“Survive the Party”: An Educational Game about Relationships and Consent.

Abstract

It is now an unfortunate, yet well-known, fact that approximately 1 in 5 women (∼18%) report lifetime exposure to sexual assault [7]. These statistics, among others, highlight the ever-present need for comprehensive sex education, particularly with regards to consent and relationship norms. Unfortunately, without cohesive or consistent implementation processes for sex education, a highly diverse “patchwork” of sex education laws and practices exist in the United States [3]. In response to these issues, our team decided to make a scenario-based video game to teach incoming college freshmen about common situations that may happen at a college party, and the best ways to handle those situations. ‘Survive the Party’ is a scenario-based experiential learning game where learners play as a ghost that is haunting a college party. The ghost floats around the party and ‘overhears’ various conversations between individuals of different backgrounds, genders, and sexual identities. At certain points in each scenario, the ghost can step in and make decisions about how the scenario should play out. In this paper, we will describe our background research, our targeted learning goals, the game itself, possible applications for our game in educational settings, and finally, opportunities for future work.