"Breakaway": A Global Electronic Game to Address Violence Against Women

Fifteen episodes are being built for the game, with plans of sequential releases beginning in June 2010 through to January 2011. Our plan is to release the first episodes of Breakaway to coincide with the 2010 World Cup™. Children's camps, extracurricular school programs, youth leadership events, and local football organizations are where the game will initially be unveiled. Following a staged web release, a mobile cell version is planned that will truly reach into the lowest resource regions of the world. The social networking platform in support of the game will act as a global community space for youth to discuss the story events of the game.

To be effective in the campaign to end violence against women, the educational strengths of games must be matched to proven approaches for changing attitudes and behavior. The game (with the working title, "Breakaway"), designed by students at the Emergent Media Center, utilizes three successful methods: the UNFPA toolkit of culturally sensitive approaches to create change, the Sabido methodology of entertainment-education, and the FIFA (Federation Internationale de Football) “Fair Play” rules.

Employing the global popularity of football, the game design links the winning benefits of respect on the playing field to respectful behavior towards girls and women in the player’s social sphere. The player becomes a teen intent on becoming a champion football player. Game play is based on football performance and on navigating community-based relationships. The player experiences diverse viewpoints and perspectives. To be replayed multiple times with different endings, the player is challenged to make complex decisions that influence the future of the team and the women in his family and larger community. Within these contexts the player comes into situations whereby decisions must be made about gender-based behaviors and violence. Choices the player makes determine player success at winning the game. The player discovers the causative effect of personal choice - creating an arena where individual change from within can happen. The overarching theme is for the player to learn how to be a champion on the field, in life, and as an advocate for womens' rights and equality. Reliant on game design principles and demographic research, conflict, competition, reward systems, action, and exploration are key factors of the design. Adapting the Sabido methodology, the game employs positive, negative, and transitional role modeling; cliffhangers; and time to reflect on important issues.

The game features three major modes of play: narrative events, tactical football, and skill-building training mini-games. Narrative events provide the story arc for each episode, creating a context in which the game player is prompted to react to situations filled with gender inequity challenges that may lead to gender-based violence. Time-tested Sabido role models supply the player with positive and negative choices; as the events unfold, the consequences of each decision are depicted for the player’s consideration. Game players explore the issue of gender-based inequality through their actions, which in turn impact their relationships with teammates and impact the outcomes of the game.

The tactical football system transitions the narrative to the football pitch, putting the fate of the team in the game player’s hands. Game play cycles between the player, his team, and the opponent, offering strategic decisions that trigger one of three skill-based mini-games. Intermittently, the player is also faced with moral decisions tied back to the social issue. The player has an unlimited amount of time to make these decisions, and any one of them can mean the difference between winning and losing a match.

The skill-based training games provide the player with frequent, fast-paced pieces of game play that satisfy the desire to engage in the visceral, action-oriented aspects of football. Athletic components such as speed, strength, agility, and timing are introduced in three mini-games focused on Defense, Handling, and Kicking. Time spent training in these areas will ease the difficulty of each mini-game when triggered during a football match, and success or failure in completing a mini-game results in meaningful consequences in the tactical football system.

The tactical system ties together the action-packed mini-games, which provide pure entertainment and appeal for the audience, with thought-provoking narrative decisions, which hold the message and facilitate game learning. Narrative events have a direct influence over the difficulty of the tactical system by influencing the player’s ability to improve his skills. It is in this interlocking design that players come to understand the outcome of their choices.

In order to instill large scale change in society, it is often necessary to introduce ideas that are very revolutionary. However, such revolution can lead to fear, confusion or lack of support from those who see the status quo as 'just fine.' As a result, it can be difficult for new ideas and new approaches to big problems to be taken seriously as viable solutions. Our team has experienced this throughout the development of this game concept.

Our team's approach of addressing and involving young boys in social change for women has met some barriers from those who hold alternate cultural viewpoints. For example, Some don't see the logic of a project that is directed at boys when the purpose is to advance women's rights. We have been told that in some circles, this is seen as asking men for permission to ensure women's safety. Yet the United Nations backs the need to educate and involve boys and men in change for women's rights through much research as well as implementation of this concept in their global programming. We also believe the point is for boys not to protect girls from violence, but for boys to become advocates in society so this behavior does not exist in the first place.

Another challenge to our concept in raising awareness and changing attitudes about violence against women is that our project has a long-term goal. These changes do not occur as an immediate fix through game play, but repetition leads to mastery of concepts. So as youth are making choices and shaping themselves within society, our hope is that playing this game, and then subsequent reflection and discussion of its concepts will lead to the seeds of change within these budding adults.

Another challenge to the medium through which we hope to instill change, is that few people can grasp the potential of games because they are such a young medium. However video games have great power to influence and get a message across. And thus it is a very appropriate way of reaching our target audience.

Finally, a technical challenge that our project will encounter when we have finished developing the mobile phone version of this game is that there are so many cell phone platforms on the world market that it will be cost prohibitive for us to format the game for so many versions. Thus we really hope to find corporate partners who would be interested in helping us enable this process in a more streamlined fashion.

We have developed many alliances with organizations, schools, corporations and individuals through networking and social media. This list is just an example of who is helping us put the puzzle pieces together all around the world:

Champlain College (The EMC is an academic center of Champlain);

United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA is the project's major funder);

Population Media Center (is EMC's collaborative partner on the project);

U.S. Secretary of State's Office of Global Women's Issues (advisors of the development process);

IBM (volunteer partner in language translation of the game);

Jager DiPaola Kemp Design Firm, Burlington, Vermont (volunteer advisors on youth marketing elements);

Individuals within the electronic game industry (volunteer advisors on youth marketing and game design elements);

Primary Schools in Winooski, Vermont; South Africa; and Saint Lucia (students at these sites volunteered to be subjects for the team's initial research and preliminary game testing phases);

Grassroots Soccer Organization - South Africa (partner in game roll-out at FIFA World Cup children events)

Pro Mundo Organization - Brazil (partner in game testing in international locations)

A successful merging of new media to this global crisis by capturing the hearts and minds of the world’s youth, can be an important step in reaching potential future perpetrators of violence and improving the future for women.

This game will be successful if a player experiences the following 4 shifts:
1. Understanding the problem of gender violence
2. Recognizing one’s own personal responsibility to change
3. Changing one’s own behavior
4. Advocating for others.

We hope the main impact of this game will be to create a shift in attitudes and behaviors towards the treatment of girls and women in society by the youngest generations around the world. It is our hope that playing this game at a formative age will inspire today's youth to become responsible adults who see that there is another viewpoint out there and they choose to advocate for the equality of all human beings.

We also hope that this game will encourage and inspire the creation of more 'serious gaming' initiatives with a social message aimed at youth, so that less time and resources are aimed at violent games, but rather, games to prevent violence.