In India, girls are ready to explore, learn, achieve, and use their voices to make choices that impact their lives and future. However, their environment is often limiting.
Howard Delafield International introduced in India a new mobile game and D2C digital platform designed to empower girls as decision-makers. Game of Choice, Not Chance is made possible by the support of the American People through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID.)
I spent a couple of days with the team and the spirited young girls at Purkul Development Society and Him Jyoti Foundation, both residential schools for the underprivileged at Dehradun in Uttarakhand, where the game was test-launched.
Research conducted with girls in Delhi, Rajasthan, and Bihar, showed that most girls face a culture of silence and shame about the changes they experience during adolescence. Often, they are misinformed about safe practices, unaware of risks, and unprepared for the consequences of their actions. For too many adolescent girls, dreams of education and a career are disrupted by early marriage and pregnancy.
According to a 2020 report by Google and Niko Partners, mobile gaming in India is here to stay. Girls are gaming, a reality that has created a new avenue for positively impacting their lives. Our mobile game delivers opportunities for play, discovery, and exploration in a vibrant interactive environment. This unique gaming experience is designed to build girls‘ knowledge and confidence so they may become more informed and active decision-makers in the big and small matters that impact their lives.
Game of Choice, Not Chance™ is an initiative that has created a mobile game designed to empower girls to make informed choices, develop strong voices, and shape their future with confidence. This youth-centered game has been co-designed with Hindi-speaking girls in India.
Meet Nisha. In her world, girls experience the power of choices.
Informed by their lived experiences, the story-driven game provides an entertaining and safe space where girls can discover, learn, and build decision-making agency through interactive role play in a virtual world.
The game is the central component of a digital platform for impact games that integrates behavioral science, human-centered design, game-based learning, and interactive storytelling, with direct-to-consumer strategies to generate a novel approach to increasing girls‘ reproductive empowerment.
Through research with girls, we learned they can experience a conflict between their individual needs, wants, and aspirations, and family, cultural and social norms. This produces a push-pull dynamic that can limit girls’ dreams and undermine their sense of agency.
As players move through the game’s narrative, they face realistic sexual and reproductive health decisions within a safe and private virtual space, enabling them to reflect on and learn from the simulated outcomes of their choices.
The game’s narrative consists of five episodes, or levels with an expected play time of between eight and fifteen minutes per level with the opportunity to ‘try again’.
With research showing a correlation between identification of players with an avatar used to represent them and their real-world choices, the purpose of the game is for girls to realize their decisions matter and to provide opportunities to practice making choices. In addition, the gameplay is expected to increase girls’ fertility awareness, build agency to refuse sex and negotiate use of contraception, encourage communication with parents and support networks, and provide links throughout the game to relevant resources.
In June 2022, Go-Nisha-Go, the mobile game for adolescent girls was finally launched in India. The launch saw the active participation of the young adolescents, the gaming and the support teams, influencers as well as representation of the government, USAID and others.
At 200,000 downloads of the Go-Nish-Go game, young adolescent girls continue to acquire information and knowledge through this game and feel empowered!
HDI along with partners Metamersive and Vihara, kicked off work to conceptualize and develop a game for boys in India. Based on formative research concluded by Vihara in late 2021, HDI developed a strategic brief to develop a game for boys. This game will contribute to one of the GOC's strategic objectives - Advance and Support Adolescent FP/RH Behaviors.
The Vihara team worked with Restless Development and Metamersive to plan and facilitate 4-days of sessions in New Delhi and Jaipur with boys aged 15-19. The action-packed sessions included scenario building activities where boys built if/then scenarios around prompts provided to them about boys’ romantic relationships with girls.
Photo elicitation exercises encouraged them to express their perceptions about photos that explored a couple in various stages of intimacy, in order to explore their love language, as well as to get a sense of the visual signs and symbols of a relationship.