When it comes to gaming for good, Thrust Interactive, an Atlanta-based mobile, web and game app developer, knows just how to get the job done with the power of collaboration.
Founder and CEO Jesse Lindsley said the company has a unique process of finding partners and writing grants to successfully launch research-based games with solutions to real-life problems.
As an entrepreneur, Lindsley said he'd spend a lot of time and money on projects that weren't always successful. But he discovered he could partner with a research institution, a customer, an expert in evaluating government grants and bring his company's gaming expertise to the table to create a win-win scenario for all involved by developing an educational game. By collaborating, the researcher collects data, the customer receives a product that works, the project is funded by government money and Lindsley gets to develop a game.
"We’ve proven this model works and now we are replicating that model," he said.
The concept started in 2014, when Thrust Interactive received its first grant from the National Institutes of Health during a partnership with Emory and Georgia Tech. Modeled after a physical game often used in waiting rooms at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, game developers at the company were able to craft a digital game to teach kids with sickle cell anemia, diabetes and asthma about blood oxygen levels and disease literacy.
"We were the game developers that were learning from experts about the plights of these kids and the problems they were facing with not understanding their disease and thus not taking good care of themselves or following what they need to be doing or parents understanding," he said.
While one most likely couldn't create a company on developing chronic illness games alone, the grant allowed Thrust Interactive to create gaming for good on a small scale. The company, which is part of ATDC's healthcare vertical and a recent Goodie Nation's Hack Cancer + STDs pre-accelerator candidate, has recently been awarded a second grant for $1.4 million from the NIH to enter phase two of the project, where they will enter a larger market.
"What we are good at is working directly with parents and kids because we have worked on many educational games," Lindsley said. "Our first educational game was with PBS kids in 2009, and we've been in the educational game space ever since."
In their games, Thrust Interactive focuses on entertainment first and education---or "spinach" as Lindsley calls it---second. The prime goal is to get kids to play, and learn while they're playing.
"That doesn’t always resonate with educational institutes but it resonates with our players, it resonates with parents and it resonates with creating fun habit-forming experiences," he said. "So you can have a very smart educational game that’s very boring and no one will play, and kids won’t tell their friends. Sure, you can sell it to a school and it’s part of their curriculum, but we’d tell you that’s a very challenging path to take, so we’ve chosen not to take that path and embrace the hiding of the spinach in very fun and entertaining ways."
The company is also piloting two products for HIV anonymous support for older demographics they are hoping to fund with a U.S.D.A. grant and a nongovernmental grant from an HIV organization. Above all, Lindsley said these projects show the process of collaboration works for the bootstrapped company.
"We can have a process that we plug great partners into and with a mission on innovation through collaboration we can touch a lot of things with the gaming for good. We can find ourselves in areas where we wouldn’t have found ourselves before and hopefully having a long lasting impact," he said.
