Playlogue’s Simon Vincent on lessons for journalists from the world of games

In this episode, we're talking with Simon Vincent, a journalist-turned-game-developer. Simon is a content strategist at Playlogue, a game development services team based in Singapore. He talks about the lessons he's learned about the transformation of media from what began as a board game.

The following transcript from our conversation with Simon is edited for brevity and clarity.

Hosted and produced by Alan Soon and Rishad Patel, co-founders of Splice.

Tell us why and how Playlogue happened. 

Playlogue started out when we began working on Fly-A-Way, a board game on bird migration and conservation. That game is basically a kind of experience on the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. We wanted to focus on migratory birds in Asia. There are all of these very important threats that birds are facing and a lot of ecological messages that we wanted to bring across. 

We had worked with BirdLife international, our knowledge partner. We did a brochure for them about what threats migratory birds are facing. We enjoyed this partnership and wanted to do something new and fun and something that perhaps can have a broader appeal for people. So we started thinking of this board game idea and then it took off.

We are now Playlogue Creations, but we were from Tuber, which was a design and editorial consultancy. Through this board game, we transformed in a lot of different ways. A lot of that had to do with getting on Kickstarter. When we put the board game out there, we saw that people are interested in this game. Game design is something that we really liked and enjoyed, and there was so much potential to explore this medium, to tell stories in a different way.

From there we started thinking deeply about what we would do as a game company. And that's where Playlogue came about. We wanted to bring play and dialogue together.

How do you explain Playlogue to your friends and family? On the one hand, it sounds like you are a game developer. On the other hand, you are a media design firm.

When we were exploring game design, we found that a lot of game designers had all the expertise in designing games — the game mechanics, how do we get this game design working, how does the game work? But they didn't always have the illustration capabilities, the graphic design and the branding. 

In Tuber, we have this experience over many years of working with clients on publications. We were good at putting out content. We saw this opportunity where we can fill this gap for game designers.

We started this from tabletop game development, but we saw that there was a lot of overlap with what you need to do to put out media content. So we're kind of open that way. 

We're willing to use tabletop game mechanics, but we want to help people — you have a campaign and you want to gamify it. Gamification is so big right now. And even books and comics, they all kind of have game elements to them. So we thought that's something we can help with, and that's where the media part comes in.

When you look at what other people are doing in this space for gamification, what have you seen that really stood out as a fundamental shift in the way we think about content and games?

There's this company called Game to Grow. They use Dungeons and Dragons to do lessons for children and they use it as a form of therapy.

So you have a kid right now, and he's having trouble opening up. So you create a character and you create some challenges. You get the kid to inhabit the role, and maybe along the way you have to defeat something or you have to speak out, and you get the kid to do that.

For me, this was amazing, right? You're bringing something that's so old — Dungeons and Dragons — and you’re putting it in a Zoom context and you can do it over Zoom. That was very exciting for me, and I liked that it uses games to bring people together for maybe a bigger cause.

I'm fine with just having fun. That's great. But you know, with games, there is this social component to it. You can kind of get people to think deeper or do something that they don't even realize is something bigger. That was something that was quite interesting to me.

And I also found that, especially now with the Covid situation, everybody's going through all of this digital transformation. In the board game scene, there's a lot of wondering about how we are going to adapt to this. 

So a lot of people have been using this platform called Tabletopia. It’s basically an open platform where you upload your artwork, and you can let people play the game if you want. We use that for our play-testing sessions. Nobody expected Covid and this happened just when we were about to go to Kickstarter. And play-testing is so important.

So I uploaded it on Tabletopia and we got play-testers to do it. It's not always easy because it's an open platform, and the functions you are using are not always fixed or not always catered to your game mechanics. But it was good just to get things rolling.

So if you don't have a good story your game is not going to work, right? Have you guys worked with journalists or news media organizations yet? Is that part of your plans? 

Not yet, but we’ll definitely be open to that. First, because I come from a journalism background, I approached the collaboration with BirdLife with that sensibility. 

So, you're working with a story, you go to your source, your partner, and you interview them and you get as much out of them as possible. Even just the feeling of what it’s like to [go birding], what makes people so enthusiastic about it, and why they go out there for hours together and do those birding competitions.

