Take 5 with our co-founder Anna 🦘

Tell us a bit about yourself- who are you, and where do you come from?

Let’s see if I can do this in a single sentence like a good millennial: I’m a fugitive-lawyer-turned-game-company-co-founder from (close to) Sydney now living in Stockholm, Sweden, and I like sports, stories and (somewhat ironically) sunshine! 

How do you prepare to facilitate so you know you’re going to bring your A-game?

Aside from downing a strong cup of coffee, the most important thing for me is to know something about the people I am leading - which usually means I google the heck out of them! I look for weird facts and although stereotypes are limiting, they can also be a helpful reference point for building some rapport- sometimes I like to throw them out there in a playful way, so teams can either confirm or deny. 

Some of my favourite groups to work with are sales teams (they love to compete!) and finance- they know they’re labelled as boring and they’re totally at peace with it. It can be a bit tough online and some playful but targeted banter creates an open and approachable atmosphere from the start. 

What is the weirdest thing you have seen happen while facilitating?

Gratefully, I’ve not seen anyone get trapped inside a cat filter or use the bathroom while on a call, but I have definitely seen some interesting stories play out in those tiny squares on the screen. 

I had one player join from a treadmill (cool) without going on mute (not cool), who then vigorously thwarted my attempts to silence all the thudding, whining and heavy breathing coming from her Zoom window as she plodded along during the game. If she didn’t raise her own heart rate, she certainly managed to raise mine. 

As a general rule, however, I think the weirder the better when it comes to online interactions, and I try to embrace the awkward- when remote or mostly-remote, a kooky prop or obscure Zoom background can be a helpful reminder not to take life too seriously.

You do more than just facilitate- as a co-founder and co-creator of the games, can you give us some insight into your creative process?

Sitting down to brainstorm new game and activity ideas is one of my favourite things to do!

We are pretty allergic to the repetitive tropes that you see in this space- e.g. Russian spies, crack-the-code/diffuse the bomb type scenarios- and I really relish creating games that are quirky and clever. 

Whilst our process has changed over time, we tend to start with a loose idea, sometimes even just a name, which we then extrapolate on in every direction. The Hunt, for example, is inspired by all the things we search for- from the absurd, like Bigfoot, to the mundane, like a missing sock or the TV remote. We continue to riff off the theme until we arrive at the meta-problem, and then work backwards to lay out all of the individual puzzle pieces.  

We like to keep the games current- you’ll see references to crypto and Elon Musk’s rockets in our latest game The Ascent, but we also work extremely hard to make sure that most problems rely on logic rather than general knowledge to solve. This means the games are more inclusive and accessible to people in different parts of the world.

A lot of testing goes into creating puzzles that are the right level of difficulty for a broad audience (i.e. challenging and fun but not soul-destroying for your team) and which perform fairly uniformly across diverse teams from around the world. 

There also has to be one, logical and hopefully satisfying answer at the end of it. Putting all these elements together is harder than you might think! 

Once the skeleton of the game is mapped out, we lay claim to our preferred puzzles and then go away to create the logic & graphics for them- the result is an array of visual, word or numbers-based problems that combine to deliver an ‘ah-ha’ moment. Or so we hope!

Can you tell us what types of games and activities might be coming soon?

Whilst we’ll continue to release a new social game every couple of months, one thing we know from talking with many customers is that a content bank of shorter, engaging activities is really helpful for when you only have 10 to 15 minutes to spare, and want to warm people up or give them a break from a meeting.

We already have a lot of short form activities which are not yet available through our platform, so we are working hard to make them accessible. We are also creating new game and activity content based on what we know works from our problem solving series.  

Another extremely exciting thing we are working on is customisable game content. We have a long history of building bespoke games with organisation or theme-specific content.

Right now we can only do this in-house, but we are also exploring how to bring this option to customers who are subscribed to our new game platform.

There are many things happening behind the scenes at the moment- so stay tuned!