Optimaaro Games

New Zealand and Australian speaking tour

Jean Leggett — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 03:54:43 +0000

OMSG CEO Jean Leggett will be travelling to Wellington, NZ Sept 1-7 and Melbourne, AU Sept 7-18 to speak about OMSG’s journey and its work on the upcoming Charlaine Harris project.

NZGDC & Wellington Game Dev Meetup

Stories that Haunt and Heal

Serious topics such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Sexual Trauma, Disordered Eating and Mental Illness are being increasingly explored through game narrative.

This talk aims to educate the audience on the important process of creating serious games, and how to handle games that engage with the sensitive and deeply personal.

Jean Leggett and Gabriella Lowgren will speak about games they have worked on and their experiences telling difficult stories. Jean covers the design of Charlaine Harris’ “The Body in Shakespeare Park,” a novel-to-game adaptation and how the development team designed narrative choices, events and characters to mindfully explore trauma, PTSD and character progression within the construct of a 2D mystery adventure game. Ella discusses Shrinking Pains, a free semi-autobiographical visual novel, and how the game was designed to foster further empathy and understanding for sufferers of anxiety and eating disorders.

One Game at a Time: An indie studio’s 5-year journey

Married founders Blair and Jean Leggett set out to build a new game engine specifically to help authors adapt their stories into narrative games. Over five years, they developed the platform and content, as well as taught youth to make games at camps they hosted. This talk looks at OMSG’s strategies for maximizing resources (recruiting interns, raising over $500K, accessing government grants, and developing valuable partnerships) and overcoming challenges (how to deal with difficult situations with your co-founders, staff, contractors, investors).

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Founders Jean & Blair Leggett accept teaching positions at Sheridan College

Jean Leggett — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 03:54:59 +0000

Founders Jean and Blair Leggett have accepted part-time teaching positions at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario with the Faculties of Animation, Arts and Design. Jean will be teaching Story, Quests and Missions and Blair will be teaching introduction to game programming for both undergraduates and post-graduate students. They have also relocated OMSG’s headquarters to Oakville from Barrie.

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CBC All in a Day interviews Jean Leggett

Jean Leggett — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 03:39:06 +0000

Jean speaks with CBC Ottawa about the challenges designing a game exploring sexual assault and PTSD that normalize the conversation around recovery, trauma, and therapy.

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-92-all-in-a-day/clip/15719269-video-game-company-explores-ptsd-sexual-assault-with-new-game?fbclid=IwAR3R2PoEAjdkq-GUvph3lcyZArWX1VvrdANlsRQYTF5qhjUA7tYJolIe2LA

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GDC Talk: Stories that Haunt and Heal

Jean Leggett — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 03:42:32 +0000

Stories that Haunt and Heal: Mental Health and Game Narrative

Jean Leggett (CEO, Optimaaro Games)

Jessica Fong (Co-founder and Creative Director, Lonely Egg Studio)

Gabriella Lowgren (Communications Manager, Infinity+2)

Location: Room 3016, West Hall

Date: Monday, March 18

Video from the talk – behind the paywall – https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025874/Stories-that-Haunt-and-Heal

Serious topics such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Sexual Trauma, Disordered Eating and Mental Illness are being increasingly explored through game narrative.

In this session, Jean Leggett covers Charlaine Harris’ ‘Lily Bard Mysteries: The Body in the Park’, and how the 2D mystery game was designed to mindfully explore PTSD from sexual trauma. Ella Lowgren discusses ‘Shrinking Pains’, a semi-autobiographical visual novel, and how it fosters empathy and understanding for sufferers of anxiety and eating disorders. Jessica Fong shares the development of her upcoming game ‘In the Keeper’s Shadow’, a surreal 2D hand-painted adventure that reimagines her ongoing struggle to overcome the trauma of child abuse.

Takeaway

Attendees will have have a deeper understanding of how games can explore sensitive subject material in the mental health space, the benefits that the medium of games offers this material, as well as concrete suggestions on approaches to creating sensitive content in a respectful way.

Intended Audience

This talk is for attendees who are interested in the rising area of serious games; educating creatives on narrative design and responsible depictions of mental health, sexual trauma, and domestic abuse.

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2018 OMSG World Tour

Jean Leggett — Tue, 01 Jan 2019 03:48:52 +0000

Optimaaro Games’ founders Jean and Blair Leggett traveled extensively in 2018 to give talks about their upcoming game adaptation of Charlaine Harris’ Shakespeare’s Landlord from her Lily Bard series, about a rape survivor who deals with PTSD and is also an amateur sleuth. Their game, newly titled “Lily Bard Mysteries: The Body in Shakespeare Park” is due for release in 2020.

