Jennifer Ann's Group

Video Games about Consent!

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Consent Games for Students

Consent has been in the news a lot recently. Unfortunately, one of the reasons we've heard so much about it is because some people fail to understand - or to respect - that consent is a prerequisite to sex.

Consent is a legal word with a very specific meaning which affects all of us. Although our focus here is on the meaning of consent as it relates to relationships between people, consent affects our rights in a variety of other ways as well. It is important that everybody understand its meaning.

Jennifer Ann's Group is a nonprofit charity and we believe video games are the best approach to educating and empowering people - especially adolescents.

Since 2008 we've been producing serious games which help young people, teachers, and parents and have produced these games about consent to help all people - young and old - have a thorough understanding of its meaning. We hope these consent video games will help everybody have a greater understanding of, and appreciation for, consent.

Consent Video Games

The video games about consent include: Stuck in a Dark Place from Another Kind (Belgium), Crossing Boundaries from Testudo Studios (U.K.), How to Blorrble-Blobble from Jared Sain (U.S.A.), and ADRIFT from Quinn Crossley and Andrew Connell (U.S.A.)

These games about consent are free for students, educators, and parents! All of these video games can be played in most modern browsers (HTML5).

What is consent?

Consent has an important legal meaning which affects all of us. Although for our purposes we are focusing on the meaning of consent as it relates to relationships between people, consent also affects us in other ways. For example:

• healthcare: Informed consent helps a patient decide if they want to have elective surgery. A doctor would provide a patient with sufficient information regarding elective surgery including possible problems which may occur. The patient, once they have sufficient information about that surgery, can then make an informed decision to proceed and can then grant the doctor permission to do so.


• privacy: Consent is sometimes requested by law enforcement if you are stopped for a traffic ticket. The police officer may request consent to search your car for contraband. The driver can decide if they are willing to grant that consent or not. If the driver does provide consent to allow their car to be searched they can revoke that consent if they so choose. They can also limit the scope of that consent. For example, "I grant consent to search my car other than my glovebox." Consent is permission that is granted and, ammong other things, this permission is revocable and limited.

For our purposes we are focusing on consent between people - more specifically between people in dating or sexual relationships - but consent still has the same legal meaning in other contexts. Once you understand how consent applies to dating relationships then you'll be able to use that understanding of consent in other ways that consent applies.

Consent Defined

• To give assent or approval (Merriam-Webster)


• Give permission for something to happen (Oxford)

So far this is straightforward, but these definitions are fairly broad and open to interpretation. Let's look at Black's Law Dictionary for a more precise definition of consent:

• A concurrence of wills.


• Express consent is that directly given, either lira voce or in writing.


• Consent is an act of reason, accompanied with deliberation, the mind weeighing as in a balance the good or evil on each side.

Although this provides more detail about the meaning of consent it also invites many questions! Words used in law have very specific meanings which might be different than the way we use those same words in everyday conversation. So, what we will do is look at the different elements of consent.

Elements of Consent

We think it will be helpful to take the legal definition of consent and then break it down into its individual elements in order that everybody has the same understanding of what - precisely - is meant by consent. We believe that after evaluating each element of consent the true meaning of the word will become clear.

Consent is a very important and fundamental part of a healthy relationship. Consent involves giving permission and getting permission. More specifically, the permission is: informed, freely given, actively given, and revocable.

★ Informed ★

This requires that the person giving permission has a full appreciation of what the permission entails. For example, a person must be beyond a certain age to legally engage in sexual activity. The rationale for this is that while they are young, they aren't able to fully understand and appreciate the consequences of sexual activity.

★ Freely Given ★

This requires that the person giving permission does so free of coercion, intimidation, force, or threat. For example, an employee is not freely giving permission for their work supervisor to have sex with them if they are only doing so out of fear that they would otherwise lose their job.

★ Actively Given ★

This requires that the person giving permission actively communicates that permission verbally or through action. For example, an unconscious person cannot actively consent, nor can a person who is too drunk or otherwise incapacitated.

★ Revocable ★

This requires that the person giving permission is able to change their mind and revoke or change that permission whenever they so choose. For example, if a person engaged in any number of consensual activities with you last year that does not mean that the consent still exists when you bump into them at a pub with their new beau.