Wicked Saints is making Pokémon GO for young activists
techcrunch.comJess Murrey isn’t your typical founder. After ten years working in nonprofits to train young activists, Murrey and behavioral change researcher Alicia Clifton decided that mobile gaming could be an unexpected way to broaden their reach. And so, Wicked Saints was born.
“American teens care very deeply about the planet, equality and mental health, but the problems often feel so big it’s paralyzing,” Murrey told TechCrunch. “We wanted to activate them to take whatever the world throws at them, and the best way to do that was with games.”
When leading training sessions for young activists, Murrey lamented the fact that she could only connect with these future leaders in one moment, rather than over a longer time.
“When they leave the training, you don’t have this constant connection with them,” she said. “You can’t continue to train them for a long period of time. And so the technology provides us a way to scale this incredible, transformational change that we were seeing, and also bring people into a community that we could keep and continue building.”
Wicked Saints’ first game, World Reborn, is an interactive story game with graphic novel style graphics, which also incorporates augmented reality. Currently in beta with a small group of users in Canada, the post-apocalyptic story is designed to teach gen Z how to stand up for what’s right in an entertaining way.
“You spend energy on your choices that you make within the graphic novel world, and when you run out of energy, the only way to power up is to power your real self,” Murrey explained.
The game will ask players to do things like leave a friend a note of encouragement, or pick up trash at a local park. For some of these actions, players can verify that they’ve completed
Read more on techcrunch.com
