News

ExPlay 2012: Thought Den's Ben Templeton on mobile gaming's mission to make museums more interesting

#ExPlay12 Getting smart with smartphones

ExPlay 2012: Thought Den's Ben Templeton on mobile gaming's mission to make museums more interesting
"We like to make museums more interesting," explained Ben Templeton at the start of his ExPlay talk.

As the creative director of Thought Den – a service agency that's focused on fun educational games – Templeton pitches game designs to charitable organisations and museums, and it's a process that's produced some interesting concepts.

When Thought Den was pitching to the TATE, for instance, it produced a concept called TamigARTchi, which tasked players with looking after Tracey Emin in her studio, looking after the outspoken English artist and feeding her doses of gin.

Not just about Apple

Templeton reckons Emin would have been on-board with the idea, but in the end, Thought Den developed Magic Tate Ball instead – an app that recognises a user's location and displays the most appropriate piece of art based on the lighting, weather, time and place.

Thought Den's other projects include Survival – a wildlife quiz created for Bristol-based charity Wildscreen.

The charity was keen to launch the game on Android as well as iOS, and the project taught Templeton that "it's not just about Apple anymore."

Survival garnered a total of 35,000 downloads across both Android and iOS.

The other main lesson Thought Den took away from Survival is that "HTML5 and JavaScript works a treat, if you don't mind outputting 14 versions of each graphic."

Featured all over

Templeton also explained the value of a featured spot from Apple.

One of the studio's apps was picking up 50 downloads a day around launch. After being featured on the homepage, downloads soared to 4,000 per day.

And it's not just Apple that can feature your game. Thought Den has seen significant download spikes after being featured in national newspapers. Even a tweet from UK performer Derren Brown produced a noticeable download spike.

"Marketing is essential," Templeton said. "Annoying and essential."
Staff Writer

PocketGamer.biz's news editor 2012-2013