Jean Leggett spoke at several conferences in 2018:

Game Developers’ Conference, March, San Francisco: PTSD & Sexual Violence in Game Narrative
IGDA Game Leadership Summit, September, Austin: One (Story) Game at a Time: Tales from the First 5 Years of an Indie Game Studio
Grace Hopper Conference, September, Houston: PTSD & Sexual Violence in Game Narrative
Talk & Play, October, Munich: PTSD & Sexual Violence in Game Narrative – The Making of the Lily Bard Mysteries
Poznan GIC, Poznan, October: One Game at a Time: The First 5 Years of an Indie Studio
GCAP, Melbourne, October: Sensitive Subjects in Serious Games &

Team OMSG traveled to and spoke in many cities including San Francisco, Dallas, Vancouver, Honolulu, Austin, Houston, Munich, Poznan, Berlin, Singapore, Melbourne, Tasmania, Vancouver (again!), Seattle, Toronto!

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Game Developers Must Treat Sensitive Issues Ethically And Responsibly

Jean Leggett — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 21:34:12 +0000

Game Developers Must Treat Sensitive Issues Ethically And Responsibly

Richard Moss

November 12, 2018 12:41 PM

Games don’t have to be escapist fantasies. They can tackle important issues like mental illness or sexual assault with respect and help elicit empathy, say Jean Leggett and Gabriella Lowgren.

The cultural tides are rising, Optimaaro Games CEO and founder Jean Leggett and indie developer/Infinity Plus Two communications manager Gabriella Lowgren said in a talk attended by GameDaily at Game Connect Asia Pacific (GCAP) about dealing with mature and traumatic content in games.

We now have biographical games, like Depression Quest and That Dragon, Cancer, that tell personal stories, and efforts like Spec Ops: The Line — which explores the horrors of war — along with the burgeoning field of serious games, all of which challenge the traditional view of games as entertainment. And with the tools of game development becoming ever-more accessible, we’re seeing more diverse teams make greater numbers of games that in turn reflect more diverse and at times more serious themes such as sexual assault, gender dysphoria, post-traumatic stress disorder, or any number of other sensitive subjects.

“An experience doesn’t have to necessarily be a really beautiful, lovely experience to get something across,” said Lowgren. “There is value in creating art and creating experiences that can be harrowing and can be raw and can be real.”

Both women emphasized that game developers have a responsibility and an ethical obligation to do right by their audience in terms of how they treat sensitive subjects, but they added that many people in the games industry don’t currently take these obligations seriously.

“You make these games and you tell your story, and then what we forget is that they resonate with people,” said Leggett.

That means it’s important to be upfront with trigger warnings so that players can know what they’re getting themselves into, because some of the content could be potentially traumatic to experience, especially for people with a personal connection to the themes, and it means that the key feeling to evoke is not shock or anger or confusion. It’s empathy.

Lowgren, in particular, wants players to empathize with her game characters. To help do this, she said, it helps to have gender-neutral characters so that players can more easily project themselves into the experience. In her game Shrinking Pains, for instance, the player controls a nameless character of unspecified gender and appearance — referred to only as “you” — who has anorexia.

“Using second person makes it so immediate, and it does make it a little bit uncomfortable,” Lowgren explains. “It’s a way to get you to really connect with the lived experience. Also what I think is really important in Shrinking Pains is the illusion of agency. I believe that immersion plus agency equals increased chance of fostering empathy.”

Only having an illusion of agency is critical here because when it comes to mental illness, there often is no choice. In Shrinking Pains, the game presents some choices as blurred and grayed-out — because sometimes, even if there is food available, eating is not an option for a person with an eating disorder (as they are repulsed by even the thought of food).

“Of course [playing a game for] half an hour is very different to living with an illness, but it gives you even that little bit of insight and that little bit of empathy, which can make a huge difference in our world,” Lowgren said. “The more that we talk about these issues, and have empathy for these issues, the more we de-stigmatise these issues, and we can further the conversation away from just being diagnosed to being treated to being accepted and loved and supported — by society and by your interpersonal relationships as well.”

See full article at GameDaily.biz

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Nominated for Barrie’s Innovation Awards

Jean Leggett — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 21:11:26 +0000

Optimaaro Games nominated for two inaugural Mayor’s Innovation Awards

Congratulations to OMSG founders Jean & Blair Leggett on their recent nominations for not one but TWO awards in the upcoming inaugural Mayor’s Innovation Awards. CEO Jean Leggett was nominated for the “Shift Disturber” award, honouring a person with major vision, who is changing the game in business or community. Founders Jean and Blair Leggett were jointly nominated for the “Innovative Business” category for forward-thinking businesses using a new technology or approach to increase their overall footprint in the world.

Congrats to the team and to founders Jean and Blair for the nomination. Finalists will be notified in late August 2018. Good luck!

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The Hashcast Podcast

Jean Leggett — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 15:57:59 +0000

The Hashcast Podcast interviews Jean!

