Media and digital literacy gamified. Go Viral! against scientific misinformation

Scientific misinformation has grown during the Covid-19 pandemic. To reduce the impact of false information, serious games are emerging that aim to make young people media and digitally literate through gamification. The main objective of this work is to analyse the potential of the Go Viral! edugame in terms of its journa-listic quality and design in order to detect the advantages of its implementation in different social contexts. The methodology used is based on a discursive and content analysis used in the study of other newsgames. The results indicate that this game, based on psychological inoculation, effectively allows the user to know how misinformation is created in networks, how it is increased by echo chambers and what tools are necessary to create a network community from the point of view of from the disinformer's point of view, thanks to the transmission of data, contextualization, awareness, interaction and stimulation to action. Although its journalistic quality is limited; the content, the architecture and the design indicate advantages that favor the reduction of disinformation noise as mechanisms to bury the echo chambers created in social networks. Although it cannot be presented as a single effective vehicle to combat scientific misinformation, it can become a valid instrument alongside others such as awareness campaigns, educational resources launched by institutions and the regulation of digital platforms.