Games developer Jeremiah Alexander details his time in Brazil exploring its burgeoning interactive entertainment sector and looking at opportunities for international collaboration.

Digital Sãovation: Collaboration and Redevelopment in Brazil's Gaming Industry
(by Jeremiah Alexander)

Beyond the cheesy title to this post and the standard rhetoric on amazing discoveries and false expectations, this article is genuinely about opportunities. We too often look without really seeing or worse still mistake potential collaboration for competition. So, in this post - a commentary on my recent study tour of Brazil's interactive entertainment sector - is also an insight into my newly developing skill of turning everyday into a Hidden Object Game, where the object is the opportunity. Please read on and hopefully enjoy...

Email, email, email, I hate email the biggest time consumer in most peoples' days and yet probably the least productive in my opinion. I prefer to be developing, or designing or planning or thinking or talking or anything else apart from trying to clear my inbox. Except accounting, which is even worse. Anyway, I digress, occasionally an email comes through that makes it all worthwhile.

'Hi Jeremiah, would you like to come and talk at an event in Brazil?'
…
'Yes, I would!'

In December 2011, I was fortunate to take part in a British Council mission to speak in Brazil. The focus on the trip was the Game On seminar at São Paulo's Museum of Image and Sound. Either side of which, I met a number of games developers and educators, in both formal and informal gatherings across São Paulo, Recife and Rio. The trip was amazing and I could speak for ages about why, but instead I want to focus on what I learned.

Brazil is growing rapidly, and despite incremental ups and downs, it’s inevitable that a country with so many natural resources and talent could not ascend to greatness. With the World Cup and the Olympics on the way, the government is making sure that from an infrastructure point of view Brazil can service and sit centrally on a world stage. This presents opportunities, especially around redevelopment. I drove through East London recently and barely recognised many large chunks of it, largely, although not entirely, due to the expansion efforts around the Olympics. Global recessions aside, expansion continues.

The challenge for Brazil is then one that all rapidly developing countries face: narrow the naturally increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots.

A very large part of this is about education. One example of an education challenge is around language. The majority of people in Brazil do not speak English and this is largely due to the education system, where much like the UK, we start learning languages too late and too often our students don’t see the practical application. This is not a point to say that English is essential for success in the world, but it does help and many of the private schools in Brazil are teaching it thoroughly. This means the school you end up in affects your ability to communicate on a global stage later in life.

While in Recife we were fortunate to visit C.E.S.A.R. There are far too many good things to say about this organisation and many have been said already. At C.E.S.A.R we had a great conversation with Guilherme Cavalcanti about the education system in Brazil and the implications of a low literacy level.

So, the first opportunity I saw was on international collaboration to help develop language and literacy; something we've always had a passion for at Ideonic and now something we're focussing on in Every1Speaks. A couple of days before visiting Recife, I spoke alongside Luciano Meira at the GameOn exhibition. We both spoke about our experiences and ideas about game based learning, and we were kindred spirits in terms of our shared belief that gaming can change education - Ideological Buddies perhaps. This is promising. Rather than seeing this as a new competitor from international markets, I see this as an opportunity to combine our skills and ideas. Many marketing experts believe that when in an emerging market, competition is a good thing because the focus needs to be on growing the market, not on getting a bigger market share.

One of my highlights of the trip, which was either pure coincidence or providence, was seeing a group of school pupils at C.E.S.A.R who were finalists in a games design competition who just happened to be there at the same time as us. I jumped on the opportunity to speak to them and get a video for Every1Speaks.tv. Speaking to them, and seeing the games they made was encouraging, as a group they had immense promise and will no doubt go on to be the talent that pushes Brazil forwards – it’s never too early to invest in talent. The games they made were exceptionally good for their age; in fact, I’ve probably seen worse content from many so called professional companies. Best of all for me, was the collaborative and open-ended nature of the project they were doing, very akin to current educational thinking around Enquiry Based Learning.

So what comes next? My current focus is very heavily slanted towards collaboration and our collaborative learning platform Every1Speaks. So the whole time I was on the trip I was thinking about opportunities to extend Every1Speaks to Brazil and the potential that it could have. Even now, I am still really excited about the prospect of getting schools in Brazil using Every1Speaks to collaborate with schools in the UK. I’m imagining collaborative projects on sustainability, culture, language and life. It’s really exciting and to move it forward I’m going to continue the conversations with the organisations I met out there and hopefully form some strong partnerships. Watch this space!

On the gaming front, the talent in the gaming sector in Brazil is right. There is no lack of developer ability or creativity, and it’s simply a lack of access to markets. The console and mobile markets in Brazil are not as big as they should be and this is largely, I believe, due to hefty taxation attached on these devices. What we saw in Brazil was a lot of companies working on social and advergaming, particularly online, games that can reach the world and require minimal technology to access. Some of the companies like Jynx, had perfect development pipelines in place and were literally able to churn out social games. We’ve always got more great ideas than we have resources to develop ourselves, perhaps some might work well as international collaboration; another avenue to explore this year.

One of the other great things about international missions in general, is that you often get to know the people on the mission with you even better. On this trip, I was fortunate to be partnered with Neil Holmes of Blitz and Caroline Parkinson of Creative Scotland. Over the trip I quickly realised the overlap in our thinking and ideas, and believe I have made a few more Ideological Buddies.

Overall, the trip was not only eye opening, but also full of potential opportunities. The problem, however, with potential opportunities is that you need to first spot them and then you need to act on them. The trip is only the introduction, the hard work comes now but hopefully it will involve a few more trips to the sunny beaches of Brazil.

Jeremiah Alexander is an award-winning games designer and digital entrepreneur who has represented the UK's creative and design sectors internationally. A British Council Young Interactive Entrepreuer 2009 finalist, Alexander is active with student-led learning platform Every1Speaks and educational game developer Ideonic.