Tales of Impact: Game Development Drives Social Change in Africa

Tom Leonard 

I'm Tom Leonard. I'm the host of the Gamers Change Lives podcast, where we talk about how e -sports can create jobs anywhere in the world. Play games, create jobs, change lives. In season one, we talked about jobs. In season two, we talked about money, follow the money. In season three, we talked about business basics. And in season four, we're talking about accelerators, incubators, and other sources of support that an e -sports, or really any entrepreneur can let out there. So we're spreading the word today. Really, really glad to be talking about people. The other great thing for me is like I get to talk to people on the inside of the world. So two people from South Africa. So we have Glenn Gillis, who is the CEO and co -founder of Sea Monster and chairperson of Games for Change Africa. I always mangle names here. Games for Change Africa.

Tom Leonard 

So, and also Bella Rogerson, who's the marketing manager at Sea Monster. Welcome, Glenn.

Glenn Gillis 

Thanks Tom and always amazing to share these same experiences and to share our perspectives and to learn as much from the questions as we do from hopefully the insights that we can share with you and your listeners.

Tom Leonard 

Thanks and welcome Bella.

Bella Rogerson 

Thank you so much for having me. It's really great to be a part of this and really looking forward to the session.

Tom Leonard 

Thanks. So I'm going to ask really quick for each one of you, are you gamers?

Glenn Gillis 

Great question, let me go first. So yes, absolutely, we are. My wife thinks that we're watching a whole lot of Netflix series together, but actually I'm on level 119 of Real Racing 3. You would know if you were a 12 year old boy that you're in the company of greatness here. I'm a casual sort of slash hyper casual gamer. I'm much more interested in how games can change the world, but I think at a fundamental human level. I love to learn through play. I think play and games more generally have a role in so many parts of society. So yeah, I look at the world like a gamer does, but I also bring a business lens and hopefully a social change lens to that too. Bella, what are you playing?

Tom Leonard 

Just a second with Glenn. Glenn, one of the things you said that I wanted to key off on was you said, look at the world like a gamer does. How does a gamer look at the world?

Bella Rogerson

Oh, absolutely.

Glenn Gillis 

Yes. Yes. So if you think about what makes a game in its essence, it's obviously about a goal and rules and feedback, but it's critically about voluntary engagement. And what that means is that you need to put the user at the center of an experience. If you think about marketing as an example, is the customer really at the center of most marketing messages and advertising? Typically what's happening is it's interrupting something that we'd rather be doing. And so we very quickly get offered a subscription based on Spotify or Netflix. And what's the first thing you do with that subscription is get rid of the ads. That must send quite a powerful message that actually we'd prefer to be doing something else. We'd prefer to be entertained. And so this idea of always being user centered in our design, putting the human at the core of this, giving them something of value. Trading not just their purchase, but also their time and their energy for something is the essence of what makes a game. And so we always like to say that there's no problem in the world that can't be solved or made better through the application of game thinking or a game per se, or gamification more generally. And that's why, yeah, whether it's a learning problem, a social challenge, a business challenge we think everything can be made slightly better through the use of a game.

Tom Leonard 

That's a really good description. So Bella, how about for you? Are you a gamer?

Bella Rogerson 

So I'd like to go at this from an angle that we often get asked this question. I feel like it's the go -to question for anyone who gets to speak to us or just anyone that we meet. And often we like to say, well, it's a bit tricky because you don't call people “movieers” or TV watchers, TVers. It's not really in common vocabulary. But for some reason, people have this very specific preconceived notion of what a gamer is. But in reality, gamification and game design has become so much part of our daily lives with, you know, different aspects of, as Glenn was mentioning, marketing becoming so much more gamified and just general user interfaces and just our, you know, using technology. It's, it's, it's all gamified. And so, yeah, I think like a lot of people, like almost everyone on this earth, I'm definitely a gamer. I am a huge fan of Wordle. I still play, although it's perhaps less trendy than it was. I'm a big Wordler. Almost a huge fan of board games, all kinds of traditional stuff. So whilst I may not be a kind of Call of Duty Pro or FIFA legend, I'm definitely a gamer through and through.

Tom Leonard 

No, that's good, yes. It's just like, one of the things, when I worked at Netflix, one of the great fun things there was we got to talk about movies all day and get paid for it. I mean, just like, what movies did you watch last night or over the weekend? It's like, that was part of, you know, so same thing, if you're working in anything that touches on games, it's like, and at Warner Brothers, I got to play all the WB games and talk to the guys there about it. So it's like, yeah. It was not tough that way. Sea Monster. I want to talk about the Sea Monster. Glenn, I'll let you explain more about it, being the CEO there. Can you explain what the company Sea Monster does? And starting out, can you talk about where the name came from? Great name.

