Years before esports programming became a thing in New Orleans, nonprofit Unchained Realities began with a group of friends who wanted to improve youth outcomes by focusing on athletics, education and community building.
Its founder, Gentilly native Brent DeLarge, has since expanded the organization into a gaming hub that offers internships, esports labs and social connections at schools, public recreation centers and other locales across New Orleans. Its subsidiary, NOLAGROWN also introduces kids to graphic design, screen printing and photography.
Through a partnership with the New Orleans Recreation Department, the organization cut the ribbon on its third and fourth esports lab last year.
Unchained Realities now has esports labs at Joe Brown Park in New Orleans East, Milne Playground in Gentilly, Cut-Off Recreation Center in Algiers and the Lyons Center Uptown.
How did you guys bring in the gaming aspect of Unchained Realities?
During the pandemic, communicating through the game was one of the only ways to hang out with my friends. We thought, ‘We need to do something like this for kids.’ But we didn’t know what or how. We later started working with this school that was connected to the YMCA and we got someone to donate 10 gaming PCs. We had students unbox them. We didn’t know much about curriculums but we started teaching lessons about design and media for about six weeks.
And how did you grow from there?
Maybe a year or two later the YMCA reached back out to us, and we ran free play where kids would come out and play video games with us. We started learning more about the gaming space from an educational standpoint.
Can you tell me about how the partnership with New Orleans Recreation Department came to play?
I heard that NORD was trying to get into the esports space. I had a relationship with NORD, so I reached out to (CEO) Larry Barabino, and he brought me to the table.
What other places do you offer programming?
Our newest thing is we’re teaching at the Juvenile Justice Intervention Center on Saturdays for four hours. We have two different sets of kids that do curriculum and play games with us. We do field trips where we go on site or they come to us and we talk to kids about the jobs they could pursue in the gaming world.
Can you give some detail about the curriculums you’re teaching?
Sometimes the gaming environment can be stressful. Kids get frustrated when they lose. We teach them about triggers and social emotional learning skills to better manage their emotions.
We introduced our kids to Unreal Engine, which creates games such as Fortnite.
We teach kids how to set up a stream through Twitch or YouTube. We teach them how to use AI prompts to come up with their own esports teams. They pick team names, create a logo and then the kids print T-shirts with the logo they designed. For our music and sound design program, we take a video game clip and they learn how to do voice-overs and add sounds to it.
What kind of impact could gaming have on New Orleans youth?
When we first started with the YMCA, kids from an alternative school came to us two times a week. For whatever reason, the school and the YMCA parted ways and those kids could no longer come to our lab. But two of the boys ended up pulling (car) door handles one day and one of them was shot during the same exact time frame that they would’ve been with us. I’m not saying it would’ve never happened, but it wouldn’t have happened that day.