The person that we work with closely is Dr. Yong Ding Li, a very well established bird scientist working on bird conservation. He was working very closely with our creative director who's a bird photographer, so she was already kind of involved in the community.

For our game design process, we would discuss it with BirdLife International. What is the game going to be about? We wanted to focus on the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, which is this huge part of the world which extends from Russia in the north all the way to New Zealand in the south.

Birds in Asia are not usually featured in many games or even in the media. We were thinking about this map, [we said] okay, it seems like we should use this map as the game board. And birds have different destinations, so why not this game be a route building game?

In this game, you are placing links and completing migratory routes to save birds. But when you are playing this, you are learning that the Fairy Pitta goes from this destination to this destination, and along the way we have these threats, or Fowl Play, and that's where the conservation element comes in. Oh, birds actually hit buildings? 

There are all of these different ecological threats. So we got all of that through a lot of conversations with Ding Li and everything was vetted with him to make sure we balance the fun with the science.

It strikes me that birding is like the original open world game, right? You're collecting data, you're comparing it, and you're all bound by this big mission.

Yeah, exactly. If you think about gamification, it's in so many things that you don't even realize. Even if you are going to a bubble tea shop and you are getting your stamps, you are waiting for the fifth or 10th bubble tea. That's a game in itself.

I'd like to understand more about the company and how you work with clients. What does a standard pitch sound like when you go out and you're pitching for someone's campaign? 

The first most important thing to figure out is what medium they want it to be on because that will determine a lot of things. 

There is a TikTok game now, it's like a swipe, like a Fruit Ninja thing. I think it was developed by a government agency. So you're swiping and it fits TikTok because you want something that's maybe a little quirky and easy to play. 

But if it's a larger campaign and maybe there are specific messages you want to bring across, it could be an online game.

So I think it really depends on what you want. Is it a long campaign or just a game? There are even games that are just done by emails, which can be quite effective.

That sounds really cool — email games. How does that work?

There was this game I played. It was launched on Kickstarter. It was called Wait For Me. It's a journaling RPG game. Every day you get a prompt, and you respond to it. 

It's a writing game, but it's pretty introspective. You get as much as you give to this game and it's a time travel game where you're writing.

You have to have a journal, something to write in, and this is what you are sending to your past self. The cool gamifying part here is that they actually ask you to take physical things to place there, to send as proof to your past self. So you will actually reach into your wallet for instance, to take out the receipt with the date on it.

And you're like, “Hey, past self”. You write a note there, and this is just an email game. You can now go and download the whole PDF and do it yourself. 

It's something very simple but effective. And I think it got a lot of people connected to the game because of the pandemic. Everybody was searching for community because you're feeling alone.

What if I had an article on, say, how many tax dollars it took for a billionaire to go to space. How could you help me with gamifying that into a little rocket ship game? What would the onboarding process be if I wanted to launch this?

I can’t give it a specific game design path right now, but I would imagine a lot of it would be the way a data science or data journalism story is rolled out.

There's a lot of potential there for gamifying. You have to click and then there's a path you want people to go towards. I would imagine it would be cool if you can actually create multiple pathways in a kind of story.

With journalism, there's always different angles. What do you lead with? I don't know how exactly that would work, but it would be an interesting experiment.

I've even thought about Kickstarter, where there are a lot of projects in which you're funding for something long-term. Perhaps you could even just start a magazine — for one year or one month, three months or whatever. I tell you all the content you want and this is how much funding I need, and then you just create something beautiful or magical for that period.

And you get all the best contributors and you tell people, these are the people you want to hire, and then you start. And then you find that people are interested in it because I think the sustainability thing is something a lot of people talk about.

Perhaps something short term, but concentrated could be interesting. And later, you can see if you want to start a company or not.

Looking back at your career, you've written freelance pieces across the region. What do you wish you knew about gamification principles that you wish you could go back into your past life and apply?

For me, it was a lot about community engagement that I felt was missing for me as a journalist.

It's funny how you learn this, though not from media or news outlets. When I went to Kickstarter, you really get the sense of how much is at stake because you're asking quite a lot out of people. You're putting all the products there and showing how credible you are and how invested you are in people's trust.

