Likely Story

Likely Story is an award-winning educational game I founded and built to help teens navigate sexual health, consent, and the warning signs of trafficking. I led it end to end, from research and design through launch and evaluation, and grew it from nothing to 30,000+ learners and 500 educators on $800k in grant funding. It earned Silver Anthem and Webby recognition, and our evaluations showed measurable change in how teens understood healthy relationships.

Teens need to understand consent, healthy relationships, and how trafficking actually happens, but it is one of the hardest subjects to teach. The content is sensitive and easy to get wrong, the audience tunes out anything that feels like a lecture, and educators rarely have tools they can trust to handle the topic safely. The challenge was to build something teens would genuinely choose to engage with, that educators could deploy with confidence, that was accessible and trauma-informed by design, and that could prove it changed behavior, not just delivered information.

I ran mixed-methods research throughout, working carefully with a sensitive population and a trauma-informed approach from the start. Three insights shaped everything.

1. 01

   Agency beats instruction

   Teens disengaged from direct instruction but leaned in when they had agency and could make choices safely. The format had to put the player in the driver's seat, not the audience.

2. 02

   Safety is the precondition for honesty

   Feeling safe and unjudged was a precondition for honesty. The design had to earn trust before it could teach — no quizzes, no scoring, no surveillance.

3. 03

   Educators need turnkey, curriculum-aligned materials

   Without curriculum-aligned, easy-to-run materials, adoption stalled at the teacher. The educator surface had to be designed with the same care as the game itself.

Every major decision traced back to the research and to the reality of building on grant funding with real stakeholders. A few of the calls that shaped the product:

• A game, not a course

  Play was the only format that earned genuine engagement on a subject teens usually avoid. Anything that read as curriculum lost them in the first minute.

• Single-player and multiplayer

  Different settings needed different modes: classrooms versus individual learners, group discussion versus private reflection. We shipped both, with the same characters and choices.

• Trauma-informed by design

  Players control pacing and can opt out of intense moments at any time, so the experience never re-traumatizes. Content warnings sit at the scene level, not buried in settings.

• Accessible to everyone

  I built WCAG accessibility standards into the product from the start so learners across abilities and schools could use it — not as a settings menu, but as a content constraint.

• Instrumented to prove impact

  I built analytics and KPI tracking and designed pre- and post-game evaluation, so we could measure behavior change rather than guess at it. The tradeoff I navigated most often was how playful and fun the experience could be against the seriousness of the subject — resolved by leading with character and choice, and letting the weight land through consequence, not tone.

Likely Story is a game teens actually want to play that quietly teaches them to recognize healthy and unhealthy relationships, understand consent, and spot the patterns of trafficking. A player steps into a branching story, makes choices that shape who they become, and lives with the consequences. Sessions run about 20 minutes and are replayable — most players come back to see what a different choice opens up. It ships in single-player and multiplayer formats with educator materials that make it easy to run in a classroom.

Flow 01

Single-player story mode

The core experience: a branching narrative where every choice changes who you become. Designed for a 20-minute session, replayable to see what a different choice opens up.

Flow 02

Multiplayer classroom mode

Up to 30 students play the same scene in parallel; the class compares choices in an anonymized live view. The teacher facilitates from a prompt deck the game generates on the fly.

Flow 03

Educator view

Lesson plans, content warnings per scene, opt-out controls by topic, and debrief prompts written by sex educators. The thing that made the game adoptable in red and blue districts alike.

Two years in, the numbers earned the visuals — and the evaluation data backed them up.

Adopted across 3 nonprofits and hundreds of schools, in Canada and internationally. Evaluations showed measurable behavior change: a 9% increase in intervention behaviors, 92% of players felt comfortable enough to respond honestly during gameplay, 42% of teens learned something new about unhealthy relationships, and 67% reported they highly enjoyed playing. Most cited reason in renewals: teens asked to play it again on their own time.

I led Likely Story as founder, designer, researcher, and the person who hired and ran a team of more than 20. It taught me how to hold a bold vision and the unglamorous work of shipping and sustaining a real product at the same time, and how to design with care for people in vulnerable moments. What I carry forward: the educator surface is never an afterthought — if I started again, I'd ship it in week one, not year two.