We’ve been following the fortunes of West Country agency Thought Den for several years now. Kirsten (KCH) and Martha (MH) took the opportunity to grill founder Ben Templeton on what fuels their fire.
KCH: Hello! Tell us a bit about you, and your company, Thought Den. How did you come into being? Who’s in your team? Where are you based? What sorts of things do you make?
Thought Den is a small creative studio based in Bristol. We flirt with London via some shared office space in – you guessed it – Shoreditch!
We have a working philosophy of ‘playful learning’. This means we make tools, games and live experiences that help people learn stuff in a fun way. We specialise in doing this for arts, culture and education clients like Open University, Tate, Imperial War Museum and National Museums Scotland.
The team here in Bristol has grown over the years since our incorporation in 2008. Dan Course and myself were the founding directors and grew the team to a modest six, plus two in London. This year, the end of our fifth trading year, I bought Dan out of the business, so we’re facing some exciting changes.
KCH: You’ve done a lot of work with museums and other cultural organisations. Tell us about the challenges of making cultural educational experiences. Give us some examples of projects you’ve worked on.
It’s bloody hard work, that’s for sure. There isn’t an awful lot of money in this sector but there are three important reasons we do what we do for clients with not much money.
Firstly, we’re encouraged to focus on delivering innovative work because this sector is in competition with far richer commercial brands. Tate’s most successful mobile app “Magic Tate Ball”, with 125,000 downloads so far, was among the first to popularise ‘contextual awareness’ – using smartphone sensors to analyse the user’s surrounding environment.
Secondly, the content we work with has real substance and we’re continually learning as we go. I sleep soundly in the knowledge we connect the public with positive, interesting and important content. “Zoom” for Bristol Zoo is an installation where visitors strike animal poses to unlock images from an archive spanning 100 years. The physical gestures aspect was great fun to develop but we also really felt like we were peeling back the layers of one of Bristol’s fondest organisations.
Thirdly, these organisations are great brands to have in the portfolio, not least because they have awesome content and they lean towards innovation. This in turn allows us to continue working with more exciting brands in this space. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy! I think…
KCH: You came and spoke to the #LEGup group [London Educational Games Meetup] in London in September 2012. Tell us how things have changed for Thought Den since then, and what your plans are for the future.
The main thing is our latest big project Capture The Museum is emerging from the laboratory. More on that later…
Thought Den are five years old now – an important landmark. The company structure has changed with my co-founder’s departure and we’re adopting a more fluid working process. With five years of very varied digital experience under our belt we can focus with some authority on play and technology in a strategic sense, not just in terms of practical delivery.
Our brand of playful thinking and execution is reasonably well known in the industry. Looking forwards, our core team are the steering group and the face of the company, drawing other experts into the team on a flexible basis as they are needed. We hope to take on more challenging, bespoke projects at the intersection of technology, play and learning.
KCH: We’ve heard rumours about a new game called Capture the Museum. Can you tell us a little about that?
I’m really excited about Capture. It’s been a total arse to build (someone please kill HTML5), another year-long project like Magic Tate Ball, but the initial soft launch was a roaring success. Imagine the fun of Risk and Trivial Pursuit, played out on a giant scale, around a museum jam-packed with interesting exhibits. There’s a 90 second video to explain and more details on capturethemuseum.com
It’s a team game for up to 50 players, currently only available at the National Museum of Scotland, in Edinburgh. It’s a hosted event that we want to make freely available in due course, hopefully at other locations.
I think experiences like this are a big deal for arts, culture and education. From pop-up restaurants to immersive theatre, people want to do weird, memorable, social stuff. Why shouldn’t museums provide this experiential fix? At the very least its an avenue worth exploring for a sector fumbling desperately for a sustainable revenue model.
With the rise in private tutoring you never know, perhaps education could focus a little less on the outcome and more on delivering rich experiences. Watch this space.
MH: Games agency Littleloud (Sweatshop and other games) sadly went to the wall this week. Is it difficult to be an indie games agency out there at the moment, particularly one making educational games? What are the main challenges and how have you dealt with them?
It’s sad to hear about Littleloud but I’m absolutely confident those guys will bounce back. They’ve got great skills and contacts. This is why I feel a more flexible working environment is the future for Thought Den.
It IS tough out there (here). Especially the poor old culture sector. But there will always be a need for creative people who understand technology and the way Sally from Maidenhead or Johan from Antwerp engage with their shiny new toys.
Our biggest challenge is sustaining interest. Not just in respect of the end user, continually distracted by the next ad campaign or cat video, but internally within organisations. Sometimes it’s worth re-investing in products, iterating them, rather than starting anew every time. Things don’t move quite as fast as Twitter would have you believe.
MH: Is there anything you’d do differently if you could start over again? What advice would you have for others starting out in the same space?
I’d perhaps think a little harder about what I wanted from the future. It’s been tough getting this far and I’m sure there were a few shortcuts I missed…
I’d do my very best to bring a strong business mind on board. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial streak, it got us this far, but you need more than enthusiasm to make a small business profitable.
Find someone unafraid to crack the whip and get their foot in the door.
MH: What gets you personally excited about making games?
I’m less a games designer and more a play designer. I don’t play game games much (console games and the like) because I’d rather be playing real-life football or running from real-life zombies.
What really inspires me is giving people the opportunity to have a mini eureka moment. I love to see lightbulbs ding! above peoples’ heads, that moment of realisation and pleasure in understanding. Games, or the principles of play, give people a chance to test their boundaries, do things they wouldn’t normally do, add some safe risk to their lives. Everyone needs to feel challenged from time to time.
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