Government-Funded Video Games Include Dustborn and Something Called Cat Park

Video Games

You know Dustborn, that lame (presumably; I haven’t played it) woke video game that teaches gamers how to be activists and weaponize cancel culture and bullying? It was government-funded, with the European Union and the Norwegian Film Institute (which, according to its website, falls “under the authority of the Ministry of Culture”) awarding the game and its developer, Red Thread Games, the funding based on ESG and DEI criteria like the number of women who worked on the game. (I’m sure the game being a radical left-wing propaganda tool helped.) This is probably why Dustborn’s abject failure doesn’t seem to be phasing the people behind it; they got a lot of their money from government grants with the intention of spreading their ideology as opposed to making a profit. Mark Kern posted some details in an X thread:

Dustborn used far more government money than has been previously reported.

The Norwegian Film Institute funded the game for 14 million kroner, or nearly 1.4 Million USD. This is in addition to the 150,000 Euros from the Creative EU grant program.

Dustborn is basically an antifa… pic.twitter.com/bNQxPqtPlq

— Grummz (@Grummz) August 26, 2024

Savvy Artist played the game in its entirety and listed some of its more troubling elements:

Dear @RedThreadGames

I have completed your game, #Dustborn . I have gotten both 1% and 0% panels at 2 different points but I have a question for you.

The ending of the game says words were not the weapon, but it was empathy all along. Could you please explain to my little pea…

— Savvy | Artist (@MadamSavvy) August 28, 2024

Sounds like torture to me, courtesy of the European Union and the Norwegian Film Institute. But if you think the United States government is in the clear on this one, I hate to disappoint you, but they’ve recently started pulling this con job, too. Stuttering Craig, the co-founder of Screw Attack and host of Side Scrollers, posted a screenshot of a “notice of funding opportunity” from August of 2021 out of the US Embassy in the Hague, revealing that the US State Department gave $275,000 to help fund a “New Counter-Disinformation Game” and invited developers to compete for the grant:

Everyone is laughing at Norway & the EU for funding Dustborn but a quick search shows the US also provided $275,000 of funding for a “new counter-disinformation game” pic.twitter.com/av5G0zXCcB

— Stuttering Craig (Official) (@StutteringCraig) August 28, 2024

That Park Place has a lot more information on the project. It appears, in large part, to be a test run for funding more games like this, given the criterion for it to “develop and implement data collection and analysis methodologies to demonstrate the project’s achievement of expected results.” In the guidelines, the document says that games are “an effective tool in building cognitive resistance to disinformation.” What I take from that is that the government wanted/wants to track anyone who plays the game to see if they continue to visit undesirable websites, follow the “wrong” people on social media, engage with posts, etc.

The methodology behind it is as insidious as you’d expect, with the game intended to target people age 15 and up and teach them how to identify and avoid “disinformation,” as well as teach them how destructive this is, while promoting “digital literacy” via “inoculation theory.” And who wouldn’t want the government telling them how to read and interpret information on the internet? This funding appears to come from the Global Engagement Center, or GEC, which is part of the State Department, and a letter from several Republican congressmen and one congresswoman to the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, accusing the GEC of overstepping its bounds by participating in “subsidized censorship of free speech and disfavored opinions.” They identify the GEC’s targets as “US conservatives,” “climate change deniers,” “vaccine skeptics,” and “election deniers” (presumably just the one election), which come from disinformation research from the University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab.

According to Real Clear Policy, the game the State Department funded appears to be Cat Park, which I’ve never heard of, but it fits with the criteria for the grant, teaching gamers the dangers of misinformation and internet memes that make fun of the left. (I’m paraphrasing.) If you want a deeper dive into Cat Park, here’s a GEC contractor explaining it:

I don’t know what’s worse, the attempt at “inoculating” gamers or the crushing level of cringe. One of those character designs is clearly a ripoff of Carmen Sandiego, and her name is Carmen! And calling this “a noir adventure” is a good way to get Razörfist on your ass. I don’t know whether to be outraged or relieved by this – outraged because they’re taking money from US citizens and funding anti-American sentiment via the arts, but relieved because this game looks so awful nobody in their right mind would play it, let alone be influenced by it. If anything, it’s so nakedly propagandist that it would push players in the opposite direction. This is the catch-22 of government; they try to enact these despicable programs, but they’re too incompetent to do it successfully. Nobody wants to play Dustborn, and I doubt anyone wanted to play Cat Park, either. It’s a disgusting waste of money, but that’s better than the alternative.

Let us know what you think of government-funded video game agitprop in the comments, and thanks to That Park Place for putting the pieces together!