Glenn Gillis 

Yeah, thank you, we appreciate it. You know, maps of old, where people didn't know what lay beyond the horizon, they would put sea monsters or dragons or whatever it might be. And then, you know, there were a few brave souls who would venture over that horizon where they couldn't see. And they would realize, firstly, you know, they weren't typically monsters. They weren't scary at all and actually more importantly, that it's a small round world. And so using games in the way that we do in organizations and public benefit organizations to drive change, which is really the essence of what we do, we want to appeal to those few brave souls who are looking to do things differently, those people who realize that we are all sharing a planet and that we are all interconnected with each other. And of course, we want to appeal to everyone. People don't change their minds because you give them more facts. People change their mind because of a psychological tension with archetype, the basis of every story ever told. And so what's better than a story is a story that you have agency in, where you cannot just be a passive participant in something, but that you can actively shape your experience and hopefully the world around you. So what Sea Monster does is it takes those ideas and it looks at wicked challenges that exist within companies and then figures out how we can create experiences where people can interact, they can make an effort, they can invest their time and hopefully we can start to nudge a change in behavior. Because what the core of an impact business is different from a traditional entertainment gaming company is that we're trying to do something else. Clearly our games need to be engaging, they need to be fun, they need to be balanced, they need to be all the things that make a good game. But how does that game do good? And by good, we can mean a lot of different things. We can share the stories that are locked in the minds of large companies, you know, where we're not selling more baked beans. We're not in the business of that. But the story of farm to fork, the story about what big organizations are doing for the environment or why one option is better than the other, I think is the basis of a good game. And those are the messages that we want to kind of get out there. Of course, if you apply that to the learning context, there really is no learning experience that can't be improved through a game or at least through gamification. The days of recalling a whole lot of information and having to recite it the time that I think you and I went to school around the same age, just shortly after they invented the Closest to School. Yeah. And we were forced to recall on what date was the Battle of Gettysburg. Why? What we need today is critical thinking. We need teamwork. We need design skills. We need communication skills.

Tom Leonard 

Probably, probably.

Glenn Gillis 

Those are the modern skills that we need to change the world around us and to function effectively in the economy. And those are all the skills that you're learning in a game. You might not be able to give it a name and identify that skill and reflect on your learning and struggle, but that's where you start to dial up the entertainment piece and the learning piece. And that's what we love to do at Sea Monster. So in a nutshell, Sea Monster is an impact gaming company that drives business and social goals using the power of games.

Tom Leonard 

Could you talk a little bit about what you mean by social impact games? Because I think one of the things that you're doing there, all of you are doing there, is really important. But I think it's also probably not well understood. I'm not saying it's misunderstood. I think people just aren't presented with it often enough, which is one of the great things of having you on here to be able to talk about it to our audience. Could you explain what impact games are and how they might be different from non -impact games?

Glenn Gillis 

So, perhaps you're familiar with the SPG framework put out by the United Nations, the Sustainable Development Goals. If you like a shopping list of all the world's challenges, and they fall into various buckets from things like environment to financial inclusion to those kinds of things. So let's take financial inclusion or entrepreneurship, a topic very much of today and more generally of what we think is needed in the gaming space. So entrepreneurship is not typically something that you can learn from a book. You can learn the definitions and clearly you need some basic information and you need to have some knowledge about a particular area of expertise. But actually entrepreneurship is a skill that is demonstrated in the real world. It's underpinned by things like resilience, critical thinking, the ability to kind of zoom out, spot an opportunity, whatever the research says. And again, a lot of this is backed by science. It's the scientists and the academics saying, we've actually figured out some of these things that are universally true. So the question then is, how do you share that with the world? Is it good enough that I tell you the definition of resilience? And I describe it to you and I test you on your ability to recall that definition. No, but if you show up in a game every single day and you try and fail and try and fail and fail and eventually you succeed, well, did we just measure resilience? So we will work with the big bank, for example, where they understand that they need to grow their audience. They'll tell you how important small and emerging businesses are and how entrepreneurship is important. Okay, cool. We get that. So how are you going to do that? And so we designed games. In the example that I'm thinking about, it's a game where you set dreams, you go to work, you make decisions, stuff happens, and you're trying different strategies to get to your dream. You can fail safely. You can do all the amazing things that you can do in the game with different strategies. And yet we look at the data that underpins that and we can see patterns in how people evolve their game strategies, demonstrate what we believe to be resilient, and then we can take that data set and we can overlay that with real world credit behavior and lo and behold there's a correlation. So wait a second, did Tom and Tom's avatar in this crazy bullshit game about how he's going to pimp his apartment as he makes his way in the world, actually demonstrate something about Tom's real world credit behavior? Turns out the answer is yes. So what we're fascinated by is these nudges in behavior change that can show up in the real world. If we're going to start to address these SDG challenges, the shopping list of what's wrong in the world, it's not going to be because people know more. It's because they do things slightly differently. And so we don't need to be the subject matter expert. We seldom are. We'll work with the scientists, with the subject matter specialists who really understand this, with the academics. And then we'll say, great, now we've got a starting point. How do we wrap that into a game -like experience? Give you another example, which is absolutely on point. We built for another bank a game in Roblox. And if you think about any tycoon game, it is essentially teaching you resource management, again, many of those critical skills that you need. Now, what the bank thought they wanted was, hey, big brand here, you know, look at us, we're so cool. And we said, guys, you're going to have to be almost completely invisible. You're going to have to calm down. There's no branding everywhere. Everyone will see that it's your brand. But actually, what we're going to do is allow eight to 10 year olds, to start a restaurant, upgrade their equipment, hire staff, fail, and it's been a breakout success. The kids are happy, they're engaged in something that's fun, they get that it's about them, they're seeing themselves in the game, so there's a very powerful, positive cultural influence that games have on the world about showing diversity.

