Micro Games to PlayLoops
Our Origin Story
March 2016 I was let go from my job as a game designer at a startup in Mountain View. Half pissed off, half overwhelmed, but actually completely relieved I went out for a mid-afternoon walk. Somewhere between the maze of Google buildings and parking lots I fell in to a hole in the earth and blacked out. It hurt a lot when I finally came to. The center of my palms were glowing neon green. I could sense that everything had changed.
I was done running the hamster wheel at one soulless company after another.
I went searching for people working on tangible social change. I reached out to my friend, filmmaker, and anti-caste activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan. I started hanging out with Desi activists in the Bay Area. Over the next few months I broke through my 26 year haze of caste privilege and learned how caste is the single most important lens to understand India. It was incredibly humbling.
Iteration 1 — GIFs from MiniGames
That summer I worked on a grassroots campaign to defend California Textbooks from getting warped by Hindutva casteism and islamophobia. I was still a game designer, so I began making tiny games and sharing them as GIFs on our social media page.
The GIFs did awesomely. They increased our reach on Facebook at least 10X.
Iteration 2 — Micro Games for Social Media
Buoyed by their success, I set about creating more tiny games. If GIFs could be so successful, I thought, interactive experiences on social media would have even more potential for engagement. I called them Micro Games, and was bent on proving that these games could be meaningful for the fleeting attention spans on social media. I recruited my friends to help me make example Micro Games.
We made games that posited difficult choices for the player like the Trolley problem. The train in this Micro Game speeded to the middle of the screen, abruptly stopped, and started over like a GIF. It was a call to action for the user to direct the train one way or the other, and in the process empathize with each of the identities on the tracks and then choose for themselves. We successfully built small looping games that had the user role play new perspectives.
The next step was to design a way to automate the Micro Game development process, so other activists could easily build their own interactive loops. There was still the issue of embedding these looping games on social media, but we were confident we would figure out a way later.
Iteration 3 — Interactive GIFs Against Trump
And then Trump happened. Trump affected all of us on visceral level. His presidency colored everything I worked on in 2017.
I built an editor where you could pick a superhero, customize its face with your own, and the message that appeared as your superhero character punched out Trump. The output of the editor was a game in which your superhero character punched Trump every time the player tapped on the screen. It was cathartic. It got plenty of laughs. People loved to feverishly punch Trump. People loved to GIF their faces, and make their own Trump puncher.
But, ultimately, one can only make so many Trump punching games.
Iteration 4 —A Universal Interactive GIF Editor
The Trump puncher editor was neat, but it only allowed users to build different Trump punching games. I needed to build a more universal editor for Micro Games that I had by then renamed Interactive GIFs.
This editor allowed users to design their own interactive GIFs by customizing a parent GIF and any number of children GIFs. In the output, the parent GIF loops infinitely while waiting for the user’s tap. With each tap from the user one of the child GIFs plays once and disappears to reveal the looping parent GIF once more.
Well aware that I could not directly embed interactive GIFs on Facebook or Twitter, I made the editor automatically generate a summary GIF of the interactivity in the interactive GIF. This way whenever a user shared a link to an interactive GIF on say Facebook, it’s summary GIF would show above a link to the interactive GIF page.
Iteration 5 — GIF Design Tools and a GIF Library
In October 2017 Theeba Soundararajan, our advisor and contributor to The PlayLoops Zine dragged me to a BlackGirlsCode hackathon in San Francisco. I met Faye Hayes there. She would go on to become a co-founder and our CTO.
It was also the time we were introduced to DevLabs. We participated in one of their startup bootcamps. It was in that bootcamp that we articulated our target audience for the first time, and began to look at startups as solutions to real problems that real people were having. We conducted a series of user interviews of social media managers at various social justice orgs — people who we purportedly wanted to help but had never really spoken to.
We learned that orgs did not really care about interactivity that could not be embedded on Facebook. We learned that orgs realize the need to create GIFs and videos to boost their engagement on social media, but that they had very few to no resources to do so. And lastly we learned that most stock content online doesn’t really reflect underrepresented communities or their causes.
We realized that what organizations were really looking for was a steady stream of relevant content that can be minimally modified and reposted. So we set about growing a library GIFs sourced from social justice orgs, and building GIF design tools to easily modify any GIF.
We’re now furiously working on our launch product! Visit PlayLoops.io to sign up for our Beta!
