Creating A Monster

Education is one of my passions, and I think games are an incredibly powerful way to educate kids, if done in the right way. So I think a lot of educational games that try to be fun haven't really worked because kids can see through that. What I wanted to do was to create an entertaining game that had a little bit of education in it, so flipping it round on its head. And that seems to have worked much much better.

As I said, we call it stealth education. And kids are learning! Kids love to learn, of course they do, they love to show off these things they've discovered, they love to try and beat their friends, but a test where you sit down in a dark room and work away is very different to a 60 second puzzle with our monster cheering or crying and bright colours and noise and music and sparkles. And the content is the same, but kids are going to spend hours and hours on one and run away from the other. So we're very proud of that side of the game and we just have to get the balance right.

Yes, it's a very very important part of the world, and we take our responsibility very seriously. We're looking after tens of millions of kids with an amazing moderation team, we use software with a company called Crisp that monitors every message on the site, we track and record every click. I think the interesting thing is a couple of years ago there was a nervousness about kids playing online and everybody assumed "this must be dangerous!"

And I think people are just calming down and realising kids love technology, this is going to be an extremely important part of their future, far better that they spend time on a social network with training wheels like Moshi, sort of a walled garden where they can experiment and learn in an environment that's deliberately designed for them, rather than just dropping them straight into Facebook or LinkedIn or YouTube. And I think parents feel much more comfortable about it now and we spend a lot of time educating kids. It's just like the offline world, we don't let our kids wander off to school on their own, we teach them about not talking to strangers, we teach them about how to cross the road, and I think smart parents are realising that's no different to the online world.

We are dipping our toe in the water with the DS, yes, and we think that's the perfect platform for our audience to try, and if that works well then I think we'll look at other areas as well. Maybe the Wii or the Kinect.

But with my commercial hat on, it's just not quite as exciting as building an online game. The development cycles are long, the upfront risk is high, the returns just don't seem that attractive, there's a lot of other partners that would be involved, so there's just more headache and more uncertainty involved than creating our own game where we're developer and publisher, where we have a direct relationship with the end audience, where we make 90 per cent less gross margins etcetera etcetera. So it's more kind of fun, incremental stuff that we splash around in at the edge.

But our objective is not just to build an online game, we want to build this massive new type of entertainment company, and so that does mean we need to everywhere that our audience wants us, and that does mean console, and magazines and books. I want our live show to sell out the O2 and have holograms and pyrotechnics and screaming fans.

We have lots of meetings internally, we have an amazing management team at Mind Candy and I also just spend hours in coffee shops scribbling down ideas and notes and where we could take things. So we kind of have a plan for this ultimate vision, and then it sort of depends on people we meet who could head up various areas of the business, so we're desperately looking for a head of mobile, a head of music, we want an executive producer for our animation division. And when we find someone that's great, and we find a partner we can work with, then that's when we launch that part of the business. It's not like we say "these are all things we don't to do, and this is the order in which we're going to do them" it's a bit more agile, a bit more chaotic.

So I've got a monster called Snowcrash whose level 16, I've got about 12 Moshlings that I've collected, so shamefully not as often as I should or would like, things are insanely busy at the moment, but I think it's important to stay connected to the game, so I do try now and again.

I know I'm not going on enough when our customer service team start getting loads of emails from kids saying "Mr Moshi is neglecting his monster, it's sick, it's dying, what's he doing, it's so irresponsible!" So that's when I know I need to feed it and play a few games with it. I get thousands of visits everyday from kids making sure that Snowcrash is being looked after.