Glenn Gillis 

At the same time, parents are really happy because their kids are learning really good skills. And the bank in the meantime is saying, wow, we've learned so much about what our core value proposition actually is. Not about opening another savings account, but really encouraging people to delay gratification, have a future orientation. The things that we at the bank know actually underpin financial success over time. Those are just two examples in the financial education space, SDG number, whatever it is. But as I said, there's no aspect of these challenges that we don't think can't be done differently. Maybe just to finish one last example, and I'll stick to the banking segment for a second. You might be aware that many countries around the world and many companies have signed a pledge to think about the environmental impact of the money that they deploy. This is true in America, it's true in Europe, it's true pretty much everywhere. Now you've got these guys, they typically are male, they are maybe 60 years old, and they've been trained their whole life to apply a scorecard, a financial scorecard, without emotion. You'll know this when you apply for a loan, you're like, can I just talk to the people and tell them, let them look me in the whites of my eyes and know that I'm a trustworthy person that I'm going to repay them? Well, the answer is no. The system doesn't allow that to happen. So now you've got these very conservative, very analytical people who suddenly need to think about this hippie dippy stuff on the side, which is kind of the phrase that some of them use to describe it. But hang on, it's going to affect the cost of capital. Okay, what? Yes, it's actually going to affect how you deploy this on the web. So we made a business simulation. It's a game. We didn't call it a game because they think gamers are two teenagers sitting in their underpants on their mother's couch. But as humans, we game. And so now they're thinking about complex things, how they interact with each other. And of course, a system like that is ideally suited to a game where you can mess with the rules, you can accelerate different things. So yeah, those are some of the examples of how we go about thinking about gaming and how it can drive change in the real world.

Tom Leonard 

What I hear you saying is that gaming, people, I was gonna say kids, but everyone, people playing games, there's all kinds of benefits that can be accrued from that. And there's no reason that you can't give them the tools, give them the game that can teach them more than just how to rack up the most number of shots on a particular game there. So I think it's interesting, you're taking something that already exists and you say, okay, how can we now apply it to, for lack of a better term, to do good? It's like, okay, this is how it is that we're gonna be able to do it. So, what a key movie, I can keep talking about this stuff forever because I think you're really onto something. One of things I did not do at the beginning was ask you where you're speaking from. So, Glenn, where are you speaking just from?

Glenn Gillis

Absolutely. So we're based in Cape Town, South Africa. And so many people, you know, Africa as a country, in fact, it's 54 different countries. It couldn't be more diverse. It also represents probably the next billion game players. So it's a young continent with 24 people, 24 average age. So it's going to represent this massive future market. Thanks, Bella. It's going to represent this massive future market. But it's also going to do much more than that. It brings diversity into the mix. Again, the science around how diversity creates better games, better experiences, and a better world is complete. This is not something that is an aspirational thing. It's a real practical thing. We're also very sensitive to cultures around the world, you know, and so our tragic past has made us very respectful of other languages, other religions. So it puts us in a very good position to actually create games for the States, for Western Europe, but also for Asia and pretty much anywhere. So typically people from South Africa arrive with a lot of questions rather than all the answers. And I might just mention that it's also a technical center of excellence. What some people might not know is that a big chunk of AWS is actually built in Cape Town. In fact, Cloud computing was pretty much invented here by two people that were working with Beezus in the early days. And so there's this culture of innovation, technical prowess, creative excellence that can tap into our stories and art and music and so on, but that can compete for the very best of the world and may I say so, you know, add a significant discount to what you might be paying in the more established markets. Thus ended the advert.

Tom Leonard

Bella, you're also in Cape Town.

Bella Rogerson 

I am. Yeah. So Sea Monster, we have a kind of hybrid studio, but most of us get the pleasure of working from Cape Town. So I'm born and raised in Johannesburg, actually, but have recently, well, six years ago now, moved back to back down to Cape Town and I'm really enjoying it. It's a really great place to be. So hugely recommended as tourism sites often do Cape Town as a place to visit, but also as a place to work and a place to work with. So we hugely believe in the potential of partnerships with African studios and that kind of global partnerships to create, you know, sustainable growth for Africa as a continent. I think there's incredible potential there and a lot that we can offer. And I think that's really something that we're such great advocates for and is part of the job of Games for Change and why Glenn kind of spearheads that mission as well. And it's something we're really proud of. And yeah, it's really great to be from Cape Town.

