Cat Park

About

In Cat Park you’re up against a city planning a feline-friendly park and need to shut it down. Play as an activist using misleading headlines, cherry-picked facts, and us-vs-them rhetoric to sway public opinion. Each choice shapes your strategy from viral outrage to subtle manipulation. The story unfolds through dialogue and branching decisions with a cartoonish visual novel style. The game’s real hook is its educational angle. Based on research from the University of Cambridge it teaches players to recognize disinformation tactics through hands-on practice. A post-launch study found players were 19% more likely to identify fake news and 15% less likely to share it compared to non-players. Sharp writing and absurd scenarios keep the tone light despite the serious subject. The browser-friendly format makes it easy to dive into short sessions packed with satirical twists.

Storyline

Cat Park is based on “active inoculation” theory, pioneered by the University of Cambridge’s Social Decision-Making Lab. Much as vaccinations work by exposing subjects to an innocuous strain of a virus in order to trigger an immune response, empirical studies indicate that the controlled experience of disinformation through a game can build cognitive resistance to disinformation in the real world. This concept is also known as “prebunking.” Rather than simply waiting for lies to spread and then debunking them with a fact-check, the goal of Cat Park is to proactively educate about common disinformation techniques so that players are better prepared to spot fake news no matter what form it takes. In a survey analysis of the game’s efficacy conducted by the University of Cambridge, researchers found that individuals who play Cat Park are 19-percentage points more likely than a control group to spot disinformation and 15-percentage points less likely to want to share disinformation.