About – Mission & history

What we do

We’re a nonprofit game publisher. Our games exercise critical thinking—how ideas relate, how meaning shifts across contexts, how the same word connects to different concepts depending on who you are.
We’re trying to push the word game genre forward, toward something more cognitively interesting and more inclusive. Idea-linking games are conceptually adjacent to the New York Times “Connections” puzzle and party games like Taboo, Codenames, and Decrypto—but built for the screen, with thousands of valid solutions.
Our puzzles reward whatever’s already in your head. Players of all backgrounds can win, whether they know 1980s hair bands or 2010s K-pop, whether their go-to breakfast is Cheerios, Vegemite, or miso soup.
Before games, we built online museums, visualization tools, and partner projects for nonprofits, museums, universities, and government agencies.

Who we are

We’re a small team that’s worked together for nearly two decades. Our work has reached 150 million people. We’re bootstrapped—no investors, no shareholders—funded by grants, product revenue, and contract work.
  • Michael Douma — Founder & Executive Director. Spent his career making complex information accessible. Before IDEA, built time.gov at NIST—the first single-purpose government website. Created WebExhibits and ColoRotate. Built SpicyNodes and the games with Greg. Secures the grants, judges the CODiE and Serious Play awards. See personal web site
  • Grzegorz Ligierko — Technical Director. Senior iOS developer specializing in graphics programming—Metal shaders, real-time visualization, custom rendering. Joined in 2005 to build SpicyNodes. Now builds the games. Co-authored research with Michael in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. See personal web site
  • Li Mei — Language Data Architect. Designed the algorithms that map and weight word relationships in the Linguabase. Mathematics background; decades of software engineering.
The organization started in 1999 in Rockville, Maryland. Incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2002. Each phase built on the last—from WebExhibits (110M visitors) to SpicyNodes (40M users, $2.4M revenue) to word games today.