Jop Wielens
Bio
After spending five years in London working on games, highly interactive sites and social media campaigns for clients like Disney, Xbox, Pixar, Aardman, Miniclip and many more I moved back to The Netherlands to start my own business.
My main goal is to create amazing experiences where one smile means more than 10 pages of Google Analytics. From hands-on coding to the big strategic ideas.
In 2014 I started Moppadop with a very good friend of mine, a company that is focussed on making kids smile. We make digital toys for touch devices like smart phones and tablets. The kick of seeing your 4 year old daughter choosing your app over one from Toca Boca is priceless.
Graham and I are the co-founders. We worked together during our time in London and have over 20 years experience between us creating apps, games and websites for kids and teens. Frustrated by the limitations of selling our time we decided to leverage experience with brands such as Xbox, Disney, CBBC and Chorion to focus our time, energy and skills to produce our very own products.
There's a catch! We live 16,559 km's apart. I live in the Netherlands in IJlst and Graham lives in Sydney on the Northern Beaches. We overcome this challenge with technology by using Skype to host our weekly production meetings, Trello to keep track of our actions and all the files are stored on Dropbox.
Session
6 unusual uses of gaming principles
Everyone loves games. From Angry Birds to League of Legends, from board games to The Sims. For me creating games is even more fun and I reckon a fair share of the people attending Reasons.To is developing games as well.
I've created loads of advergames for clients like Disney, Xbox, Chorion and Miniclip over the years to promote their latest movie, game or other product. Selling advergames into clients is relatively easy, especially to promote big brands.
Over the past couple years we've been using gaming and gaming elements in a different field: serious gaming. Can you make tedious tasks fun? Can you keep people interested over a long time? Can you draw people in that would normally not be interested? Can you help people using games?
And can you get the budget from clients to invest in a game? Something that isn't tried and tested like their dull forms?
I'll talk about some of our projects. Projects that make people happy, projects that teach kids how to read using AR, projects that treat patients and many more.
And my one golden rule: all games should be fun!
