This Is Not a Game: The Game
A live mobile trivia game built with Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and Win the Future, the political group I co-founded with Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus. It paid real cash for civics knowledge, passed a million downloads, and reached the App Store's top five before the 2018 midterms.
By 2018 it felt like everyone had an opinion about democracy and almost no one could explain how it actually worked. HQ Trivia was huge that year, and the format suggested an obvious experiment: what if you paid people to learn civics the way HQ paid them to know pop trivia?
We launched 'This Is Not a Game: The Game' on the September 12 episode of Full Frontal. It was a live nightly trivia game, real questions about how government works, real cash on the line, up to five thousand dollars a night. I built it with Win the Future, the political group I had co-founded with Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, with one practical goal underneath the fun: get players registered to vote before the midterms.
It worked, maybe too well. By Win the Future's count the game passed a million downloads and reached the top five on the App Store, and on launch night the crowd was big enough to crash the servers. That is an embarrassing problem and a good one to have.