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Notes -
The drug analogy I'm imagining is a scenario like this:
(source is a random worksheet I found on Google, because I couldn't find the one that I was given at school)
It is not necessary for the kid to be lying in this scenario; he/she could be telling the truth about the high, and just not be aware of the potential downsides of abusing cold medicine (or not believe the authority figures who try to tell him/her about them). People can hurt you by being mistaken, even without deliberately lying.
Looking at it another way, Amelia is kind of like the cool uncle who offers you a sip of beer even though you're only 16. Most of society thinks that's totally fine, but the police officer at the D.A.R.E. assembly wants you to know that it's a slippery slope to ruining your life with addiction, DUIs, and a painful, untimely death. I think the term "disinformation" is getting at the same kind of thing: the idea is that people should Just Say No to
infohazardsdangerous opinions, even if they appear benign or are factually true statements.The problem for Pathways is that that's a really hard sell. (It was a hard sell for D.A.R.E., but it's an even harder sell for this.) I think a successful version of this story would involve Charlie getting more extreme and radicalized on their own, maybe even to a point where they push Amelia away or hurt her somehow, because the ideas themselves are just that dangerous. But even setting aside that that's a much harder story to write, and as you mention Pathways is too afraid of actually depicting or engaging with those ideas to convincingly portray them as being harmful, the game's creators ultimately wanted it to be a game about doing the "right" thing. You're supposed to choose the options where Charlie decides not to go to the protest and maybe speaks to a counselor about their career concerns. But if the alternative was a long and compelling story about how attending a protest was the first step in a radicalization pipeline that eventually led Charlie to abandon their family and gaming buddies and gruesomely murder Amelia, the "don't do that actually" button would just feel like an early game over.
That's fair. This kind of earnest education aimed at teens is very hard to do well - it's a naturally anti-authoritarian, rebellious demographic, after all.
This one just seems like a particular failure, or one that sends perverse messages. As Eetan noted, the correct answers in the game are usually apathetic. The only one that seems productive is the one where Charlie asks the teacher for help improving his work and applying to more job. For all the others, the correct answer is either to stick your head in the sand and do nothing, or ask an authority figure for guidance.
I do wonder if part of the problem is concern that research or facts by themselves don't do enough work? They don't make the case by themselves. You could argue that "do your own research and use critical thinking" doesn't suffice as an antidote to extremism in a time when misinformation is everywhere online; less charitably, I'd note that "do your own research" codes right-wing now. But whatever the cause, the scenarios in Pathways are those where an earnest person researching them online could come to the conclusion that the radicals are right. In the hiring example, Charlie might come to the conclusion that being a white man, rather than a woman of colour, is making it harder for him to get a job - and that's plausibly true. In the migration examples, Charlie might find that the rate of immigration is high and the ancestrally British proportion of the UK's population is only projected to decrease. That's also, well, true. And you can't really combat people being concerned about that in the space of a Flash game with only two or three sentences of narration.
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