2025: Communication Video Games

The game theme for 2025 is communication. This video game design challenge will launch in February 2025. Visit the communication games website for updates about the 2025 Life.Love. Game Design Challenge about communication.

Social Connectedness Video Games

The game theme for 2024 was connectedness and the winning video games have been announced! Visit the connectedness games website to learn more about the importance of social connectedness for young people and their communities and read about the winning games from the 2024 Life.Love. Game Design Challenge.

Critical Thinking Video Games

The game theme for the 16th Annual Life.Love. Game Design Challenge was critical thinking. The winning games were announced September 2023. Visit CriticalThinker.games to learn more about the winning critical thinking games and to learn more about critical thinking.

Critical Thinking Video Games

Resilience Video Games

The game theme for the 15th Annual Life.Love. Game Design Challenge was resilience. Four award-winning resilience games are now available to play in your browser: New Sun, One New Message, Unearth, and What's Next?!?. We still have one more resilience game to publish.

An important goal of Culture Overlord is to provide a free media literacy video game for young people. By doing so, our intention is to encourage players, especially young people, to consider the impact of movies, books, songs, games, websites, and more. More specifically, what attitudes and beliefs are they acquiring from popular media? In their Parent's Guide to Media Literacy The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) asks parents "where do children get their beliefs?" and "what messages are they receiving?"[1]

Similarly, the Center for Media Literacy (CML) conducts research to study how media impacts students in the areas of "violence, nutrition, body image, and sexuality."[2] Media Smarts in Canada encourages educators to engage students about media in the classroom in order to "become active, enaged media consumers" and that the need for this media literacy education "needs to start at the very early stages of learning."[3]

According to common sense media [4], encouraging early education in media literacy is intended to help young people:

1. learn to think critically
2. become a smart consumer of products and information
3. recognize point of view
4. create media responsibly
5. identify the role of media in our culture
6. understand the author's goal

Media literacy is usually not taught in classrooms.

According to Media Literacy now, fewer than one-third of states include media literacy in their education standards.[6] Further, the media literacy curricula include for-profit corporations that don't sufficiently consider the roles played by "power dynamics, profit motives, or their own internal beliefs and biases."[7]

This is one reason we are sharing this award-winning media literacy video game with schools, parents, and young people. If schools are not able to take advantage of our free media literacy resource, we hope parents will use this free media literacy game themselves to engage their children. And, if neither their schools or parents are talking with a student about media literacy, we hope that young people will play Culture Overlord themselves. This is why this game is completely free: we want teens to benefit from the game without needing to worry about the cost.

Select Media Literacy Resources

• [1] The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE)
• [2] Center for Media Literacy
• [3] Media Smarts - Canada's Centre for Digital and Media Literacy
• [4] common sense media
• [5] UNESCO - Media and Information Literacy
• [6] Media Literacy now
• [7] FAIR - Not All Media Literacy Programs Are Created Equal - and Most Have Yet to Be Created

The primary goal of Culture Overlord is to prevent abusive dating relationships, more specifically, teen dating violence. One way of accomplishing this is through the promotion of healthy dating relationship ideals and attitudes for adolescents. Encouraging media literacy through this video game is important to help us achieve this goal. This is true, in part, because young people's attitudes and beliefs regarding healthy relationships and gender norms are heavily informed by the media to which they are exposed.

The Making Caring Common project's report The Talk: How Adults Can Promote Young People's Healthy Relationships and Prevent Misogyny and Sexual Harassment reveals that young people are tired of the media's overhyped focus on "hooking up" and would prefer to instead learn from their parents and their schools about healthy relationships. Some of the key findings from their report:

• ► 70% of the 18 to 25-year-olds surveyed would have liked more information from their parents about emotional aspects of romantic relationships
• ► 65% of those surveyed would have liked more guidance at school about emotional aspects of romantic relationships
• ► 76% of respondents never had a conversation with their parents about how to avoid sexually harassing others
• ► 32% of male and 22% of female respondents thought men should be dominant in romantic relationships
• ► 14% of males and 10% of females thought women should be dominant in romantic relationships
• ► 57% of responsdents never spoke with their parents about the “importance of not having sex with someone who is too intoxicated or impaired to make a decision about sex”

Jennifer Ann's Group, a nonprofit charity focused on teen dating violence prevention, leverages the power of prosocial video games to engage, educate, and empower young people about healthy relationships and related topics. Through Gaming Against Violence, they have been producing, publishing, and researching video games intentionally designed to assist adolescents since 2008. These video games address a variety of topics, to include consent, healthy relationships, teen dating violence, and protective factors for violence prevention.

Healthy Dating Relationship Resources

• ► HONEYMOON, a video game for young people about healthy dating relationships
• ► Teen Dating Violence Prevention through Video Games
• ► The Talk: How Adults Can Promote Young People's Healthy Relationships and Prevent Misogyny and Sexual Harassment (the full report in PDF)
• ► Jennifer Ann's Group