Tom Leonard 

Great. You mentioned the next topic that we wanted to cover here, and that is games for change, because that sounds really good... The kind of program that here at Gamers Change Lives, we kind of identify with doing things. And so, yeah, Glenn, can you talk a little bit about what Games for Change, which organization is all about and maybe how it got started, not about Games for Change in Africa, but the larger organization, I think, based out of New York. Could you give us some background on what it is that they do?

Glenn Gillis 

Absolutely. In fact, they are coming up for their 21st birthday this year. So you can imagine that. Yeah, yeah, incredible. So way back then, there were a bunch of people who were working in the gaming industry. In fact, some of them came from the media industry more generally. And I think at the very same realization that Tom, you and I are sharing and talking about today. OK, so games can actually do good in the world.

Tom Leonard 

Wow!

Glenn Gillis 

There were a lot of organizations that were doing game -based learning, academics working essentially in isolation in the world of academia, talking about the incredible results that game -based learning does, and even applications in the military and beyond. So Games of Change really came into being to say, could we create an umbrella organization that brings together all of these disparate industries because they might not have met otherwise? They would be going to their own individual conferences and working in their silos. But actually, if you bring together two or three different elements together and celebrate what's possible, you can really accelerate the adoption of games to drive change in the world. And so that was the core realization of what they did. And so they have an annual festival, typically around June, July in New York. I was lucky enough to be there for the first time last year. We signed a memorandum of understanding with the United Nations. It was the first time that a game -based organization at that scale was created, and signed a MOU to say how we might be able to work together. And then just to segue into how Africa kind of came about, you know, doing what we do is a lonely business. Being an entrepreneur is lonely. Being in South Africa, a long way away from many things can be a challenge. And so, very early on, we identified, hang on, there are a bunch of crazies in New York who believe the same things and are actually doing this. Turns out they're not that crazy. They're highly skilled professionals at the top of their game in the world, but they share the same belief that tomorrow can be better than today. And so we reached out to them and they ignored me for I think two or three years. But you know, resilience is an actual thing. And so slowly, slowly we got to earn their trust. And we said, look, you've got chapters in Latin America, Asia Pacific, you've got a chapter in Europe, but you don't have a chapter in Africa. And so over the course of years, we built a deeply trusted relationship. We're hugely respectful of their strategy and what they're trying to do.

Glenn Gillis 

and they trusted us to take on the role as chair of setting up this chapter. And we're delighted to say that we've got representatives from eight countries across the continent. We've got different sectors represented from academia to game studios like ours, people in the e -sports space, because that's important too for building communities. We can come back to that one. And we've run three festivals now. Luckily, we're in the Southern Hemisphere, so December, it's mid -summer here and we attract some of the best and brightest minds of the gaming industry to Cape Town to talk about how games can change. Africa can contribute as part of the global family.

Tom Leonard 

I want to dive in there in a little bit more detail because you kind of touched on some of the things that you're doing. And I also liked the fact that you talked a little bit about how you got started because one of the things that whenever we're talking to entrepreneurs and that's the majority of our audience out there, eSports and non -eSports, but there's always that inflection point. There's that beginning when it's like, okay, how did they, you know, how did they decide that in a lot of cases they're a gamer and they want to make this a living. And so they decided, yeah, there's that starting. And that's why I like hearing the starting stories, but like you're, you are going through there. So yeah, can you talk a little bit about the kinds of support that games for change gives to entrepreneurs, for example. So let's say if you're an e -sports entrepreneur and you want to do more in this space, what are the kinds of things that games for change Africa or games for change anywhere in the world, what are the kinds of things that they can offer to the entrepreneur?

