Someone posted about it already while I was writing this, but I actually sat down to tell you about it first-hand instead of just what I could read in articles, and I can tell you it's as bad as they say if not worse. The british government funded a game for schools, a short CYOA-style story about a student going through difference scenes related to racilization. If you know the UK, you know what to expect. And if Dustborn was relevant to this sub, so is this.
The game is described in an official document as "a bespoke interactive learning package",
The official website describes its features:
Encourage learning about the concept of extremism and radicalisation through the process of choice and safe exploration.
Illustrate the scope of online dangers and radicalisation routes.
Introduce and explain the Prevent Programme to young people.
Equip young people with an understanding of support available if they have concerns for themselves or others in relation to extremism.
Highlight the thin boundary between online extremism and ‘real-life’ harm, demonstrating the connection between the two worlds.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251117162428/https://www.shoutoutuk.org/pathways/
This game was made to be shown at schools as a learning tool. East Riding, Hull City Council and ShoutoutUK logos are displayed at all times in the corner. ShoutoutUK is self-described as non-partisan, but the contents of this game say something else. Also, you may notice their website likes to talk about media literacy, which is a term that was in vogue with leftists these lasts years all over twitter and reddit.
In the game you play as Charlie, a young white brit, either male or female depending on your choice but referred to as "they" always. It has 6 scenes, each one focused on a relevant issue about radicalization:
1) Someone on the internet tells you to download a video. You can tell an adult, ask the uploader what the video is about or download it. No matter what you do, you are warned about the dangers of extremist beliefs and how some videos are illegal to download.
2) A brown-skinned girl gets better grades than Charlie on a test to find a job and a white girl says this is proof immigrants are taking white jobs. You can ignore her and ask the teacher how to improve, you can ignore her and say nothing or you can “agree and explore the idea further”.
*If you ask the teacher, it ends with just Charlie getting some help with her studies. *Agreeing is portrayed as bad, but so is staying quiet as the game says Charlie starts thinking about it later and agrees with the white student.
3) Seeing a video on social media about muslim men getting houses meant for war veterans and how the government is betraying white people, that white people need to take back the country. You can ignore, research on your own or engage with the post.
*If you ignore it, Charlie then sees a video of a veteran happy at home and is glad not to have shared the video because “they learned that the information was not accurate”. *Researching is portrayed as bad, since it leads to you “intaking a lot of harmful, ideological messages” and some of the groups are described as illegal. *If you engage, Charlie gets angry, shares the video and feels “they had performed a patriotic service by standing up for veterans and white people’s rights”, but then the game warns you some of the groups were illegal.
4) The white girl from the second scene, Amelia, posts a video encouraging the youth to join a political group in defense of English rights, and invites Charlie to join “a secret group on an app Charlie hasn’t heard of before”. You can ignore the video, like it without joining the group or share the video and join the group.
- If you ignore it, Amelia gets angry and ignores you the next day.
- If you just like the post, Charlie is added to “an encrypted, private group” without permission. The scene ends with Charlie terrified.
- If you join, Charlie is happy, but their mom is worried.
5) Amelia is hanging out with you even if you angered her before. She wants to go to a protest against “the changes that Britain has been through in the last few years, and the erosion of British values” but she can’t go, so she begs Charlie to go instead. You can decline, watch from the sidelines or agree to join in.
- If you refuse, Amelia breaks her friendship with you and Charlie is upset, but gets over it.
- Amelia is happy with just watching, but Charlie finds out the protest seems to be “more about racism and anti-inmigration than british values and honouring fallen veterans”. The police then come and Charlie runs away, because “the line between observing and participating was too easy to cross”. *If you join the protest, Charlie almost gets in a fight then gets stopped by the police. Nothing happens to Charlie, but they’re worried their parents might find out.
6) Charlie thinks back to their choices. Though The Daily Sceptic says you get sent to a program if you take too many bad choices, this is not true. No matter what you’ve done, the teacher talks with Charlie and everything looks to be fixed. Then you get to see what would have happened otherwise. Charlie is sent to a workshop that helps them engage positively with ideology and the difference between right and wrong in expressing political beliefs” and receives counseling that makes them feel much better.
Finally, there's an epilogue that shows how Charlie is getting along with everyone, and they “will have no further involvement with Prevent or other similar services, because [Charlie] made responsible decisions”. You then get an explanation on what Prevent is, portraying them as impartial and aiming to prevent radicalization. Then it tells you how your teachers can send a referral about you to Prevent and Channel, the specialists in radicalization, who will all give you support and counseling. This is the only part you can’t skip.
Wait, are you telling me they made the cute goth e-girl the "racist"?
Do they understand how the internet works?
She's also literally never anything but nice to you. It's like an anti-smoking PSA where everyone smoking a cigarette looks cool and has nothing bad happen to them ever.
I guess the point is you're supposed to
reportquestion even what your friends say.The point is actually the opposite, destroy personal relationships and always listen to authority
The entire theme of the game is literally "any attempt to reject the fantasy presented by this software will result in punishment"
I don't see how that's the opposite at all, but ok.
What makes it the opposite is the former suggests the devs want you to think "well maybe you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, that seemingly nice people can actually be bad", but the intention of the makers is clearly "EVEN IF someone is ACTUALLY good this thing we disagree with makes them "bad" so you should shun them or be punished"
It's worse than those anti drug ads from the 80s where a guy touches weed once and his head explodes.
This game is like if in the ad the dude touched weed once and won the lottery the next day
Or someone (some people) on the developer team know exactly how the internet works😉
Oh God!
I didn't think of that
It would be genius
Manchurian Candidate levels of psyops
No, they do not.
Well we wouldn't want that when we have Big Brother and their non-partisan opinions to do the thinking for us. Disgusting.
Yeah that's the worst part. The CEO of the "studio" talks a lot about "media literacy", and the game explicitely promotes not doing any research, which is cosmically dumb whatever side your are on. It promotes laziness, not fact-checking anything, and basically makes you even more susceptible to being indoctrinated or radicalized.
You clearly didn't read the whole thing and then process it as a cohesive product. It isn't "dumb" it is intentional and targettedly anti white.
You MUST play the game as a white kid, a rarity these days
You don't think for yourself about what may or may not be best for you/your people, go to the teacher and do what they say
You don't do research for yourself over issues that could result in your harm, simply ignore the information entirely as it must be false simply because
Do not maintain relationships to people close to you, instead only listen to the teacher who by the way will send the result of this "safe exploration" to a government office for review and possible follow-up
It is alarming that they care more about what you believe - this also being mainly a subset of ideas unpopular with the government - rather than how these could be achieved.
None of the most 'egregious' actions I saw in any of the other write-ups from this game seem like an uncommon choice. I think the government is just forming a cult of personality but around a small subset of ideals designed to designate the good from the bad.
I don't think it's going to work for them though.
There's no way you can teach kids about indoctrination in history - have the government pull this simultaneously and not cause some neurons to fire.
Fuck the UK government, and fuck reddit formatting just as a bad. Who thought this was a good idea? New Reddit sucks for different reasons, but just as much. The post should be readable on old reddit now. I hope you enjoyed my little melty over it.
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It's OK; now kids just have phones in their laps and aren't paying attention to whatever this is.
I'm pissing myself laughing when I go through this "game".
Wait, the mods removed this shit?!
When does Charlie learn about grooming gangs?
Charlie learns that grooming gangs are a good thing and volunteers to recruit for his local branch
🤣🤣
at least amelia seems cool
Gen Z anti immigrant goth gf. Fuck, I wish that archetype was real.
its a common thing in eastern europe
I'm sorry, I happen to live in eastern europe and I have yet to see such creature irl
Honestly not as rare as you’d think now, the immigration as a women’s safety position is growing quite quickly.
We need to get some artists to trim her into Vivian James 2.0
Somebody read 1984 and now they made it into a game, lmao, ministry of truth vibes...
1984 was never "don't do this governments!", it was explicitly meant by Orwell to be "your government is already becoming this and you cannot escape your future"
Orwell would probably hang himself if he saw that despite having enlightenment level understanding of human nature everything he wrote produced no impact on how people see and deal the government.
I read it, with some optimism, as "This will be the future if you idiots (the people) don't do something about it"
I await some Brit to adapt 1984 and make it how Big Brother was the good guy and accept everything they tell you. Kinda like how they are butchering Animal Farm.
Is this dustbin 2.0?
i've never heard of a western government coming up with stuff like that before and the corpo artstyle is the cherry on top.
not even the most desperate kid in the 90's would have "played" this, nevermind today's kids with their phones
I can only hope this backfires spectacularly. This seems like just the kind in-your-face propaganda that sometimes wakes people up. But of course that would depend on British young people having some critical thinking skills.
It's targetted at those very children because stats show they are already very "radical".
This is also why it is filled with overt threats against the player that real life consequences can result in doing things the games deem as "wrong", including thinking and researching for yourself: they know they cannot convice and likely even that they are logically and morally in the wrong but "fuck that do what we say or be punished chud"
Subjects.
This is exposing kids to what is going on. Even though it's telling them how they are supposed to think, I bet it will have the opposite effect and open their eyes to some of the issues with mass migration.
Which is why it contains an explicit threat at the end, so they don't come to those conclusions
We need more women like Amelia
I hope that the UK sinks beneath the ocean.
I really didn't think this dystopian bullshit was going to sweep in over the course of a single decade. I always joke that'd I'd be dead before having to suffer through it but the fascists seem to have their foot on the accelerator hardcore here.
I don't have a lot of faith that the people of the world are going to fight for their rights when the time comes.
I do ,there's zero critical thinking going on anymore. SM and phones has turned people into braindead zombies,you name it :facebook boomers who gobble up anything,ultra woke millenials that push all this shit and zoomers who only only engage with brain rot.
