Most students’ video game experiences take place in their dorm rooms or apartments with close friends. Juniors Ben Brooks and Joe Chee have something different in mind with their business Ukatsu: a youth development program for gamers.
Ukatsu, which uses the Japanese word “katsu” to create the play on words “you win,” describes its mission as “to encourage the positive problem solving and social interaction that comes from being a part of the gaming community.”
It was created as a successor to a previous video game-centered program in the summer that Brooks and Chee both worked at as camp counselors. After the original program ended, the two decided to start their own year-round program.
“We couldn’t bear the thought of leaving those kids without any kind of infrastructure,” Brooks said.
The business has a variety of programming, the most prominent being its summer camps, where participants compete and cooperate in various video game titles to build important skills. This coming summer, Ukatsu plans to put on six weeks of camps, up from the four weeks last summer in the business’s first year of operation, with each camp taking 30 participants, Brooks said.
This year, the camps will run out of the company’s new location on Grindstone rather than out of the Columbia Career Center, where they were held last year. Brooks said the camps, along with the rest of the business’s programming, serve children and teenagers ages 8 to 18.
“Obviously, we have to interact with them differently and with different kinds of curriculum … we segment our summer camps based on those ages,” Brooks said.
Besides the summer camps, Ukatsu has also hosted various gaming communities around Columbia, such as the Mizzou Smash and League of Legends clubs. Brooks said the organization’s main project at the moment, however, is an upcoming eSports event for the game League of Legends, partnering with Columbia and Jefferson City public schools.
Much of Ukatsu’s programming focuses around competitive titles such as League of Legends and Overwatch, and for good reason. Besides their immense popularity and easy access, they help build developmental skills, Brooks and Chee said.
“These competitive titles allow a lot of kids to be in a social environment where they can interact with each other in a team perspective,” Brooks said.
However, during summer camps, games such as Mario Kart are available for younger and less competitive gamers.
As the company continues to grow, expanding its programming and even gaining its own location to host camps in Columbia, Chee and Brooks, roommates and business partners, remain at the center of it all, providing much of its direction.
“My role and Ben’s role are similar,” Chee said. “We do it all, really. A specialty I bring, however, is the media production. As a former photographer and videographer, I produce most of the media content that comes from the company.”
Ukatsu has also earned support from local Columbia business resources and already-established gaming communities.
“All the support we’ve had is community support, some of our parents and kids have been the most supportive in telling other parents to get our name out there,” Brooks said. “We’ve also had help from the [Missouri Innovation Center] and the [Small Business and Technology Development Center] downtown. There’s a lot of resources in Columbia that are designed to help emerging small businesses, and those have been huge.”
Chee and Brooks said they have no doubt there’s success in store for the company in the future and believe they will have a hand in defining the role of video games in youth and family development.
“We will one day be the community for young gamers and their parents to thrive in,” Chee said. “Whether it’s a tournament, personal training, ‘life-coaching,’ it’s going to make an impact through positive influence.”
According to Brooks, that positive influence will remain focused on one word that kept appearing: balance.
“That’s what it’s all about, is teaching balance through video games,” Brooks said. “They’re not going to go away, so we help connect parents to kids by turning games into a positive tool for growth.”
_Edited by Morgan Smith | mosmith@themaneater.com_