We were brought on to help create an event for the client’s global service day. They wanted to foster a love for game design while making it accessible to young kids, ages 8-14. This meant that we couldn’t entrench them with anything too technical, but at the same time, we wanted to be faithful to what the game industry had to offer.

The client wasn’t sure how to engage kids, so they left the thinking to us. I wanted to utilize their strengths in character stories and design, multimedia (music and videos), and the fact that they were industry professionals. Our own strengths also lied in character and narrative work, as well as working with kids.

For children, we needed to make sure that the event was constantly engaging. This meant cutting down on any presentations and including as much interactivity as possible. It was also important to note that there was a wide age range (8-14) and the writing skills would likely vary. Furthermore, a 14-year-old might also not enjoy working next to an 8-year-old, lest they feel like a kid. Conversely, an 8-year-old might be intimidated next to a 14-year-old.

On the other side of the coin, we also needed to think about the artists who would be working with the kids to bring their character ideas to life. This meant learning how fast they could draw and the turnaround time for sketches. However, one thing we learned while talking to the client was that the artists weren’t very experienced in dealing with kids. Since they would be working with the kids during the event it was important to know just how much we would need to facilitate.

The event kickoff needed to give the kids an overview of the client’s work and hype the kids up for creating their own character within the universe. I decided to add one of the client’s videos that were used to herald the start of a new season and get players ready to start anew.

When it came to designing the characters, I needed to introduce the kids to the region they’d been assigned to within the universe. Since most of them didn’t know what the client’s game was, I wanted to immerse them with audio (music from the specific regions) and visuals (character designs, landscape art from the regions). In addition, when the kids went to their regions I played a video that told a story set in that region. All of this culminated into an immersive audio/visual experience that would serve as an introduction to the world and region.

I also created character worksheets that asked simple questions and broke down the character into multiple parts. For example, the worksheet might ask “what special attacks does your character have?” or “what does your character wear?”. The questions were simple, but when combined as a whole could paint a relatively fleshed-out character far better than asking a kid to come up with something random. The artists would be listening in either in person or through call and would draw the characters as the kids were drawing and describing them. As the day progressed the kids would start to see the rough sketches of their character materialize.

During the wrap-up, the client had a few professionals talk about the industry. We had one producer and one quality assurance tester. Unfortunately, as the kids were quite young, they were also rather uninterested. However, that changed quickly when we did our final reveal with everyone’s characters designed and sketched out!

In conclusion, the event was a huge success. The kids loved the experience and were able to take home some memorable goodies. Furthermore, the client was excited to talk about how we could collaborate in the future. That being said, there were a few things I could have done better. While the event went well, it didn’t go very smoothly and I think it would have been useful to do a dry run. In addition, I should have thought more critically about what kind of talks would interest the children.

Here is my LinkedIn post and the LinkedIn (we’re the first one).