Pencil Labs is taking a new step in its journey and officially presenting Pencil Games, a Research & Development lab dedicated to creating and refining serious games techniques and approaches. The initiative is born with a focus on three impact verticals:
- 🏛️ CiviTech: civic participation, governance, and evidence-based decision-making.
- 📚 EduTech: socioemotional skills, curricular learning, and behavioral change.
- 💊 HealthTech: cognitive screening, public health, prevention, and gamified rehabilitation.
But why games?
A few months ago, while researching predatory monetization practices (for this other article), I came across a 10-year field study on American brown bears that intrigued me: cubs that play more survive better. The research showed that play — which apparently carries evolutionary costs with no immediate benefits — is directly linked to increased survival, possibly relieving stress and building resistance to future stressors.
Play is not a luxury; it is an evolutionary necessity. But at some point, we reduced games to screens, purchases, and button-tapping, in an industry saturated with repeated formulas and triggers — while indie projects seek to reclaim digital games as a way to express creativity, fun, and play, reconnecting them to their true innovative and resilience-building purpose.
Brazil is the largest gaming market in Latin America, with over 100 million players. Yet when institutions try to harness this power for health, education, or citizenship, most gamification initiatives fail, resulting in boring, horizontal, and generic experiences — just points, rankings, and mechanical missions applied without due attention to the complexity of the problems.
The problem with horizontal gamification
Horizontal gamification happens when we insert game elements and mechanics into areas outside the entertainment world without proper care in deepening the relationship between the mechanics and techniques and the field of interest.
For example, this article, published at SB Games, illustrates the use of a puzzle to incorporate game mechanics into teaching the Brazilian states: the game mechanic is directly related to the object of learning, where territorial boundaries, borders, and the location of each state merge with the very drive of finding the contiguous pieces and completing the puzzle. Consequently, using a domino or card game would have been far less adherent — and far more horizontal — for this initiative.
The lack of depth in the use of game mechanics in the construction of serious games is what we call horizontal gamification.
Traditional educational games and gamified tools are usually adaptations of entertainment structures forced to carry pedagogical content. The result is tools in which fun and the structure of the knowledge object do not converse with each other, offering little to no practical differentiation.
From Discovery to Epic Production
With this challenge in mind, Pencil Games builds the tools and methodologies to operate from game conception through implementation, always deepening game mechanics and strategies so as to fuse them with the pedagogical or technical content to be gamified. To ensure this fusion happens with methodological rigor and commercial viability, we structure our projects in two distinct phases:
- Methodological Research & Prototyping (Discovery) — We don't start with code. We start by bringing together specialists from the field (physicians, neuroscientists, educators, and researchers) to survey the state of the art and define which game structures organically dialogue with the structure of the knowledge we want to convey. We use established frameworks, such as the Core Drives of Octalysis, not as a superficial layer of points and badges, but aligned with learning theories to create validated prototypes. The outcome of this phase is a robust technical scope, evolving from a concept on paper to validation in a relevant environment.
- Epic Production — With the methodology validated, we move into production. As demonstrated by academic research in the field (such as Demenciano Costa's study), the pedagogical effectiveness of a game depends directly on fun and structural similarity to the knowledge object. That is why our technical team applies its full expertise to create an experience of high visual and technical standard. The knowledge to be conveyed must work in favor of fun, creating a virtuous cycle: learning drives engagement, and engagement drives deeper learning.
What we've already built
In just over 18 months, we have launched four projects — such as Colmeia / Bullying Map (education/bullying prevention), Caça Mosquitos VR (public health), and Lady Health (health and well-being) — and are currently working on two more.
More important than the volume of deliveries, however, are the connections and deep relationships we've built with different institutions. It is this network that supports our research efforts with scientific credibility:
- LabLivre / UnB (University of Brasília): Direct dialogue with academia and support for submitting our own projects, connecting Pencil's engineering with scientific research.
- UniSER (University of Aging): A partnership that grants us access to validation for research on cognitive health, aging, and well-being.
- Lobos Academy: A company specialized in developing active learning methodologies and in combating systematic bullying.
- Instituto Cidade Democrática: A Pencil Labs partner for a decade that shares our vision of citizenship and participatory democracy empowered by digital tools, and which now supports us in the launch of our games.
In these and in upcoming projects, working side by side with researchers, physicians, and educators is what ensures our tools are, in fact, validated interventions with measurable results.
The lab is open
We present the complete path from idea to funding, from project to game — with serious methodology, technical validation, and epic production.
If you work in a health, education, or governance institution and believe games can be tools for real intervention, the lab is open to new partnerships.
Check out our portfolio and get in touch!
