Choose Your Own Adventure: The EDC Multiverse
By: Jordan Lo, Mominah Subhan, Minh-Tram Tran, Elizabeth Trueman, Jedrick Zablan
Play this interactive game by stepping into the shoes of women with differing socioeconomic backgrounds to learn more about how endocrine disrupting chemicals affect women’s reproductive health!
The purpose of this game is to educate players about the socioeconomic factors that contribute to one’s exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC’s). This game allows the player to step into the shoes of characters from varying backgrounds and go about a day in their life, making choices that affect their EDC exposure. Our game focuses on how EDCs impact women’s health, and each storyline follows a different woman going through her daily life. The choices she makes lead to different EDC exposure levels, calculated by an “exposure points” system. This “choose your own adventure” style emphasizes that the impacts of EDC exposure are influenced by everyday, mundane choices, most of the time without awareness or knowledge of their impact. As players make choices throughout the storyline, the impacts of lifetime exposure and the conditions that women face throughout their life are revealed. These experiences are snapshots into how endocrine disrupting chemicals play a hidden but major role in women’s reproductive health. Overall, despite the many choices our characters have throughout the game, their EDC exposure is largely shaped by their environment, socioeconomic status, and other factors that are out of their control. Each character ends up with a relatively similar EDC exposure point total regardless of their choices. The point system of the game allows the player to be actively engaged in the EDC exposure that comes with daily choices and creates a system for one to visualize the tangible impact of EDCs and how they disproportionately impact people of color and low income folks. The point values added throughout the game remained low to highlight that although each choice may not have much of an impact, continuous exposure can result in harms to the body.
comments powered by Disqus