About This Project

The Record Is the Arbiter

DECLASSIFIED is a political and legal fact-checking game built on a single operating principle: the evidentiary record is what matters. Not affiliation. Not narrative. Not the emotional temperature of a claim. What does the documented record — statutes, court decisions, official transcripts, verified government data — actually show?

The game was built to answer that question rigorously, interactively, and without flinching. Each claim in the game is assessed using primary sources. Every verdict — TRUE, FALSE, MISLEADING, or INSUFFICIENT INFO — is anchored to something checkable. The annotations tell you exactly what the record shows and why.

INSUFFICIENT INFO is a first-class verdict — not a hedge, not an abstention. Some claims are structured so that they cannot be verified or falsified by any available evidence. Recognizing that accurately is its own form of analytical precision. The game scores it accordingly.

About Sean McKendry

Sean McKendry is an independent researcher, writer, and pro se federal civil litigant based in Lansing, Michigan. He is the plaintiff in McKendry v. PNC Bank, N.A., Case No. 1:26-cv-00330-PLM-PJG (W.D. Mich.), a civil rights case alleging violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act arising from disability discrimination in bank onboarding processes.

The same analytical discipline applied in DECLASSIFIED — bone-honest, statute-heavy, no overreach into unsupported claims — is the same standard Sean applies to his own pro se legal work. The game is not a product of that litigation. It is the same methodology applied to a different domain: public claims by public figures against the public record.

Sean built DECLASSIFIED while simultaneously managing active federal litigation, drafting legal briefs, and with plans for future commercial distribution on major gaming platforms. Real name, real stakes, real record.

Analytical Frameworks

The game uses three original analytical frameworks developed specifically for DECLASSIFIED:

The Bogost Citation Scale
Rates evidentiary quality behind a claim: STRONG (primary source), CAREFUL (institutional consensus), WEAK (contested), INSUFFICIENT (no basis). Named to honor game theorist Ian Bogost's work on procedural rhetoric and verification.
The Phillips Pattern Library
A taxonomy of rhetorical mechanisms — Demonstrable Falsehood, Selective Summary, The Big Lie, Institutional Delegitimization, and more. Named to honor pattern-recognition work in public communication analysis. Describes mechanism, not intent.
The Benkler Calibration
A difficulty mode weighting claims by historical impact and structural resistance to debunking. Named for Yochai Benkler's research on information asymmetry and network-level disinformation propagation.

These frameworks are original game mechanics. They are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the scholars whose names they reference.

Verification Standard

Every claim assessed in the game is supported by independently verifiable primary sources. Every case citation in the legal content has been verified against primary legal databases. Every statute quoted is verified verbatim against official federal code. AI-assisted research is used as a starting point for human verification — never as the final word.

If you find a factual error in any game content, please contact us. Corrections are taken seriously and made promptly. The integrity of the record is the entire point.

Editorial Independence

DECLASSIFIED accepts no advertising influence over editorial content. Game verdicts, annotations, and pattern assignments are determined by the documented evidentiary record and by no other consideration. Advertisers and sponsors have no role in, visibility into, or influence over game content, claim selection, verdict assignment, or annotation text.

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Contact

Questions, corrections, press inquiries, and sponsorship inquiries: contact page.