Introducing "Abstinence-Only: The Video Game." Price Tag: $434,000.

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Introducing "Abstinence-Only: The Video Game." Price Tag: $434,000.

by: AFY_Nikki

Wednesday, August 4, 2010 at 3:05:00 PM EDT

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Federal Government: We gave you $434,000 in taxpayer money, and all we got was this lousy abstinence-only video game featuring creepy purple avatars.

The Institute for Simulation and Training at the University of Central Florida is developing a virtual reality game designed to teach middle schoolers the merits of sexual abstinence.

An Orlando newscast (see the video above) recently provided a glimpse of the gameplay. From the looks of things, the engineers have been working hard on upping the game's cool factor:

- You control a character's movement by flailing around in a full-body motion-capture suit.
- You earn points every time you learn a new social skill. Did you just refuse to kiss or have sex with that sketchy avatar who cornered you on the playground? Congratulations! You are now a Level 5 Abstinent Master.
- Moments of challenging sexual innuendo are interspersed with immersive day-to-day school adventures. The screenshot below, for example, shows the level where you and your fellow avatars nosh on invisible lunches in the school cafeteria:

All of this for the low cost of $434,000. That's how much the National Institutes of Health granted The Institute for Simulation and Training to engineer and pilot its creation in Florida classrooms. (The game is targeted at middle school girls, and is scheduled to be tested in after-school programs in the Spring of 2011.)

In all seriousness, we're not against using novel technologies (including socially-minded video games) as a tool for positive behavior change. But this video game appears to be the opposite of that. It leans on shortcuts and gimmickry when the real task at hand should involve providing students with comprehensive, medically-accurate, and age-appropriate information — i.e., practical knowledge that empowers young people to make responsible decisions regarding their sexual health.

What we see here is a fantastical world inhabited by souped-up puppets whose language consists entirely of pick-up lines. In this world, there's apparently no info about what sex actually entails (from a biological, social, or personal/emotional standpoint). No info about condoms. No info about contraception. No info about relevant community resources. And no info about how students might go about talking to their larger network — including parents and teachers — about important sexual health issues.

Ultimately, the biggest problem isn't the amount of money wasted. Rather, it's the fact that our government doled out $434,000 to help create a game that could damage the health of young Americans via mass-distributed ignorance.

Bless the day when our public officials realize that you can't take a widely discredited abstinence-only-until marriage ideology, wrap some fancy new technology around it, and expect it to spit out something good. Special dancing avatars notwithstanding: