Brent Dusing of TruPlay On The Future of Gaming

To make sure you have a really good team. I think you should have some people with experience. It’s okay to have some new people, but I wouldn’t advise building a game with an entirely novice team.

As a part of our series about what’s around the corner for the gaming industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Brent Dusing, founder and CEO of TruPlay, a gaming platform created to bring high-quality, fun and biblically-sound entertainment to audiences worldwide.

Brent Dusing is the CEO and founder of TruPlay, a gaming platform created to bring high-quality, fun and biblically-sound entertainment to audiences worldwide. An entrepreneur at heart, Dusing pioneered game creation with Christian content through Lightside Games, a Christian gaming studio reaching more than 7 million game players worldwide and resulting in 25,000 decisions for Christ. As the founder and CEO of Cellfire, Dusing created the nation’s leading mobile coupon company, used today at grocers like Safeway and Kroger, and leading to Catalina Marketing acquiring Cellfire for $108 million. He began his career as a venture capitalist at Menlo Ventures, where he sourced multiple nine-figure exits and generated top-quartile returns. Over his career, Dusing has been featured on CNN, Fox News, ABC News, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly and other news media. Dusing has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share the “backstory” behind what brought you to this particular career path?

I’ve always had these ideas of things that I wanted to build or opportunities that I saw on the market. I’ve always had a deep desire to make a transformative change. Being an entrepreneur and being able to leverage technology me helps do that.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

We have had a phenomenal team join us and have been able to raise a significant amount of investor capital. I really believe that God has orchestrated the quality of the team and the inspiration for the products we build. We feel like God’s hand has been part of the entire process.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

My Chief of Staff is named Jenni Joseph and she has been my right hand for years. When I was running Lightside a few years ago, which built the top Christian video games globally, we were making these explicitly Christian biblical games on Facebook and she was a player of the game. One of my colleagues said, hey, there’s this woman who’s essentially running the forum on a volunteer basis. Why don’t we pay her to do the job she’s already doing? So, we did, and in her role, she ran the forums and community, and we had a million Facebook fans and one of the biggest online Christian communities in the world. Jenni had a big job, and then she got promoted and was doing more Q&A, operational and financial responsibilities, and now she’s the Chief of Staff. She’s been involved deeply in HR, the financial side of the business and the operational piece. Jenni serves as a lot of my right hand on decisions and I am so appreciative of her.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

TruPlay exists to make a transformative impact on the lives of children throughout the world. The world is full of toxic content for kids and children are experiencing anxiety, suicide and depression rates at all-time highs. They’re experiencing increased brain damage from drug legalization; they’re experiencing anxiety and rage. They’re experiencing isolation in a culture of fear and they’re not getting God’s truth. Children are on a screen 52.5 hours a week and are exposed to pornography at an average of 11 years old, which means so many of these children are seeing it way before they’re even that age. Seven, eight, and nine-year-olds exposed to content that is over-sexualized, excessively violent, and it’s hopeless. We exist to bring God’s love and truth to children all around the world to help them realize they are loved and have worth.

Ok, fantastic. Let’s now move to the main focus of our discussion. Can you tell us about the technological innovations in gaming that you are working on?

At TruPlay, we are building a subscription service that contains multiple games, or various gameplay styles in art styles in one app.

How do you think this might disrupt the status quo?

It will disrupt the status quo because there’s almost no positive content for children.

You, of course, know that games and toys are not simply entertainment, but they can be used for important purposes. What is the “purpose” or mission behind your company? How do you think you are helping people or society?

TruPlay’s mission is to transform generations of children in such a profound way that it will shape culture. One of the only entertainment companies to create Christ-centered digital experiences for kids, TruPlay’s products bring God’s truth to the forefront of where many children spend their time. The content of many popular online games today has adverse effects on users, especially children. TruPlay aims to make it easier for parents to find gaming experiences that are enjoyable for their child and enriching for their faith.

Built by a team with deep industry experience, the high-quality, world-class entertainment platform invites children into an engaging world of hope and biblical truth by embedding a faith experience into every product.

I’m very interested in the interface between games and education. How do you think more people (parents, teachers etc.) or institutions (work, school etc.) can leverage games and gamification to enhance education?

It’s really about your games making things fun, enjoyable and strategic. What games really do is build a logical structure, and then what makes the gamer successful in the game is to succeed within the logical boundaries you’ve given them. That’s why when you play Mario Brothers back from the early 80s, you don’t start with the fire flower and the star and just blast all the way through the thing. That’s why in Candy Crush, you don’t have infinite lives. There are rules. Games can be used to teach and for educational purposes, but they can also be used to get people deeper into the story. Jesus told stories. He told a lot of parables. That’s how he connected with people and in the same way, games can be used as storytelling mechanisms. They’re already used to convey values, sometimes in a very negative way. But we also know because we’ve seen it, we’ve built games that have conveyed values in a positive way.

How would you define a “successful” game? Can you share an example of a game or toy that you hold up as an aspiration?

I think a successful game is one that reaches millions of people that, in my view, has a positive transformative effect on their life. We did that with the Journey of Jesus game. Previously, we had two and a half to three million people play the game globally. We had a lot of people tell us that it changed their lives for the better. We saw it in the data that they shared with us. These are people from all over the globe, which translated into 15 different languages, so that’s something that we’ve seen firsthand.

What are the “5 Things You Need to Know to Create a Successful Game” and why. (Please share a story or example for each.)

The first thing is to find the fun. What’s the activity or action inside the game that the consumer enjoys? The second is to test the game with your audience until you see the success you are looking for. The third one is just like any other product or business, divide roles and responsibilities. There is the game design, the game production, the coding, the art, the music and then the sound. There is the story that is being told, and so with these different sectors, you can divide responsibility. The fourth is to focus more on building the core loop right, than getting all the other things like art and story focused on the core activity first. The fifth one is to make sure you have a really good team. I think you should have some people with experience. It’s okay to have some new people, but I wouldn’t advise building a game with an entirely novice team.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

At TruPlay, we really want to bring God’s truth to children everywhere. We want children to know that they’re loved, unique and valuable. That the God of the universe thinks that about them. The world is trying to tell them who they are, and the world is giving them messages of hopelessness, anxiety, fear and negative self-esteem. Those worldly messages of hopelessness are lies. God thinks the opposite of that.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Back in high school my wrestling coach, Don Price, used to tell me that “little things make big things.” In wrestling, the grip you have in your hands, the way you position your head in a takedown, or where you put your hand on someone’s head in a half nelson (a wrestling hold technique), all affect the effectiveness of the technique. In technology and gaming and as an entrepreneur, people often believe that there’s a silver bullet solution, and occasionally that’s true, but what’s much more common is thousands of lead bullets, getting the small things right on an incremental basis can be like compound interest. If you were to loan $1,000 and only make 1%, that’s no good. What if I gave 1% a day? Well, yeah, at the end of the year, you make 38x more money. These small little incremental changes build up massive improvement over time, particularly in consumer software.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

Instagram: @truplaygame

Twitter: @TruplayG

Facebook: TruPlay Games found at https://www.facebook.com/truplaygames/

YouTube: TruPlay Games

Discord: TruPlay

LinkedIn: TruPlay Games

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.