inCHARACTER
“Take Action Games and The Independent Television Service partnered to produce a documentary meta-game for the multi-year Women and Girls Lead campaign – an innovative public media campaign designed to celebrate, educate, and activate women, girls, and their allies across the globe to address the challenges of the 21st century.”
“This hybrid digital + physical card game integrates content from dozens of documentary films with a conversation prompting system. It leverages the half a million yearly participants of community screenings and elicits sustained dialogue about the inequitable status of women and girls in today’s global society.”
inCHARACTER was orchestrated to leverage the ITVS Women and Girls Lead (WGL) extraordinary collection of gender-justice films. The goal of the game was to extend the impact of the documentaries and to provide an opportunity for more direct engagement with the stories and issues the films reveal. inCHARACTER is a discourse-prompting game about gender equity, documentary storytelling and social change. The game engenders meta-critical conversations about the game itself and about the many possible relationships between the subjects on the character cards, the communities the subjects are part of, the filmmakers who choose to tell these subjects’ stories, and the game designers who inevitably summarize layers of complexity in order to craft a playable experience.
““This game was extremely interesting and it kept me captivated. I did not want the game to end. I liked the fact that I was able to express my personal opinions and not have someone attacking my ideas.””
““You can get a dissertation out of the game pretty much; people are throwing out, you know, contextual elements and theorizing.” ”
Physical game card with augmented reality content accessible with a smartphone.
““I think the game makes people think about social justice issues more seriously and creatively. If a person wants to win the game, they can’t think about such issues on a surface level.””
How to Play inCHARACTER.
Footage from the first playtest of inCHARACTER at an Independent Television Service (ITVS) Community Cinema event. This event took place two weeks prior to the PBS premiere of 'Half the Sky'.
