🔒New Haven startup Playbl blends gaming with youth health education

It's no secret that kids and teens love playing video games.

While detractors have criticized gaming for its apparent hold on the nation's youth, others have focused on the benefits the medium can provide.

New Haven-based Playbl’s suite of digital health games aims to promote wellness and risk prevention for young people ages 10 to 20.

As mental health has become a hot-button issue in the U.S., especially during the pandemic, Playbl has experienced a significant surge in demand for its products, company officials said.

"The fall of 2020 really drove that home," says Founder Lynn Fiellin, who launched Playbl in January 2021, as a spinout company from the play2PREVENT (p2P) lab at the Yale Center for Health and Learning Games, which she also runs.

With many students sequestered to virtual learning during the pandemic, Fiellin said the lab saw an uptick in issues with mental health and substance misuse, especially with adolescents.

That drove the need among educators, parents and school administrators to find a novel way to assist their students and clients, according to Fiellin, who noted that the lab had issued nearly 400,000 game logins to clients.

The burst of demand motivated the creation of Playbl as a new entity to manage marketing and distribution as a consumer-facing brand.

"It's kind of dividing and conquering," Fiellin said. "Playbl is focused on getting these games in as many hands as possible."

Now in its second year of business, Playbl has its sights set on growing its customer base — particularly bringing p2P clients into the fold — and refining some operational aspects of the company.

According to Vice President of Operation Anusha Raja, the New Haven startup hasn't wasted any time toward that end as the company is finalizing a contract with its first customer, a full-time health educator for a high school, who is planning to use all of Playbl’s games during the coming school year.

"Hopefully, if that goes through, our goal is to have some support staff who can deal with any sort of troubleshooting that comes with having the first customers," Raja says.

Currently, Playbl operates with a lean crew of two employees — Fiellin and Raja — and a five-person advisory team.

Playbl’s target consumer base includes educators, parents and clinicians working with teens and kids.

While the company hasn't reeled in any revenue — admittedly something it is working on this year — it may be a matter of time. Playbl is carving out its piece of the fast-growing serious games industry, which focuses more on education than entertainment.

"There is a huge potential, especially as schools are moving toward educational content within technology," Raja says. "That's our niche market, and we think there is a lot of potential for growth there."

She's not wrong, as reports show the serious games market was valued at almost $6 billion in 2020, and is projected to reach $32.72 billion by 2030 globally.

Redefining health education

Playbl offers five different interactive video games that allow players to delve into critical topics, including smoking and substance abuse and prevention, mental health, and encouraging STI/HIV testing.

According to Fiellin, the company's suite of interactive and immersive games provide a needed alternative solution for health educators that could meet adolescents where they are, specifically regarding tech use.

That has been the case for Zachary Keene, a health educator at West Central School in Macomb, Illinois. He said Playbl's interactive games have been an invaluable tool he used with his high school students.

The Lab distributed the games to Keene as part of a larger push to offer free access during the pandemic while kids were out of school and at home.

"The most valuable thing is that the kids are learning to make decisions on their own," Keene says. "When I was in school, we had the teacher standing up and saying 'this is how you have to do it.’ Kids are learning things in many different ways now, and it's not just a teacher standing up in front of the classroom regurgitating information out of a book to them."

Keene said he stumbled on play2PREVENT's game selections a couple years ago while searching for a novel way to teach his students that could pique their interest and hold their attention.

"There aren't a lot of interactive games for high school kids when it comes to health, so it intrigued me," Keene said, noting that he started with p2P's SmokesSCREEN, which focused on smoking and vaping prevention.

Bootstrapping and beyond

According to Fiellin, Playbl hasn't done any formal fundraising since its launch, opting to "bootstrap it" while the company looks to develop the brand further this year. That hasn't kept the New Haven startup from capturing the attention of lawmakers and philanthropic organizations in recent months.

In May, Playbl was named "Innovator of the Month" by U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy.

A month before that, Playbl was among a dozen recipients recognized by The Blavatnik Fund for Innovation at Yale. The organization awarded more than $3 million in accelerator funding to projects that resulted in spinoff companies like Playbl hailing from the university.

While Fiellin declined to comment on the amount the company received out of that award, she says the funds are already being put toward developing a new dashboard to track in-game data to help educators and clinicians to analyze student engagement trends.

Raja said Playbl has also seen interest from venture capitalists looking to partner with the company.

"We are in talks with them," Raja says. "We'll see how that goes, but for now, we're focused on keeping it lean and getting non-diluted funds, and once we have the right partner, then we can think about more of a VC series A funding."