Interview with Ann DeMarle and Lauren Nishikawa of the Emergent Media Center at Champlain College
What do you want people to know about the project?
Ann: My answer to that is two-fold. One, violence against women is a huge global problem; that’s the most important thing for people to know. Secondly, we’re using a medium,games, that has been labeled as promoting violence, and we’re taking it and applying it in the opposite direction, to create behavior changes to end violence. It’s not as easy to accomplish as I wish it would be.
What was your impetus for taking on this project? Why a video game, and why one focused on this issue?
Ann: Games are a natural thing for us to be doing here. I began the degree program at Champlain College in game development, and in 6 years it’s become one of our most popular majors, and it’s the first program for game development in the Northeast. Games are an incredible medium, I compare it to the early days of film, they’re just finding their footing. Games provide an opportunity to accomplish communications goals and related tasks that is immense, and there’s a real potential for education if we can unlock it.
The focus on violence against women didn’t come directly from us. At the Emergent Media Center we work with partners, some corporate and some nonprofit. Population Media Center came to us to collaborate with them. They work with the United Nations on issues such as AIDS, teen pregnancy, overpopulation, education, etc., One of the eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals is Gender Equality and key is to reduce gender violence. They believe that gender violence is one of the root causes of poverty world wide. And I’ve had direct experiences that mirror those statistics, so it has personal poignancy for me as well.
What do you see as the challenges that face people working to promote respectful treatment of women and girls?
Lauren: One of the biggest barriers is the mentality that’s embedded into the cultures young boys and girls grow up in. When we went to South Africa, they felt that violence against women was just a part of culture and a part of life. So just getting over the idea that it’s a normal part of life is a huge challenge.
Ann: We started the project by doing research here in the U.S., and then in the townships of South Africa, and we came away with this one quote from a girl we spoke with. She said, “If my boyfriend beats me, he loves me the most.” So it pointed out to us that for generations people have assumed that it’s ok for a man to control the life of a woman, in Western nations it’s just as prevalent, but people don’t talk about and address it, it’s gone underground.
What kind of research did you do in choosing the game’s focus and design?
Ann: When we first wrote the proposal for this project, I thought, how could we possibly accomplish this mission? Because games have been shown to be really good at skill building, such as hand-eye coordination, critical thinking, and in just getting ideas out there, but it hasn’t been shown yet that they can cause behavioral changes. Population Media Center has done work around the world using entertainment to change behaviors, and that I think was a huge help to us.
Lauren: Working off Sabido Methodology we knew we needed to have a storyline, a narrative system. Our original ideas were around making the game about relationships, conversation, etc., but we realized that was a type of game play that appeals to girls in this age group more than boys. With Sabido Methodology, you’re usually working within the local cultural frame work, but we needed to appeal to a global culture, so we chose soccer. That way we could link the narratives with soccer play, and link the elements in with mini games. The storyline is that a girl is going to join the team, so you have to make decisions about how to treat her, whether to welcome her or support the team captain in rejecting her.
Ann: One of the strengths we’re also employing is that the UNFPA has a list of strategies that they think can help to end gender violence.The game is built on those as well prime being the fact that it’s built for boys, with strong positive male role models inside the game. The international soccer (football) association, FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), has its FairPlay rules, which are all about respect, so that goes into the game design as well.
How does the game work?
Lauren: The web version will be released in episodes. The episodes lead up to pivotal moments in the narrative, and in between you will train with your team mates, and every couple of episodes you will play against another team, and then you work with team interactions. Your character is the center midfielder, the person who has the most control over who gets the ball and who has the most play time, which gives you the ability to really influence the games. In between you’ll be building player skills You can choose to become friends with the positive characters or the negative ones. they will then teach you their moves for the field. We’ve made it so that the positive characters moves are more effective and rewarding, so the player is rewarded in the game for making positive choices. When you see the negative characters fail in the anarrative as well as the play, that has an impact too. Likewise if you make negative choices as a player, you also face the consequences of your behavior.
You did some testing work with kids as test players, how did that work?