Glenn Gillis 

Okay, cool. I think there are two questions there. And I like the way that you phrased it. Yeah, exactly. So let me start with the Games to Change angle and then let me talk to you about our origin story and how I came to kind of continue because I do think that they are sort of, if you like, top down and bottom up perspectives on it. So Games to Change Africa, it's pretty much self -funded. We try to raise money where we can. Sea Monster invests what little we can, but as much as we can back into creating the chapter. And we've been able to attract some sponsors and so on. But it's tricky, you know, running a non -profit anywhere is a delicate dance, always. But what do we do? The main thing that we do is we have a chapter. And I say that there's an organization, it has a constitution, it has agreements in place. And what we try to do is have a social media presence, we showcase what's possible out there. And we're constantly talking to the community and trying to build that community around saying, ‘Have you thought about impact games? Have you thought about games for good?’ And that goes from people who play games and might be attracted to those, to people in industry who have not thought about gaming as an instrument to change, of course, the governments and so on who all have a role to play in that. So the first thing that we do is we have the chapter, we showcase what's possible and we nurture the community. We take a double step on that around the festival. So this brings together, as I mentioned, people from around the world. And there we're now really taking some of these very wicked challenges. We're about depth and quality, not breadth. So the festival is really saying, let's bring world -class professionals together to think strategically about what it is we're going to do. There'll be a couple of talks. There'll be some panel discussions. But often what we do is we tap into the wisdom of the crowd. And so we'll put people around the table and say, you're working for Supercell, you're working for the United Nations, the US Department of State. These are just some of the visitors, Google, that we were lucky enough to attract. And we say, okay, how are we going to work together to do this? And so in a three hour work session, we're actually crafting an action plan together. So ours is, we don't exist just to talk about it academically. We're saying, okay, how are we all going to do this very differently? The third element that we do is we actually seek to, we take people to the main festival in New York in July. That's really important because there what we need to say that we have a presence. It's not just a bunch of people sitting around thinking about these. There are studios across the continent. Here's the work that we're doing. Here's the results and data that we're getting. So just participating and being amongst equals there really does create an incredible platform for us internationally. And the last thing that we do is we encourage solutions that are driven by the research and the needs of studios and the industry more generally in Africa. Too often what happens is people come from the outside and run a game jam or do something well -intentioned as they are, but in isolation, assuming that there's nothing here, that this is the first day of our lives that we just woke up and thought about these things. That's just fundamentally not the case. And so what we're doing there is we're saying what we need is large scale productions over extended periods of time. The industry is crying out for partnerships. We are ready. We're not begging for them. We will earn our rights to produce significant projects. And I don't mean $100 million console gaming. That's not what we need. We need as little as this. We need $2 million projects committed over a three -year period times five. We're talking about changing the face of the continent, unlocking the potential of the community here for $10 to $20 million, but done in a way that is predictable and scalable. And that's what we do. We talk about driving this from the center and from what we need. So that's Games for Change Africa. I can talk more about it if you like, but it really is about being part of the family of equals.

Bella Rogerson 

Sure, thanks, Ben. I just wanted to add from my perspective, from more of a kind of marketing side of things, I also, in my spare time, or not quite, but as an effort that Sea Monster tries to support Games to Change as an organization, we've also kind of stepped in to help there. And as part of our effort to kind of grow our social media channels, something that we're really working on is to use those channels to help create visibility for people in the space. So that's something that we're really trying to scale going forward is that if people have a project that is gearing for good and is trying to do something like we use the platforms that we have to make some noise about that. And we have access to people who have podcasts and things like that and create a network around people who want to create and share information about games in the space. And also at the festival, there are opportunities for young developers to go through design sprints and facilitate business meetings to meet people, meet publishers, meet funders, like you have to really understand the key players in the space and then use those networks to your advantage. And I think that's something that Games to Change is really trying to become for Africa and in Africa. So being able to involve yourselves in the studios, like in the festival events, like we try to promote whatever opportunities they might be. At the last festival, for example, we, the global president of Games to Change, Susanna, she announced the kind of official beginnings of the diverse voices new stories challenge, which is a global challenge which comes with huge funding opportunities through Google play and HP as sponsors and you know, that's something that we got to announce and share with our community and give them guidance in terms of how they can get involved. So in terms of sharing what opportunities are out there, job opportunities, grant opportunities, places just to meet and speak with fellow people in this industry because like Glenn says, it's a lonely space to do it alone. So we're really just trying to create the circle, make the circle bigger. And that's what we're going to continue trying to do.

Tom Leonard 

Yeah, I like hearing you talk about it being a lonely thing because, because people don't talk about that much, but it is. And especially, you know, in some parts of the world, I can only imagine how much lonelier it must feel like you're the only one out there trying to do something and you don't know who to turn to. Where'd you get information? What was the world like before the internet? It was so much smaller. And that's why we want to talk to you guys about what it is that you're doing and to spread the word about to give people the idea that, hey, there are places to go out there. And maybe you guys don't have the exact answer. Maybe people aren't doing a social impact game format in particular, but they can still learn things from what it is that you're doing and also the format. 

Glenn Gillis 

I think incubators don't work in isolation. They have to be part of an ecosystem. So the strategy that we really embrace is the so -called missing middle. And what that means is that there are a number of small game studios in Africa. And unless we grow those studios, what we're doing is we're feeding more people in from the bottom who have an interest and desire to be in this space, but actually don't have an aspiration or don't have something that is easily accessible from an aspirational point of view. They don't have people on the ground who understand what's relevant from the international perspective, but actually what also works here And so we favor a demand led strategy to growing any industry in gaming, e -sports, any of those, unless there are companies that are growing and that are able to absorb and partner with these skills. What you're always going to have is essentially large international companies coming here and then trying to find a way to bridge that gap. And so our strategy is called the missing middle. It's demand led. It has incubators, accelerators as a critical part of it, and game jams. They all have their role to play. But more supply side push into an industry does not create a solution. It has to be anchored around productions, longer term, higher quality productions over an extended period of time. And then everyone gets predictability and gets the opportunity to upskill, to learn from the best in the world and also showcase what's possible from the continent.

