Bloom Digital Media’s Miriam Verburg hit her stride making video games with a purpose

Since graduating from art school, I’ve always had jobs in technology. But when I moved to Toronto after my master’s in communications, I was lucky enough to get a job working for what’s now called Sago Mini as a project manager. They make games for kids. I loved it. I was like, I don’t want to make any more utilitarian technology; I just want to make video games.

When Sago had to let me go due to hard times in the industry, I used that as an opportunity to start my own thing. I can say I bootstrapped Bloom, but Centennial College was there, NSERC was there, EI was there, and ultimately, Ontario Creates paid for 50% of the first game we made. If there were none of those programs, Bloom wouldn’t exist.

Long Story, our first game, is about dating. But the secret goal was always to help kids who are 14 and just getting interested in that stuff, by giving them more information about how to make choices that support their growth and happiness.

Later Daters had a similar impetus, but for people who are aging and going into the second act of their lives. We designed it with millennials in mind because we noticed young people were really feeling like, “I’m 26 and I haven’t done anything yet. My life is over.” So we were like, “Experiment with being a senior citizen. Date. Get your kicks. Enjoy life without the stress of wondering what you’re going to do and how are you going to become a functional adult.” And it seemed to work.

Working on Disney Villains Cursed Café was a direct result of Later Daters. Someone on [Twitter] tagged us and a person at Disney saying that our game would be a great match for a visual novel based on Disney intellectual properties. We started having DM conversations, and then we had a few meetings. The whole thing grew from there. This relationship was 100% made by the internet.

One of the things we do that’s great is we try to uncover stories that aren’t being told and tell them. So a game about Disney’s villains—thinking about what their experiences are, what they want to achieve and what struggles they’re facing—is just weird, right? That’s kind of perfect for us.

For Bloom, Disney was a big part of the game plan. It’s very hard to launch your own IP now. So working with companies that have characters that are beloved and going, “We can bring those characters into a new context or create new worlds for those characters” is a good way to still do what we love, but not have to bear a lot of the cost of developing that audience interest.

I try to think about how we’re serving people with our games. Video games are where young people are learning how to be people. These online spaces aren’t just escapes. Single-player games aren’t really what young people are doing. These are spaces of socialization. They’re places where kids are learning how to be humans. We’ve got to make games that teach kids to be the humans we hope we’re creating in our society. These are the things that keep me going.

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