Some may remember a catch phrase from the old TV police drama Naked City. Each episode concluded with the narrator saying: "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them."
Local company One More Story Games (OMSG), owned by Jean and Blair Leggett, is trying to make it easier for the community, particularly youth, to tell their stories — in a modern way — one scene at a time.
OMSG is a storytelling organization where programmers and self-proclaimed "gamers" and “geeks” get to use an original, customized storytelling platform StoryStylus to tell both traditional stories and/or their own creations. StoryStylus was developed by Blair Leggett. He designed it specifically to make it easy to create narrative driven games.
Jean Leggett believes that this style of storytelling is the future of how people, youth in particular, will tell their stories. “It’s kind of like Minecraft for storytellers,” said Jean. “The idea is to take traditional stories and almost add a gaming element to them. When you think of all the tales we learned as kids, like Romeo and Juliet and other Shakespeare [plays], imagine keeping them they way they were meant to be told but in an interactive story experience. It would really help today’s fast-paced society better tell and read the classics in a fun way.”
Positive things have been really happening for OMSG. The business will soon be involved in the Girls Make Games camp in the United States where 21,000 young girls will be taught how to create and utilize software in electronic storytelling, Jean recently spoke at Comic Con, and the local-company-gone-big will be in Dubai in September at Games Middle East, one of the world’s largest technology information conventions.
“The little company from Barrie flying half way across the world to show off our StoryStylus software and some finished products we have,” said Leggett. “With the Girls Make Games camp that is happening, I’m really excited to be a part of that too."
Recent numbers indicate that 47% of gamers are female, but only 12% are employed in the gaming industry. "The percentages of girls that game compared to the opportunities that are available to them are way off and we’d like to help change that,” said Jean.
In addition to their international activity, OMSG is also active in Barrie as well. The StoryStylus platform was used this past summer in a two week camp that OMSG put on for kids aged 12 to 15. Only in its second year, the camp was designed to help kids not only understand how to use the StoryStylus program, but encourage them to use their imagination and learn the skills to tell their the stories in an interactive way.
“We had kids in here who had never used computers in this way before and it was really cool to see them become so involved and have a real desire to tell their stories,” said Jean. The camp included ice-breaker games for everyone to ease into the new environment. The group were also able to try out games that were created by previous camp participants.
Avery Lowe is one of the kids from the camp. Lowe first learned about the OMSG when Jean brought some information into her school. A first time participant in the camp, the grade 8 student was nervous initially, but became more comfortable as the camp progressed.
“Jean came to our school and she was so friendly and positive,” said Lowe. “The first day of camp, I felt like it was going to be too advanced for me and that it would be hard to understand, but it really isn’t. It was very easy to learn.”
Like most kids her age, Lowe isn’t sure what she wanted to be when she finishes school, but said that the camp really opened her eyes up to the possibilities for her future. “We got to come up with our own ideas, but the staff would help if we needed it,” said Lowe. “I really liked that you can make a career out of this and especially that girls my age are doing it more and more.”
Jean emphasized that the camp is not solely based on computers and that the participants were also taught the main elements of how to tell a story. She added that stories can often be very serious in nature and not fit the the stereotypes of 'a game.'
“Sure, it’s about having fun and there is obviously a game element to it,” said Jean. “For example, the First Nations community has so many personal and meaningful stories that could be told using this system and those tales are not games to them. Someone may have a personal or tragic subject that they feel better about when telling it through the StoryStylus program and so we try to not label all of what we do as games.”
Find out more about One More Story Games and their future activities on their website.