Tom Leonard 

Do you in Africa in Games for Change get to interact with Games for Change in other parts of the world, let's say Latin America or Asia? Because it just seems like it would be such a great learning experience. What they learn there, sharing ideas back and forth, I mean, don't reinvent the wheel if you don't have to. Is there a lot of collaboration there?

Glenn Gillis 

100 % and games of change work very very hard. One of the things that really stands out to me as their approach is that they don't arrive with a global solution and say one size fits all. What they're really good at doing is trying to surface things that are working around the world and then say look this might not be relevant to the US for example but it just happens we're based in the US for lots of good reasons. But actually, you should be talking to one another. And so they are developing, for example, a whole lot of G4C learn solutions, things that you can take to museum owners, for example, or curators into that space and think about how you can use games to make museums without borders, share these stories to as wide an audience as possible. And then you'll find things coming out of Melbourne, in Australia, things coming out of Singapore, things coming out of Sao Paulo. And we surface all of that and we try to figure out how we can make that circle bigger, learn from each other, not with this top -down sort of Western -centric approach, but just saying, yeah, how do we bubble this stuff up from the bottom? So it really is a family of chapters that are working towards a common purpose, but might be working in different ways depending on their context.

Tom Leonard 

I saw a recent one, maybe it was just yesterday or something. I saw a post on LinkedIn talking about the awards coming up for Games for Change. Maybe Bella, maybe you're an expert on the value, the marketing value of the awards. Why create awards and what does it do for the organization? What does it do for the recipients?

Bella Rogerson 

I mean, a heavy question because awards in general, I think, can play a multitude of different kinds of roles. But in our space, I mean, it lends credibility to exactly what we're trying to do. And just to give recognition to people who are putting themselves out in space and developing super high quality games that are played by millions of people sometimes, or that actively solve health care issues that revolutionize certain industries, they deserve to be celebrated. So the fact that Games for Change have created a system of acknowledging and celebrating the best of the best, I think is incredible. And it's a great place to seek inspiration for anyone interested in the power of games in this space. Just look through the kind of incredible different games that have been acknowledged by Games for Change, which is super amazing. Also, I think we're a bit late now, but the Games for Change global deadline actually ends this evening. So there's only a few more hours to apply for this year.

Tom Leonard 

Yeah, yeah, this will be too late for that but I never think of next year.

Glenn Gillis 

Yeah.

Bella Rogerson 

Absolutely, yeah. And there should be announcing the nominations for this year, probably in about early June. So keep an ear out and an eye out for those. And like I said, as a huge place to see incredibly inspirational and inspiring work. And we've submitted something and we would love to be acknowledged amongst one of them. And it's definitely something that we aspire to and we work towards because we'd love to be amongst them. So I think it's great to have awards that really kind of shine a spotlight on the impact that is being generated in this space.

Tom Leonard 

And when you think about it, I mean, giving awards, giving prizes is a games -based concept. So it's not, yeah, it fits with the theme.

Glenn Gillis 

Think tough.

Bella Rogerson 

Absolutely. And sorry, Glenn, just one more point for Games to Change. It's not a money making exercise. It's free to apply. It's free to submit your games. And that's so important because, you know, sometimes you find that award applications can just be a kind of vanity project that you apply and you put a lot of money into applications and, you know, it's dealt with very well. But the feeling with Games to Change is that this is completely different. This really does just.

Tom Leonard 

Yes.

Bella Rogerson 

acknowledge the work being done in the space and for good measure it absolutely deserves to be acknowledged.

Glenn Gillis 

And I think, you know, to loop back to this point about being an entrepreneur, and let's call it the creative industries more generally, you know, we, by definition, make something that didn't exist before. And what we do often is in the form of a game, it's actually an experience, it's intangible, you know, you'll get some community feedback, good and bad. And that's great. That validation is really important. 

Tom Leonard 

Yeah, clean.

Glenn Gillis 

That's how you make games better and you know that you're impacting a community and you're resonating with the intended audience. But if you think about it from a business perspective, how is that working? What feedback are you getting that you're doing things in the right way? And that's where not only awards more generally, but access to a bigger ecosystem plays a bigger role. And we often find that people think about ‘Yeah, I like games, therefore I want to make games, therefore I can play games’. And you know, that whole e -sports sort of loop that you've spoken about before on your shows and that's eloquently. That applies to the gaming industry more generally. And until we start to apply different skills to this industry, you'll know from your time at Deadflexes as well. The creators are one critical element of it but you have great technical expertise, you have business acumen, you have the legal and production know -how, and all of that sort of comes together to make a total solution. And people often forget that. They think, oh, I'm cool, I can play this game, and therefore, hey, I can get into e -sports or into the gaming industry. And I think each of those steps just needs to be unpacked. It's not that they're not true, it's just that they require different skills to build a professional brand, to manage a community, to think about your rights, your IP, your character, your persona, how you're doing all of those things. Those are business skills, those are marketing skills, legal skills, accounting skills that have to be brought in. And I'm not a frustrated game designer. It puts me at quite a big advantage, often talking to people about it because I actually don't know exactly what game designers do. I mean, I've got a general sense. I know enough, you know, to be able to do. No, I'm not. And I don't need to be because I've got an amazing team of world -class experts who are good at what they do. I can look at it in a way that is slightly unemotional and say, okay, how are we going to solve this? How are we going to make this happen?

