Spin Doctor

Phase one casts you as the manipulator: deploy tactics to grow followers and feel how each one works. Phase two flips you to fact-checker, where you identify the tactic behind each post.

• Deploy the required number of tactics, each adds reach but costs credibility, to reach the flip.
• Once flipped, read each post and pick which manipulation tactic it uses from the options.
• Get feedback and the tell for each tactic after every answer.
• Your debrief scores how many tactics you correctly caught and your overall accuracy.

• Desktop: click tactic cards and answer options, or press number keys to pick an option in the fact-check phase.
• Phone & tablet: tap cards and options, touch works throughout.

• Pay attention to how each tactic felt to deploy; the same emotional pull is the giveaway when you're fact-checking.
• Learn each tell from the feedback, recurring tactics reappear, so the lessons compound.

Spin Doctor teaches disinformation techniques by letting you wield them, then tests whether you can spot them, inoculation by example.

• Skills: media literacy, disinformation tactics, critical thinking
• Best for: roughly grades 8–12 (ages 13+)
• For parents & teachers: builds resistance to manipulation by exposing its tricks.

Deploying manipulation tactics and then flipping to identify them is propaganda technique taught from both sides.

Making you practise the manipulation first is the original design, and it is the interesting decision.

Inoculation research supports it: briefly experiencing how a technique works confers more resistance than being warned about it does. Having built a following on outrage, you recognise the shape of it afterwards in a way a list of definitions never produces.

Spin Doctor is a media-literacy game that teaches disinformation techniques by letting you wield them, then test you on spotting them. It is an original, free browser game built in-house.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.