The FBI has found a unique way to steer young minds away from terrorist propaganda: an online goat game called The Slippery Slope.
The game features an exploding goat and the premise is to help the goat navigate through obstacles. The Slippery Slope is in aerial view — you watch the goat from above and help it dodge giant cubes. The goal is to complete six levels using five lives.
“Use the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard to move the goat side to side,” reads the game’s instructions. “Avoid the blocks, cross each finish line, and wait for the distorted logic text to appear before continuing. Use the spacebar to start over if you crash. The game will end after you finish all six levels or use up all of your attempts (shown in the upper right corner of game).”
If the player fails, the goat explodes and the player can start fresh from the level they were on. With each challenge, the game becomes more difficult due to bad controls and the successful completion of each level shares a line about a distorted piece of logic. For example, the end of level one says “Our group is under attack” and the end of level two says “The enemy is responsible for this injustice.”
The purpose of the game, apart from preventing children from becoming terrorists, is to “follow the distorted logic of blame that can lead a person into violent extremism.”
“We want teens to apply their critical thinking skills to this issue just like they would to any subject in school,” says Jonathan Cox, head of the OPA unit that created the website and developed the concept, in a press statement. “We’re saying, ‘Don’t be a puppet,’—in other words, don’t just blindly accept what violent extremists tell you or you could end up being controlled and manipulated by people who want you to hurt or kill innocent people.”
How effective this game will be is up in the air, as the general consensus is that the design is average, at best, and outdated.
“The FBI made a video game and it sucks,” wrote Kotaku while Gizmodo accurately pointed that that “everything about this site screams awful, out-of-touch 90s educational game.”
The game links to several anti-propaganda resources made available by the FBI.