Tom Leonard 

I was glad to hear you say that.

Glenn Gillis 

How do we balance the risks that are required, the investment that is required? How do we build a business around these things? Those are perhaps the perspectives that I and others bring to this.

Tom Leonard 

Yes, that's exactly the, my philosophy here is I am not an esports player. I never built a team. I've never started an event. So, but I don't need to be. I just need to figure out and Reginald does most of it for us here is I need to find people to talk to that have done these things and that have a story to tell, which leads me to the next thing I want to, don't want to take all day here all of your time, but I did want to talk about storytelling. Because one of the things that I saw, just the impact of storytelling in games and storytelling in impactful games. And I just think storytelling is an under –scrutinized thing to be looking at. I always like to be talking about storytelling, especially from Glenn, from your perspective in animation. Can you talk about storytelling in games and storytelling in impactful games?

Glenn Gillis 

Yeah, the best question ever, really, Tom, because let me start by saying that at its highest level, we want to be part of a new narrative, a new story that Africans are telling to the world, a new story that people are running in their heads around what this means. So that's at its highest level, a very philosophical idea. And that requires that people believe that they have agency, that they can look at a story, they can see how that story unfolds, and that that story is universally true. If you think about the success of Korea, for example, both in moviemaking and more generally in the creative industries, those stories are uniquely Korean, but yet they resonate around the world. They stand out from a formula driven in one demographic or one region, they appeal to something that is true for everybody and in a way that is unique and interesting. And of course in Africa, perhaps the home of storytelling, the original place around the fires where stories were told and helped shape human consciousness. And we told stories to entertain, to learn, to engage one another for multiple purposes. Those purposes have not changed, nor have the underlying stories really changed. You'll know from your days at Netflix, I think seven basic story arcs and everything is a variation on that. And then the question is, how does that show up in the game? If it's too obvious, it can be preachy. If it's not interactive enough, I think about the work that E -Line Media does in this space and how they've managed to surface stories of the first peoples, you know, and hint at a narrative, but also make it a game. I think that that's brilliant. I think that that's properly entertaining. It's a commercial success, hopefully, but at the same time, it's honoring a rich story tradition that will be lost otherwise. And sometimes that story can be not obvious. Every game has a story, from chess to backgammon to any of those traditional board games.

Glenn Gillis 

They do have a story. It's just very subtle. And then some are obviously very narrative driven. So that whole category of how stories shape and give meaning to people's worlds, how they help us make sense of the world, how they give us a sense that tomorrow will be better because I have a role to play in that story. That for me is the beginning and end of it. Games just happen to be a mechanism by which stories could be made interactive. And I think that's what makes them more powerful than any other genre.

Tom Leonard 

It sounds like you're a storytelling fan.

Glenn Gillis 

A story seller, they call me a story seller, Tom.

Tom Leonard 

Which is, what is AI, how is AI going to impact storytelling, and in particular storytelling that you were just talking about? Is it a good thing, or is it a bad thing?

Glenn Gillis 

No comment. No, just kidding. Look, I think we're just at the beginning of that and certainly we're no expert. But, you know, it's, let me see if I can summarize my views on the little bit of reading and discussions and things we've had around it. It will undoubtedly disrupt the means of production. You know, clearly generative AI is going to, you know, make the coding process that much more efficient, the creative content creation process, the artistic creation process, it will disrupt that. It's never going to, not never, it's unlikely to in the short term replace this idea of empathy, to be able to truly put yourself in the shoes of a user and understand that emotional journey, their hero's journey. What is their hero's journey? And so hopefully what it will do is it will free up time and money to focus on the thing that's really important. And that's how games make you feel and how they can use that hopefully for good. Certainly there will be bad actors who will use AI to manipulate people and continue to do so. We can't change that piece. But what we can do is say that that same technology can be used to make the world a more human place. And so I hope that AI is used for that. Hopefully it drives more commercial success as well by lowering the cost of production. Hopefully it can increase the number of people who come into the impact gaming space and invest here where that threshold might have been too high for them. We might be able to lower that. But ultimately, yeah, for us, we work every day to think about how AI can make the world more human, which seems a little counterintuitive given what everybody else is trying to do with it, or a lot of others.

Tom Leonard 

So one of the things I've just learned from my experience with chat GPT is that it doesn't just do things automatically. You have to ask it the right questions. So you have to give it the right direction. So it has something to go on, which is like some input that so it's not completely a one -sided you're setting there and there. It's just coming at you. It's always going to be a bit of a dialogue. 

