The pages of Zoe’s journal may read like that of any other teenage girl.
Zoe, 14, likes drawing, religion, biology, acting and martial arts. She also likes to spend time with her friends.
Zoe, a character in a new online video game designed to educate children about violence and abusive relationships, has even found time for a boy, Jake.
“He’s two years older than I am and different from any other guy I know,” says Zoe in the game. “I haven’t gone out with anyone before, but maybe this’ll be the year.”
But the year she thought she would begin a fun chapter in her life brought one of the hardest situations any girl could experience. She began spending less time with her friends and missing school, and some of her friends began to suspect her new relationship with Jake was unhealthy. Fortunately for Zoe, she isn’t real.
Dating violence is a problem faced by one out of every three teenagers, according to a poll conducted by the Family Violence Prevention Fund and Liz Claiborne Inc. The study shows that roughly one in four teens reports victimization through technology and that nearly one of every two teens in a relationship reports being “controlled, threatened, and pressured to do things they did not want to do.”
It is exactly this issue that drove The Metropolitan Action Committee on Violence Against Women and Children (METRAC) to create the game RePlay: Finding Zoe. RePlay is a single-player game intended for children between 8 and 14 years old and takes place in a fictional community where Zoe and her classmates attend middle school.
When Zoe’s friends become aware of her disappearance, the player, who in the game is Zoe’s classmate, must navigate throughout the small town looking for her while combating gender stereotypes, sexist remarks and hurtful comments in general.
The object of RePlay is to find Zoe and interact with as many of her classmates as you can while overcoming their gender role beliefs and convincing them to join your search for Zoe.
“While the gaming medium teaches some important skills, they are usually played in isolation from adult supervision and critical discussion of their story content,” Wendy Komiotis, executive director of METRAC, said. “The violence and sexism in them often remains unchallenged.”
In RePlay, the goal of the story is to prevent sexism and violence against women.
The game not only encourages players to confront unhealthy and abusive treatment of women, but it teaches them how to do so. Players must walk through the community setting on a single, winding road where other children are walking. It is impossible to go around someone in the game. You can either return the way you came and find another route, or, as the game intends, engage them in conversation.
Unfortunately, the issue of abusive relationships is not limited to teens. Abusive relationships and violence toward women are global issues which transcend ethnic, racial, age and geographic boundaries.
According to The Alabama Coalition Against Domestic Violence, one in five college females will experience a form of dating violence.
Fernando Rivera of UCF’s College of Sciences is aware of existing violence against women on college campuses. He was enthusiastic about the new approach being used to target such a serious issue early in a child’s socialization.
“Children in today’s age deal with more serious issues than ever before, and they form ways to cope with it,” Rivera said. “If you can find a way to frame the issue in a way that helps them absorb the message, all the better.”
According to the UCF Police Department’s online crime database, there were eight instances of forcible sex offenses committed both on campus and in residential facilities between 2004 and 2006.
Rivera said he believes the figures are underreported.
Rivera said that with a large student population and a ratio of 55 females to 45 males, it’d be optimistic to think that sex offenses occur as little as those numbers suggest.
James Hobart, the founder and co-owner of Knight Creative + Marketing in Orlando, said that while he shares the enthusiasm for educating children through new mediums like video games, he is skeptical of their effectiveness.
Hobart is concerned that, while video games are beginning to pick up where other progressive media left off, there is still a strong element of victimizing women permeating the culture.
“Shows like The Sopranos come to mind,” Hobart said.
With games like those in the Grand Theft Auto series rewarding violent behavior – including toward women – he said he thinks video games have a lot to answer for.
“Their popularity, however, is a result of how entertaining kids find them,” Hobart said. “If they’re not doing something bad, they may not find it fun.”
Hobart fears that RePlay has good intentions but may be too direct of an approach. He suggests creating first-person shooter games advocating better behavior in the subtext may be more effective.
“If I was 10, 11 or 12 and was given the choice between Finding Zoe and Halo 3, I’d know what I’d choose,” Hobart said.
Tiffany Rurut, a senior finance major, said she’s never experienced dating violence herself but is never distant from it through friends and peers.
“It’s not uncommon, but you hear about it, and you almost always know someone,” she said. “Especially as a girl, it’s something you don’t want to hear.”
Rurut agrees that targeting children and educating them about the subject is a good example of utilizing the media to advocacy’s advantage. She also thinks other elements of the media are culpable.
“Girls may see things like this on TV and think, ‘Yeah, it’s okay that this guy is acting like a jerk; I can take it because that girl took it,’” she said. “It’s really just a shame.”
Like Rivera, Rurut thinks the target age of the game is when children begin to notice these behaviors, want to feel older and combine these two to begin emulating what they see.
Heather Daneshgar, a senior interdisciplinary studies major, believes that the game is a step in the right direction, but she shares some of Hobart’s concerns. Unlike Hobart, however, her primary concern wasn’t children’s attention span.
“I think the game might risk making light of the issue,” Daneshgar said.
She said she worries that children may associate it with gameplay, instead of what she says it really is, “an ugly truth.”
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