Meet Juliana Moreno

 

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Juliana Moreno. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Juliana below.

Hi Juliana, thank you for being such a positive, uplifting person. We’ve noticed that so many of the successful folks we’ve had the good fortune of connecting with have high levels of optimism and so we’d love to hear about your optimism and where you think it comes from.

At the Wild Optimists, we are on a mission to make the world a more joyful, connected place. We see that joy and connection happen when people open up and play. Everyone has the capacity to do this, people just need a gentle reminder and an invitation that it’s ok to let down their guard and be open. Watching people play our games creates our optimism. Seeing them persevere through challenges, cheer each other on, and come up with creative solutions is the sort of thing that will restore your faith in humanity.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

Juliana Moreno is the co-owner of the Wild Optimists, an award winning interactive design firm devoted to creating new ways to play. Along with her business partner Ariel Rubin, they dream up playful experiences with a focus on games and puzzles for live events, site specific installations, brand marketing, and at home gaming. The goal is always to enhance the guest experience by giving players the chance to be the hero.
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WO began when Juliana Moreno and Ariel Rubin combined their theatre degrees and Hollywood writing backgrounds with their life-long love for gaming to create the first ever at home escape room game: Escape Room In A Box: The Werewolf Experiment. After licensing that project to Mattel, they have since created eight other published tabletop games, selling nearly half a million units.
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Building upon that success, Wild Optimists has brought the gaming experience beyond the table and out into the real world. Collaborations include interactive design for theme parks such as Universal Orlando and Mall of America, marketing campaigns supporting high-profile Film/TV properties for studios such as Sony and Amazon, and live immersive experiences for companies such as Hasbro, AEG, and the Santa Monica Pier.

Wild Optimists is on a mission to make the world a more joyful, connected, and playful place.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Tenacity, Optimism, and Curiosity.

Tenacity – the world is full of information and opportunities, but you have to be willing to work hard and do everything that you can in pursuit of those opportunities. When we first came up with the idea for Escape Room In A Box, we knew it was a great concept whose time had come… but we had never made a game before. We threw ourselves into researching best practices for making a game and placing it on Kickstarter. It was this hard work and dedicated commitment that enabled our success.

Optimism – You have to believe that things are going to go well, and that even when they don’t, there is a valuable lesson to be learned. It is this attitude that inspires us to keep trying and keep hoping.

Curiosity – You have to be curious about people to succeed in the world of game design. What do they like, what makes them laugh, what makes them frustrated. Our play testers are our biggest inspiration. We are endlessly curious about what drives them, and that is what enables us to make appealing games.

How can folks who want to work with you connect?

From music festivals to historical sites, we love to put games in unexpected places. We love finding ways to make existing spaces more playful and engaging. We would love to partner with museums. hotels, city governments, you name it! We are looking to collaborate to find a way to make everyday experiences more magical and engaging for the user, so that they can become brand ambassadors for our clients.

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