Truth-O-Meter, meet Truth Invaders
By Matthew Waite
Published on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 4:32 p.m.
Jeremy Bernstein can't remember what the lie was, but it was clearly a lie. A whopper. And it was just the last straw for him. He couldn't take it anymore. He had to do something to expose the lies in the presidential campaign. But what?
After storming around in a funk for a while, Bernstein decided to do what he does for a living: design games. With zero budget and volunteer helpers pitching in, he set about four weeks ago to reveal lies in the presidential campaign ... by blasting them with missles.
About two weeks later, Truth Invaders was born.
The point of the game is simple: Pick your lie from a bipartisan list, then pilot your mini-White House, blasting the lie while ducking incoming fire from the lie. Hit it enough times and the lie falls away and reveals the truth. When you win, you get links to PolitiFact, FactCheck.org and other fact checkers' work that fueled the game.
This isn't Bernstein's first political game. He helped build The Redistricting Game and a few other educational games before this.
These kinds of games are great at exposing people to and educating people on ideas they might otherwise find too dry, tedious, or technical," Bernstein wrote in an e-mail to PolitiFact. "I like to think of it as the spoonful of sugar to help the civics lessons go down."
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