KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 6 — With the state elections just around the corner, voters can easily be overloaded with information, especially when what reaches us is often not verified.

It was this situation that inspired the local group Malaysia Information Literacy Education (MILE) to come up with an initiative — a browser game — to help ease the public from the mess of information.

This time, MILE is back with a new character and storyline in its Are You Yang Bijak? browser game.

Expanding from the first Are You Yang Bijak? storyline, which allowed players to take on the role of a first-time voter, MILE has released its latest character — a reporter covering the election — in time for the coming six-state elections.

Co-founder Darshini Kandasamy said with the browser game, MILE hoped to help voters, especially young voters understand the challenges and pressures reporters face in such situations, on top of what drives various media coverage of election news and its weaknesses.

"We’re doing it because it’s important for voters to be informed and be aware, but this time we thought, besides a first-time voter, what are the different types of perspectives that people should get, so we thought how about a reporter is covering the elections, so then they will know what influences media coverage — the good, the bad and how you analyse from a reporters’ perspective,” she said.

Don’t be misinformed

When MILE was created in 2019, it went to schools where a pilot project was conducted, a syllabus was created to teach the students.

Darshini said the first browser game was created during the Covid-19 pandemic, whereby there was a deluge of information but a lack of fact-checking.

"We actually created the first game during the Covid-19 pandemic period — Choice I Make — that was focused on helping people get through all the misinformation around Covid-19 at the time.

"Then we created a new game based on this concept, which we felt that at the time during the GE15 (15th general election) was when all the Undi-18 (voters) would come into effect and there would be a lot of very young voters.

"So we decided to focus on election misinformation and propaganda, but because of the rushed timeline, we focused on the perspective of a first-time voter (character) and then we worked on the second storyline for the coming state elections — an expansion of the storyline.

"We did it in such a way that we can expand constantly with new characters or do a new game, but for now, we wanted to focus on election. So for the current state polls, we came up with a second storyline so that there are examples and scenarios that people can play,” Darshini said when contacted.

Because Undi-18 came about and since no one was really focusing on equipping teenagers with critical thinking skills and basic fact-checking skills, MILE hoped to address all the misinformation that the public was facing constantly.

"But during the Covid-19 period, all schools were closed so we had to pivot, and we saw that gamification was being tried in other countries on different matters and focus, so with Covid-19 there were so many uncertainties and that really was the perfect storm to cause more misinformation to spread, and there were all those (issues) with anti-vaxxers.

"Misinformation has always been around, but we noticed how much it has spread with social media and how bias had played into it, the media had to play catch-up and there’s a lot of movement towards fact-checking.

"I freelance overseas as well, as I was observing the trend over there, I realised that there was a lot of work being done to address misinformation and to teach critical thinking in school, and so we saw that Malaysia needed something like this. So that’s how the idea came about,” she said.

Effectiveness of gamification

When asked if the browser game actually work, Darshini said while she could not quantify the effectiveness of it, in her personal encounter, she received positive feedback.

"My personal anecdote, the first game Choice I Make, a friend of mine send it back to me, telling me that ‘this game is so interesting you should try it’.

"It was sent to her by her husband’s friends, and so you know, once you release it you have no idea how far and wide it would go right.

"A lot of is being done just to gauge how effective gamification is to teach critical thinking, so this is also an interesting experiment for us as well,” she said.

What the team saw with Choice I Make and Are You Yang Bijak is that while it is not a new concept — role-playing games — in the earlier days it was adventure books from the 80’s, so this was simply taking that idea and putting it on different platforms.

"We have done online courses where we showed the game, we ask the participants to play the game, so it’s definitely something that can be brought to schools, brought as training programmes and it can be modified for different scenarios,” Darshini said.