Wout and Jean sit down for an hour-long chat about the indie game scene, Optimaaro Games’ work with children the first summer they held camps in Barrie, what it’s like to run a studio with your spouse and some of the highs and lows of creating meaningful content like their upcoming game “Shakespeare’s Landlord,” an adaptation of Charlaine Harris’ novel.

For the full interview, check out https://www.patreon.com/posts/20264514.

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Nerds Assemble Podcast

Jean Leggett — Fri, 20 Jul 2018 15:49:44 +0000

Nerds Assemble Podcast

Jean joins the gang at Nerds Assemble to talk gaming nostalgia, what it’s like to work with kid creators, the challenges of creating a game engine at the same time you’re building content and why Trumpy Cat needed to fall into a deep dark void (thanks Keiraaaaaaaa!).

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This week: the Nerds crew get to grill our special guest Jean Leggett about the creation and development of her and her husband’s games development company, Optimaaro Games (you can play some of their games by clicking through to their website).

So join Paul, Emily, Paul and Jean as they discuss a very unique take on developing games.

You can see Jean’s TEDx Talk about the history of Optimaaro Games below.

So, are you sitting comfortably?

Click here to listen in your browser (right-click and ‘Save As’ to download).

Find the podcast on Stitcher here.

Find the podcast on iTunes here

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Voices of Women in Tech: Profile

Jean Leggett — Sun, 08 Jul 2018 21:41:18 +0000

Voices of Women in Tech

An interview with Jean Leggett who created a company and platform to help underprivileged voices share their stories.

Jean Leggett is leading a revolution in both traditional book publishing and video games. She and her husband have worked tirelessly for over four years to build Optimaaro Games (OMSG), a platform designed to help children and adults create, market and monetize narrative video games that are a hybrid of book-meets-game. She started off as a stand-up comedian with an English degree, and experience with databases and web design. “I pursued stand-up comedy, speaking, and coaching in my off hours and never dreamed I’d be doing what I do today.”

[Violetta Holl] Can you tell us about what your average day looks like?

[Jean Leggett] On a day-to-day basis, I wear a number of hats because I’m one half of the founding team for our games company, Optimaaro Games (OMSG). I’m the hustler to my husband’s hacker. I’m doing a lot of the operations-related tasks like sales, marketing, accounting, investor relations, herding cats, and some days I’m also doing game writing, quality assurance and user experience testing. Our mission at OMSG is to help authors envision and transform their short stories and novels into interactive, narrative video games. My English degree comes in handy in this space and I really enjoy the opportunities I have to sit down with a content creator and help them plan out how their world is going to come to life in a new way.

We’re in production at the moment, working on a book meets game adaptation of a Charlaine Harris novel. It’s the first book in the Lily Bard series and follows the amateur sleuth Lily as she works to solve the mystery of who killed her landlord in the sleepy town of Shakespeare, Arkansas. What makes this an interesting project for me is that Lily is a sexual trauma survivor and deals with post-traumatic stress disorder – our job is to convey the mystery of the murder, but also to slowly reveal the mystery of her dark secret. Right now you’d find me prepping narrative for our voice over artists, editing text and bug testing.

[VH] What attracted you to work in tech? Was it a life-long dream, or was there some other factor that pushed you to it?

[JL] It wasn’t a life-long dream. I’m definitely more of a soft-skills person whose assets are relationship building, championing people and developing communication strategies. In my case, I joined forces with my husband Blair to start our studio. Prior to founding OMSG, Blair had worked at two of the largest game studios in the world and after a near death experience, we decided to return to his hometown and do something that was meaningful and would have an impact. That’s when I went into coaching, speaking and comedy full time. I even taught laughter yoga sessions. It was really clear that my talents for connecting with people would be a gift on the operations side of the business and together we’ve raised over $500,000 CAD over 4 years to develop our platform for authors.

It can be a challenge for me, mentally, to attend a women in tech event sometimes because I’m not the programmer or engineer like so many in the room. Where I step out of that thinking is to recognize that the contributions I make to our software are valuable – I’m helping shape the UX/UI, developing new features, and doing the customer discovery, which is important work. Yes, I do code but I am not implementing code on our platform.

What keeps me in my role and in this industry is the work we do with our youth creators – we’ve run summer camps with kids and taught them how to write, draw and code their own story-based games. I love hearing that they want to go on to be in the games industry or become programmers because they got their first exposure to code and had so much fun. Teaching kids how to code is incredibly rewarding.

[VH] There’s a lot of buzz around “building your community” as key to being successful in tech. What does your “community” look like? Who are the people you look for feedback from? Or, who are the people at work or elsewhere that you can rely on?

To read the full interview, click here: https://drivingwomenintech.com/2018/07/18/voices-of-women-in-tech-interview-with-jean-leggett/

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