Glenn Gillis 

Just one quick one, I thought of the other, apologies, apologies. But the struggle is real. And what I mean by that is that if you think about the creative process, it requires a degree of frustration. It requires a degree of reflection because it's at that juncture. This is why artists are these crazies and musicians and so on. There's something there that I think computers will not get to relatively soon. And it's at that edge of existence, that struggle, that you see this thing coming to existence that is truly new, that is truly different. And that resonates with people. You know, everything from music to art validates that it's not just a mechanical process. Anybody can make a Jackson Pollock. But who can code in that emotional response that people have when they stand in front of one of those things? That's that human struggle, which I think needs to remain, at least for now, humanity's contribution.

Tom Leonard 

And isn't it more noticeable or more recognizable in smaller independent games out there than the ones created, which are really, really good by really large organizations with unbelievable budgets. It just seems like the whole independent game industry is just very well set to employ the services of the people that you're talking about that are on that fringe that can bring that in to the creative process. More so, then the fringe is not going to show up at Ubisoft.

Glenn Gillis 

Yeah, look, I mean, that's absolutely, I think it's important. Look, the point is you've got to grow your community. You cannot, the world cannot survive with pockets of excellence and richness with a sea of poverty and hatred and rage. You know, this is a call for runaway capitalism to be constrained, to say that Africa is either going to be the next billion customers, game players, creators, or it's going to be something else altogether. So you can ignore it at your peril. You will miss business opportunities in the short term. So yes, corporations come now. We're ready. We're open for business. The market is here. But also do so in a way that might bring a different lens on it and allow those people to participate in this economy. Because yes, if you try and automate them out or AI them out of a process, you'll miss the stories, you'll miss the market, and you'll create a situation where your business is going to miss out on an opportunity to be part of something that makes money, but also actually makes a market. And frankly, we hope to make the world better and more secure and more stable and more democratic and more tolerant, the kinds of things that we want to do to raise our kids and our kids' kids.

Tom Leonard 

Yes, it's always good to end on a positive note. So, no, no, well, one of the things I hear from both of you is just that you have a positive outlook on what it is that you're doing, which makes, there's no reason not to. I mean, it makes things so much more, as far as I'm concerned, makes it easier for you, makes it easier for other people around you because these kinds of things that you're doing are important. But also you're doing really big things. I mean, bringing social impact to the world is not for the timid. So, so good for you for doing that. Where can people go and learn more about what it is that you're doing?

Glenn Gillis 

Bella, I'll leave that for you. Yeah, that's a valid question.

Tom Leonard 

That's a valid question.

Bella Rogerson 

I mean, as we said, it's all about community and we wholeheartedly believe that. So we would love to encourage everyone to join our Sea Monster community by following what we do on social media, those kinds of things. Reach out to us, have a conversation like we're here, we're accessible, we want to talk and the same goes for Games that Change Africa. We're just here to continue growing the community and we want to be able to involve people who are interested in the space as much as possible. So join us, take part in the events, come show up at the events that we go to. It's all about just showing up, making an effort and being part of this because we feel like it is a movement and the more the merrier that comes and joins us because we have a lot of heart in this and we completely just sync with anyone who is vaguely aligned to the mission that we're trying to spearhead here. So I really invite everyone to come join us and we'll just grow from strength to strength. I think that's the real potential in this space.

Tom Leonard 

Great, great. We'll put some information in the show notes, but it's always good for people to hear that. Any last words, Glenn?

Glenn Gillis 

Yeah, I think, you know, as an entrepreneur, as somebody trying to make a game studio and building a game ecosystem in Africa, and frankly, to be hopefully at the forefront of how games can change the world. We don't have the luxury of pessimism. We don't. Innovation is not something that happens in Silicon Valley. This is real and present. And yes, you can choose to look at the world and think about the tragic state it is in now more than ever. And you can while your time away playing a game, or you can choose to engage with us. So partner with us, bring us opportunities, bring us access to markets, share stories with us and some of the work that you're doing and the way that you provide these platforms for this conversation, I think are vitally important to it. So yeah, thank you and really excited to see where this journey takes us. So we're here, we're hopefully not going anywhere and open for discussion.

Tom Leonard 

Great, great. Hey, we really appreciate your time for talking about this. This is the fun part of doing this project. So I want to thank you, Glenn. Thank you, Bella.

Tom Leonard 

And thanks to everyone for listening here for the gamers change lives podcast. What I really want to ask people to do is go out and follow us on social media, subscribe to us on podcasting platforms. Most importantly, engage, send us messages, engage on social media. We want to hear from you. We want to hear what we're doing, right? What we're, what we could be doing wrong, but we just want to engage and engage with others in our community. So thanks again. This is Tom Leonard. Gamers Change Lives podcast. Play games, create jobs, change lives. See you next time.