By Madeline Reinsel

It’s late on a weekend night. You’re in your dorm room, watching Netflix, when texts start rolling in from your friends at a college party.

I’ve alrady had a lot to drink, a text from Joshua reads. Just waiting for someone fun to show up.

That’s just the beginning of “Once Upon a Party,” an interactive online game developed by Virginia Commonwealth University School of Social Work assistant professor Adrienne Baldwin-White. And though it’s called a game, it deals with a serious topic in an engaging way: You choose how to respond to your friends’ text messages about sexual harassment or assault at the party.

Baldwin-White, Ph.D., studies gender-based violence, focusing on the particular challenges faced by college students. She developed the game alongside Melody Huslage, Ph.D., from the University of Nevada, Reno, to provide a more engaging and realistic training for college students to learn how sexual violence can occur, and to promote bystander intervention. The game encourages players to consider the nuances of sexual violence and harassment, and how they might deal with those topics through realistic narratives.

“I focus on college students because they’re actually a really vulnerable group,” Baldwin-White said. “They have very high levels of anxiety and depression, even without the threat of the trauma of violence.”

Her research has found that regular sexual violence prevention trainings are not impactful for college students, who often complete them during new-student orientations. And while every U.S. university is required to provide the trainings, the format isn’t specified. Video games, Baldwin-White said, are an appealing approach and could supplement or replace trainings currently in use at VCU and other universities.

“There’s something about video games that helps information stick,” she said. “I decided that a video game would actually be a good way to educate students on gender-based violence and how to prevent it.”

“Once Upon a Party,” which is already used by the University of Notre Dame, is the first of two such games created by Baldwin-White. She began the development process with pilot funding from the School of Social Work, and she is working with two computer science majors from VCU’s School of Engineering to help complete over the summer the second game, “Student Body,” which will be animated.

The two games deal with the same topics, but take different formats. While players simply choose how to answer text messages from their friends in “Once Upon a Party,” the new game presents players with a map of a college campus and a visual, “choose your own adventure”-style narrative.

Baldwin-White designed the games to reflect the diversity of VCU and other college campuses. “Student Body” will include 10 scenarios and incorporate narrative arcs featuring several LGBTQ+ identities, and it will offer stories from people of color, who were not explicitly represented in “Once Upon a Party.”

The stories in both games, which do not depict sexual violence or harassment as they occur, were drawn from discussions that Baldwin-White had with college students during her research. “Student Body” will also include information about human trafficking, as Virginia law now requires colleges to provide training on the topic for incoming students.

“The stories are realistic,” she said. “They came from actual conversations that I had with college students about dating, their relationships, how they perceive sexual violence, how they perceive dating violence, and what healthy relationships look like for them.”

And while the primary purpose of both games is to decrease sexual violence, Baldwin-White cited a benefit that might seem less apparent.

“Universities spend a lot of resources on treating students who’ve experienced sexual assault and dating violence,” she said. “But prevention does a much better job of actually reducing those costs, because you’re keeping it from happening in the first place.”

Baldwin-White worked with VCU TechTransfer and Ventures over the last year to kickstart her company, Noble Tech, and bring her games to a wider audience. She plans to keep costs low for schools that choose the games, from community colleges to large universities.

In addition to reducing costs, she hopes the games’ short run times – it takes about 30 minutes to play “Once Upon a Party” – will keep students focused.

“I feel like these games could really help thousands of people and could really help prevent violence on campuses,” Baldwin-White said. “That leads to positive academic impacts, positive mental health impacts and positive physical health impacts.”

It all boils down to one simple goal, she said: “I really want these games to do good. That’s all I really want – to do good with these games.”

For more about “Once Upon a Party” and Noble Tech, visit the company website.