Can you name the first time you realized that something printed/published was intentionally false? Tonight I’m reminded of the first time I realized the importance of evaluating information.
It was 1992, and I was reading the April issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly in my parents’ mini van traveling home. There was a “secret code" that opened up a character in the SNES game Street Fighter II. It sounded exciting and had recently beaten the final boss. I studied the code all the way home and tried it again and again that night. It was only the next day that I realized the story was an April fools joke. I can distinctly remember the "ah-ha" feeling that I needed to think about where information was coming from.
Over the weekend I saw a story about the new EGM breaking news about a new Kingdom Hearts game on the Wii featuring Mario. I was interested to know more
but few other sites picked up the story. Joystiq did here, and covered it as another April fool's story. There's even a Wikipedia entry for all of EGM's jokes, including the Sheng Long article that fooled me.
So tonight as I looked through the most recent issue, I did it with my librarian hat on. "What were the signs that the article was faked?" "Where is the additional evidence?" "Why does the image look doctored?"
Gaming was shaping my information literacy skills long before I even knew what the words to describe it.
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