initiative

This combination of academic rigor and practitioner experience is what makes the project credible. The fact-checkers know what real disinformation looks like; the universities know how to evaluate whether the intervention actually works.

Open Source

The project website and code are open source on GitHub, built with Next.js and Tailwind CSS. The escape rooms themselves are playable online, making them accessible to educators anywhere.

Connection to Inoculation Research

ENDGAME sits in a broader landscape of gamified interventions against disinformation. Research on psychological inoculation — particularly the work by Jon Roozenbeek and Sander van der Linden — has shown that exposing people to weakened doses of manipulation techniques through games significantly improves their ability to detect misinformation. The Bad News, Go Viral!, Cranky Uncle, and Bad Vaxx games all demonstrate this.

ENDGAME extends this approach to escape rooms — a format that adds physical (or virtual) collaboration, time pressure, and narrative immersion. Where the inoculation games are individual experiences, escape rooms are social. That matters, because disinformation is fundamentally a social phenomenon.

Events like the Fake News Festival at Europa-Universität Viadrina draw on exactly this kind of thinking: getting people to experience disinformation dynamics in a controlled, playful setting rather than just reading about them.

Project Details

Related

• Psychological Inoculation Against Vaccine Misinformation — The research evidence behind gamified inoculation
• Fake News Festival 2026 at Viadrina — Another approach to public engagement with disinformation
• How Malicious AI Swarms Can Threaten Democracy — The escalating threat these interventions address
• Climate and Political Fact-Checking Collaboration — Our ongoing fact-checking research