Latest: Critical Thinking Game Design Challenge

The theme for the 16th Annual Life.Love. Game Design Challenge is critical thinking. Game pitches must be submitted by March 19th for the Critical Thinking Game Design Challenge. Visit CriticalThinker.games for more details and to submit a game pitch idea.

Latest: Resilience Games

The theme for the 15th Annual Life.Love. Game Design Challenge was resilience. Two of the winning resilience games are now available to play in your browser: One New Message and Unearth.

An important goal of Culture Overlord 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

Unfortunately media literacy is not taught in classrooms very often. 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]

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, in particular, teen dating violence. The aim is to do this through the promotion of healthy dating relationship ideals and attitudes for adolescents. Media literacy is important to achieve this goal 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, uses prosocial video games in an effort to engage and educate young people about healthy relationships and related topics. Their program, Gaming Against Violence, has been producing, publishing, and researching video games intentionally designed to assist adolescents about a variety of topics including consent, healthy relationships, and teen dating violence prevention since 2008.

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