I’m Michael Douma. I specialize in making clear, useful tools out of complex sources.
My career launched at the start of the century, taking obscure Windows 95 software buried deep in the labyrinth of NIST and turning it into Time.gov — a genuinely useful public service and the first single-purpose .gov website.
Most recently, I’ve helped found and evangelize word association games — on a journey that predates NYT Connections. With NSF and Microsoft support, I built Linguabase, a massive semantic network that helps game studios power endless, interesting levels where players think laterally about how words and ideas are linked.
Two cool articles you can check out trended #1 on Hacker News: “The Small World of English” reports exhaustive random testing showing that nearly any two common English words connect in 6–7 hops through chains of meaningful association (the conceptual basis of my game In Other Words), and “Words with Spaces” illustrates how hundreds of thousands of compound phrases carry conceptual weight but historically weren’t in dictionaries — even though they effectively double the number of meaningful terms worth playing with.
Linguabase is a data platform that supplies puzzle content to word game studios — puzzles with mutually exclusive topics that make players feel smart and remain interesting, tapping different corners of language. Built over fifteen years, initially to support my own games, it grew into a production system built on dozens of parallel pipelines that amalgamated over 130 million LLM inferences along with extensive handcrafted human data, tuned for the needs of word games.
I founded an indie game studio and launched two games that break from the genre’s reliance on letter tiles, anagrams, and spelling. Word association games aren’t just more interesting — they open up game mechanics with more ways to win, playable by broader demographics.
In Other Words is a daily puzzle about finding paths between seemingly unrelated words by following chains of meaning. OtherWordly has a space-adventure arcade feel, combining word decoding with matching words by their meanings.
Beyond evangelizing word association games, I judge for IGF, MAGFest/MIVS, GEE! Awards, CODiE, Serious Play, and Reimagine Education. I’ll always favor play where you learn through play. No “do the math to unlock the fun part.”
After Time.gov, I built calendar content that was too religious for NIST to publish, and so launched WebExhibits.org. It built up over the years with funding from the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities — interactive exhibits on science, art, and culture. I spent the dot-com years consulting for e-book publishers, mobile companies, and startups, which gave me the funds to bootstrap IDEA.org, a nonprofit I founded to work on programs in scientific and cultural literacy, plus a widely used colorblindness simulator tool. I invented a type of hierarchical visualization called SpicyNodes, which reached 315,000 creators and 40 million users. It was that concept-visualizer which led into the idea-linking games.
My two games have been recognized by Most Innovative Game (IndiePrize), Games for Good (Serious Play), and Best Educational Game (CODiE). Best Casual Game winner and two-time finalist at the TIGA Awards. Federal support includes a $295K 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-PI).*
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