We've reached a endpoint of sorts and its consequences are catastrophic.
This thread comes up first when searching for "pathways game." That's a good thing, I suppose.
Anyone know the studio or any production details? It’s deliberately left off public files. I wonder which voice artists and production team willingly worked on this.
This is hilarious, because it reminds me of anti-cult propaganda which the Catholic Church spewed in my country in the 90s, which was pretty much Satanic Panic imported from the Protestants in the US.
It’s pretty much a religious rhetoric, where the opposition is presented as a sinister cult that can brainwash you by just talking to you or offering you their religious tracts. Any dialogue with them endangers your soul and pulls it towards the eternal damnation. The only solution is avoiding them and reporting them to the
Inquisitionwitch huntersPrevent.This is exactly what the modern left is. An extremely distorted version of the feminine characteristics of Christianity merged with a cultural marxist (hegelian) view of white culture (in that everything 'white' is a product of colonial/racial/class oppression and therefore inherently unjust and must be deconstructed and subverted. It is the modern day replacement of Marxist Dialectical Materialism, which is exactly why cultural marxism is the best description of it, regardless of any 'conspiracy theory bs accusations).
You cannot argue with modern leftists, because there is no amount of logical reasonings that will ever convince a religious Zealot. Democrats are the laity, congresspeople (always remember to be inclusive) are bishops, the DNC is the 15th century catholic church, and this game (and propaganda like it) is the modern day catechism/sunday school.
A cathedral, if you will.
I selected normal options at first, and then halfway through when the goth girl showed up I selected the most chuddiest options. I burst out laughing when the teacher praised the MC for "making the right decisions. "
Amelia the Godsend
In the game they call right-wing talking points "harmful" but never "untrue"
Watched a few things about this. Imagine one on the real issue of radical Islam. Perhaps Birmingham City Council could fund it?
Got to love that the prevent woman is a Muslim.
Do you mean in real life, or the character in the game? Because you immediately write this:
And even if you meant real life, you finish with this:
It's clear the character goes to a "program" and that real life children can also be "referred" to counseling ie a program. You think a teacher wouldn't refer a student based off the choices made in game?
I should have written it differently. No matter your choices, it's presented as a video he sees, a what-if scenario, while Daily Sceptic implied Charlie can get referred for real it never happens. He's just threatened with it. The part where he no longer gets in trouble is meant also to be part of the what-if, or maybe it's not and it's written badly. I'm writing just what happens and what the game says, because I want the content and words of the game to speak for themselves. Obviously, it's telling you in real life young brits could be sent to reeducation if the teachers choose to and it implies being the "bad radical" that agrees with Amelia is grounds for being "referred", but I don't need to make it more clear than it is.
maybe you should play it, it really is just poorly made, it's hard to describe because of how terrible the writing is.
Good grief, not this again. First Dustborn, then Take Us North and now this poorly-made game. I might as well critically pan it just like I did to Dustborn back in 2024: https://readingribbon.wordpress.com/2024/09/11/dustborn-review/
If he's in college why the fuck is he basically being treated like a child.
I'm guessing the ending where your nonbinary character goes to the "workshop" was "voluntary" just like accepting a mob bosses window cleaner in front of your shop that overcharges for his services is "voluntary".
Guess they forgot to mention that Prevent prevented jacksh*t with the Southport stabbings. The perpetrator was referred three times before the incident.
Where can we download that game to see it for ourselves. I don't doubt that it exists, but there is still a crowd out there which supports the same thing the game supports and will deny the existence of the game.
I put the link at the end of the post so people could see it for themselves. I don't feel bad about people visiting because they shouldn't get any ad revenue.
They get their funding from taxpayers.
Scary stuff. Going after the children is messed up.
Absolutely fucking disgusting.
Propagandistische Staats-Games waren nicht auf meine 2026 Karte.
Using third person plural pronouns for every characters makes it painful to read. Don't know how english-speakers swallowed this, like ten years ago.
Propaganda. Ima be extreme just for charlie 🙏
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I feel I gave an explanation of the in-game events that goes deeper than the Telegraph article and provided some more information that the article didn't mention, just like the article mentioned things I didn't point out about Prevent. They might be on the same topic, but I think there is a substantial difference that justifies both existing.
Fair enough I'll reapprove the post.
Sounds interesting. Anti-immigrant extremism is not a huge issue in the UK at the moment but it will be unless it's addressed.
But pro-immigrant extremism is a huge issue. Where even the fucking police are in on it, and ignore rapes and shit cause they were done by the "wrong" group.
The police aren't "in" on anything. If they ignore ANY crime it's to cover their own arse. In the case that you mention that was absolutely the case. We would never have gotten this point if not for institutional racism in British police services in the first place.
Anti-immigrant extremism isn't an issue YET because the only people actively involved in the "movement"(lol) are toothless alcoholics that nobody takes seriously.
Rape gang apologist
Lick my nuts bro.
Try to think for yourself, instead of spouting cunty, low IQ catchphrases that you read on twitter.
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