Ann: Testing is built-in throughout, so we design, test, design, test. We’ve tested in the conceptual stage and this fall through December we have three other testings scheduled. One will be at a localmiddle school, one at a larger pre-teen group in New Jersey, and then we’re going to test the first complete episode in the Caribbean this winter.
Lauren: Our first testing was with middle school kids, 6-8 grade. We didn’t have the game built, but we were testing core concepts, and a small segment of storyline. Asking questions like whether the character was doing something realistic, what they thought the character would or should do, how they would name the characters, testing pictures of concept drawings. We also had a board game of the soccer match that they could play, and we actually did have some prototypes on the computer, which was very informative. With the visual games we realized we had made them too easy so we were able to revise that and then send it back to South Africa with Population Media Center and have them test that content as well.
Tell us about the art style of the game, how have you worked to make it appeal to people from many different cultural backgrounds.
Lauren: We’ve tested out a lot of things so far, one of the decisions we made was we originally had a character in the game that was the player, and we were trying to offer character customization for player appeal. But being a global game the choices available to the player grew exponentially which would take a lot of testing, refinement and production time to create. So instead we changed the entire game play to a first-person perspective to be more immersive. In terms of the other characters, we’re looking at a skin tone range that is more middle of the road, but we’re still feeling that out. The other thing that has helped us considerably is that different cultures look at the bulk and muscle mass of a game character differently. Some countries want the really muscular look, and others prefer a leaner look, but we were lucky because they all have to fit the pre-teenage range for the characters which would not be expected to be a body builder in proportions.
Ann: Having a female character on the soccer team is a huge issue, it’s going to be very controversial but we knew we needed to keep that because it was the most effective way to bring the issue home.
We’ve also had to consider setting, because we don’t want it to look like any specific place, and so we’ve decided to make it aspirational by placing it in a middle-class setting. Somewhere that most children would aspire to be.
And in terms of the art style, we decided to go with what we’re calling the Disney-like look, which has been shown to have universal appeal.
You talk about developing the game for mobile phones to give greater access in developing nations. Is this game something you think is geared towards developing nations alone, or something with global appeal and impact?
Ann: It’s being developed and delievered for a worldwide audience, Our plan is solid for that. Our sponsor the UNFPA insisted that it reach a global market. The Sabido methodology is geared for media routed in local cultures, but violence against women is a global problem, the UN is a global organization, and so it has to be a global game. We were pushed to find the best solution to this, and that’s why we’re testing on such a wide audience. That’s why we started testing in South Africa, because they have both a first- and third-world economy and are multi-ethnic, Because the game is episodic (with chapters delivered over time) we’ll be testing as we proceed as well. After the release of the web episodes, and while we develop them, we’ll be taking the content and porting it over to cell phones. That’s a bit harder, but we are hoping for a to worldwide release.It will have been really well tested by the time we get there. And we want the release to coincide with the FIFA World Cup.During the World Cup FIFA has the most visited website in the world and we hope to be able to catch some of that excitement. The cellphone episodes will be delivered in the following year.
What are your next steps in this project? Do you have any plans for the future?
Ann: This is our second year of development, and we have a three-year plan, including all the web and cell phone releases. If we’re successful, we’re building a model that can be modified for use in specific countries and cultures. We’re releasing in English, French and Spanish, and then we hope to be able to take that into other languages as well. Because it’s a web release, we’ve built into the plan education and support through web and social media. Calledthe ecology of the game a community can grow and can offer built in support structures for the players who want to change their behaviors, Other organizations can link into this as well. Say you’re a young boy with a very traditional family that believes women are the property of a man and should be disciplined by the head of household that’s why this age range (9-13) is so important, it’s when children start maturing and moving away from family - looking at the larger world for inspiration. In th e game the child can see that there are different choices that can make life better. We want to be able to bring in other partners through the web presence to enable these boys who want to change sustain their changes beyond the game and help those successful boys advocate for change.
For more information:
Project website
Emergent Media Center website
Project blog
Project Overview video (10 minutes)
Interview conducted last year at the Montreal International Game Summit (8 minutes)
Recent video blog by Seven Days (Vermont news media) on the EMC and with student interviews
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