I’m Michael Douma. I build interactive things that help people understand complex stuff — through games, visualization, or whatever medium fits the problem.
Right now I’m making idea-linking word games that break from the genre’s century-old assumptions. Crosswords and Wordle ask “can you guess our answer?” — and they tend to optimize for a narrow demographic. I’m more interested in games where a million paths exist and yours reflects your own mental map of language. That requires different infrastructure — and real care about what words appear together.
In Other Words, which launched in 2025, is a daily puzzle where you find paths between seemingly unrelated words by following chains of meaning. OtherWordly combines word decoding with physics puzzles in a space-adventure setting — it won awards in earlier versions and is being retooled for commercial launch. Both are powered by Linguabase, a semantic network of 1.5 million words I’ve been building for over a decade. The goal is games that are genuinely fun to play and quietly make you a better thinker. Both adapt to vocabulary level — a 9-year-old and a grandparent can solve the same puzzle differently.
Building Linguabase means LLMs at industrial scale: over 130 million operations through batch pipelines where models audit other models’ output. Before that, mapping word associations on supercomputers (2013).
I judge learning game awards for several organizations — GEE! Awards, CODiE, Serious Play, Reimagine Education — which keeps me connected to what’s happening in the field and forces me to articulate what actually works. My short answer: the play should BE the learning. No “do math to unlock the fun part.”
I started with early web work at NIST, where I created time.gov, the first single-purpose .gov site. When I built calendars content that was too religious for NIST to publish, I launched WebExhibits.org to host it myself — time.gov linked to it, and traffic took off from there. I spent the dot-com years consulting for publishers, mobile companies, and startups, which gave me the cushion to bootstrap IDEA.org, where I’m founder and executive director, until federal grants let me focus on multidisciplinary exhibits and later radial visualizations. Over the years IDEA grew to include interactive exhibits on science, art, and culture, an influential blog on digital learning and informal education, and multi-year collaborations where I led teams of up to 20. Along the way I created SpicyNodes, a visualization tool for hierarchical information that reached about 40 million users. Around 2015 I started asking: what if linking ideas could be a game?
The thread connecting all of it: taking things that are dense or specialized — how color works, how ideas connect, how words relate through meaning — and making them accessible to people who aren’t experts.
Awards include Best Educational Game (CODiE), Most Innovative Game (IndiePrize), Games for Good (Serious Play), and Arts & Humanities (Reimagine Education), plus Apple Arcade finalist. Federal support includes a $275K NSF SBIR for game development, $20K NSF I-Corps for customer discovery, a 2.3 million hour NSF supercomputer grant for early NLP experiments, and a $597K Dept. of Education grant for multidisciplinary science education (co-Principal Investigator).*
Get in touch or find me on LinkedIn.
*NSF SBIR #2304423 (2023); NSF I-Corps #2304423 (2023); NSF XSEDE #IRI130011 (2013–2014); Dept. of Ed. FIPSE #P116B011454 (2001–2006)
© Michael Douma