But they are basically committing to you with money right before they actually get the product. That's a big responsibility right there. And you have to make sure that you connect your community as authentically as possible, as much as you can. 

So when I went to Kickstarter, I did a lot of research. Why is this Kickstarter campaign connecting people? Wow, the creator is really going out there talking to people and they're posting the updates as regularly as possible. 

Kickstarter also taught me that you don't have to get everything right as long as you make sure that you're honest and you keep people informed.

Right now with the pandemic, there's a lot of problems with rising shipping costs. But Kickstarter backers understand this problem as long as you make sure you inform them ahead of time.

I have been thinking — what if I had this kind of sensibility early on, how would I have approached the launch of my book perhaps? 

For my book, The Naysayers Book Club, I had already planned the website. I don’t know if I should be revealing this, but it's fine because it’s all a learning experience. 

The website is so important. But I was just so caught up with the book that I didn't think how I was going to make sure the book connected with people. 

And the website — I did it in one month. I think it's alright. But now, with the experience I have, I’d be planning that a lot more and thinking about how I can really make sure that I connect with people.

I haven't thought about it in great detail, about how publicity for a book through a gamified medium would be. I don't know. Maybe a quiz, maybe you can do a kind of email game campaign thing. 

I would definitely not go about marketing the same way. I think when you've been doing freelance stories, you finish the story and you send it to the publisher, and you're kind of detached sometimes from how the story later gets received. 

This is sometimes understandable because journalists have a hard job as well. I've been thinking about the many ways you can do journalism better, but there are so many things to do sometimes. How do we balance that? 

You're saying build in public, work with your community, be responsive, incentivize or gamify what you're doing. It doesn't have to be fantastic and finished, it has to be a product that appeals to people. We're taking all these lessons away from you because you straddle those worlds completely.

When I told my friends I'm starting a game company with my colleagues, they're like, wait, what is this shift? But for me, there are quite a lot of things that overlap. 

I'm still writing content. And, again, what was the story for but to connect with readers? I'm still doing all of that and running a newsletter and making sure your website content and all the copywriting is good. It's just in a different industry. 

How many journalists get to start a company? For me, I wanted to go through this whole experience.

You might not think that it's important, but finding out oh, this is what it means to run a business and, okay, if you are doing shipping, how do you make sure the prices and your costs and all of that amount of work you put in, that there's something at the end? It's a whole other way of thinking.

That excites me and I find that’s especially important now. If you're a freelancer, you have to know it [all]. There’s a lot of overlap in the freelancer mentality and the startup mentality.

Do you think that's teachable, to bring those two mentalities together and perhaps teach more freelance journalists part of what they already basically know is intuitive knowledge — how to be a successful startup?

Yeah, definitely. Like making sure that as a freelance journalist you have a website for people to go where your portfolio is. That's so important. I was pushing it [back], always thinking I will do it another day, but that's so important. You need a calling card.

If you get it right from the start, it makes your life so much easier. Because it's great to be a great writer, that's important. You're making sure your content is good. But there are so many writers out there. How are you going to stand out and make sure you are the first one people approach or people want to pick during a pitch?

That means marketing yourself. You've got to market yourself. 

What would be the number one principle that people in the media industry need to apply when launching new products?

That you, as a journalist or a news outlet, are still just a content creator like everybody.

Journalism is going through a lot of changes in many ways. And if you stick with the whole idea that journalists are special and there's this special place, you don't really see your content as needing to connect with people.

I still need to make sure it's not just because I'm a great journalist [but] people are going to connect with me. And especially when you're a new startup.

You cannot assume any of these things. It might be different if you’re a legacy media outlet. You can just produce content and there's a big enough architecture to push your content out and help you. But if you are starting something new and you want to set yourself apart, you cannot work with those assumptions. That's key.

It's looking at what you do and keeping yourself grounded, but also realistic in making sure that you know what's at stake.

It’s a hard pill to swallow, right? Because if you're a journalism student, you've gone through whatever courses, you've got all of this technical knowledge, and then you're out in the working world and then you realize: It's just not enough to write a story.

It's harsh, but it's true.