Gathered at the Hotel Vermont in Burlington Thursday night, officials from Champlain College and a local nonprofit mingled with Senegal’s former prime minister and representatives from the United Nations Population Fund.
They were connected by a video game — one that promotes gender equity through children’s soccer.
The party honored Aminata Touré, who was the prime minister of Senegal from 2013-14. It also celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Population Media Center, a South Burlington-based organization that uses the power of stories to raise issues of women’s rights and empowerment, population stabilization, and the environment.
Champlain College plans to present an honorary degree to Touré at its commencement on Saturday.
Before becoming the chief officer of Senegal’s government, Touré spent 20 years with the United Nations Population Fund, coordinating its gender and HIV program in West Africa. In her U.N. role, Touré began working with Champlain College and the Population Media Center to design and fund a video game that would address gender-based violence and discrimination.
Ann DeMarle, director of the Emergent Media Center at Champlain College, initially wanted to work on a game that would address overpopulation. Touré wanted to focus more on the status of women — and took her son’s interests as inspiration for reaching the younger population.
“The minute you gave him a (video) game, he just became absorbed. Then the whole entertainment idea came to my mind,” Touré said at Thursday’s reception.
She described telling William Ryerson, the Population Media Center’s founder, “Well, the way I see it, the 8- to 15-year-olds, we should find them in their place and try to educate them. And their place was very much the video game they were spending much time on.”
The game, called Breakaway, was launched at the 2010 FIFA World Cup soccer tournament in South Africa, according to Champlain College and Ryerson.
The game, designed for children ages 8 through 15, takes players through a six-episode story. A girl joins a boys’ soccer team and faces situations of harassment and sexism, which the player must work to address.
Breakaway’s world includes positive and negative characters, but the player can choose which one to inhabit, which gives children the opportunity and authority to do some creative thinking, according to Population Media Center’s website. When a player makes choices that boost gender equality, the game enables the player’s character to play better soccer.
The game has continued to evolve. By 2016, more than 150 student developers had worked on it, tweaking and improving it.
“I had never played an electronic game before we started talking about this,” Ryerson said Thursday, “but I knew that young people in this country play electronic games more than they watch TV. So it’s a very important medium and growing in importance around the world.”
According to Boston Children’s Hospital, American kids ages 8 to 12 spend about 55 minutes a day playing video games, and that jumps to more than an hour for those ages 13 to 18.
The Emergent Media Center at Champlain College developed the game in response to a United Nations campaign intended to teach children a healthy, equal attitude toward girls and women.
Breakaway was tested at summer camps in Palestine in 2012 and in El Salvador in 2013, but Touré stressed that the message of Breakaway has far greater impact than just certain areas of the world.
“When you talk about violence against women, it’s not a poor country issue, not at all. It cuts across, you know, races, cultures, income,” Touré said on Thursday. “I think when you have that base of equality, that base of refusing dominance, that base of nurturing respect, then it becomes obvious to you that it’s the way to go.”
Breakaway is available for download through Google Play.