Hey, everybody, welcome back to The Covenant Eyes Podcast. I'm so glad to have you joining us today. We're going to be talking about one of my personal favorite topics, which is video gaming. I love doing that. As a mother of two children that just got through our high school years and, we spent a lot of time playing video games. And I'll tell you, the good, bad and the ugly about that industry. But, Rob, I know you're excited about today's conversation too, because you've got grandkids. I bet they like video games. This is something that's near and dear to your heart too. Yeah, absolutely. So great conversation. I think today, our guest today is Brent Dusing. He is the founder and CEO of TruPlay. And, Brent welcome to Covenant Eyes. Thanks for joining us. Thanks. Good to be with you. Hey, Brent, would you just start just give us a little bit of your background and how and why you started to play. Yeah, I've been a serial tech entrepreneur for for almost 20 years. I built a company called Cell Fire, which, if you've ever shopped at the grocery store, they say use your cell phone to save money or use digital coupons. That's what we did. And we actually did the first time a mobile phone integrated into a point of sale system, in America, and then built some games on Facebook that were very popular. We had over 7 million people play our games. Journey of Jesus, journey of Moses. You might you might have seen those a few years back. We did TruPlay for for one primary reason which which is that the situation for our children today is is dire. You know, anxiety, suicide and depression rates are all time highs for children. The average male's exposed to pornography when he was 11 years old. I'm, you know, I'm sure you guys, of course, very focused on that. You know, drug legalization has been so glorified and, and frankly, even encouraged in, in so many areas, and legalized that you're seeing evidence of higher schizophrenia, higher anxiety, a lot of kind of mental illness really result in that in children. And the worst stat, in my mind at least, is that well over 60% of Americans who are over 40 believe in God. Only 31% of children believe in God, right? It's because they're on screens. All these things, they're on screens over 50 hours a week, and they're getting content that's either, neutral or toxic. Right? And obviously, you guys do a lot of work at Covenant Eyes around toxic content. You do a lot of great work around that. And the problem is, though, it's not just pornography. It can even be as subtle as making light or making fun of the things of God. You know that you know Jesus. The name Jesus Christ is never used in any popular content unless it's a swear word. You never talk about Jesus as as God, as someone who rose from the dead is doing miracles, or frankly, even as a valid historical figure, it's all kind of been whitewashed away. If you watch popular movies or TV shows or play video games. Right? So, the impetus for TruPlay is let's be where kids are. Where are they? They're playing video games. The the bulk of their screen time is video games. Let's build something that's amazing. That's beautiful, that's fun. And that's what we've seen. Our kids love our product. The average child uses to play an hour and a half a week, so we're more than doubling their exposure to God's truth. They actually enjoy playing our games. Our stats are showing us more than the top ten games in the App Store. So if we look at the most popular games on phones and tablets, our games are outperforming those, so people, people love it and they're growing and they're learning. We're hearing stories from parents saying, boy, my kid, you know, learned more about who God was. They learn more about their own identity. They learn more about courage and bravery. And that that makes us happy because that's why we're here. That's incredible. And I'm just so thankful for your organization because, as I kind of indicated on the opening, you know, my kids, when they were growing up, you know, there was certainly the Wii, which had some cleaner games that were just good fun, Mario Kart and those types of things and even the old NES, we'd break that out and have some fun there. But when you started getting into the PlayStation and the Xbox games, a lot of those games were a lot of fun. But they were very, very dangerous. Not only just the language that was coming through or the violence that was coming through on those games. But the content themselves was very counter culture to the biblical worldview. And so a lot of those we had to pull the plug on as soon as we got into them. So talk to us a little bit about what kind of games we can expect with TruPlay. And how do they compare to some of the games that maybe other people are used to? Yeah. So a TruPlay, you know, if you if you're not familiar, TruPlay is one app. It's a bunch of games inside it as well as we got video content and digital comics and the games themselves are like very popular games that you might have played in the App Store. So there's there's a kind of an adventure, game where you're it's a platformer, like, if you remember, you know, Mario Brothers or, or the second Zelda game, there's a lot of kind of platforming games. There's puzzles kind of tied into it. You switch characters to try to accomplish missions, and the story's kind of told throughout that, there are there's a puzzle game where you're matching stained glass pieces, like a match three like if you played Royal Match or Candy Crush or Bejeweled Blitz, and the stained glass pieces form a stained glass window, the stained glass window comes to life and a character from the Bible comes. It tells you their story from a first person viewpoint. We've got a word game. We've got, kind of what's called a tower defense game. We've got to kind of align resources to defend against the bad guys coming at you. We've got a game, a sword fighting game called, Benjamin and the armor of Logos. Where where the character learns about the armor of God, the player learns about the armor of God as a character goes out through through battles. Really based on Ephesians 6 Another game that's a slingshot game where you're a little girl. Is she? Her parents are divorced and she's getting bullied at school, and she's learning. Your identity is not who people tell you who you are. Your identity is you're a child of God. Which is an important conversation, right? For today's kids. We have another game coming out next month called King David's Battles, where you get to play King David and go through his. It's a it's a battle game. And there's, you know, there's bad guys. And it kind of goes through his story of growing from being a boy to being a man. And so our games, you know, everything we do is built to be fun. It's built to be engaging. It's built to be beautiful. But everything we do is layered with God's truth, whether it's based on a biblical story or some of these characters we've created, like Lucas, who's on my shirt, who you know, the skunk in a crocodile robot suit, this fantasy world called rim. You might have seen Maple. She's a bunny rabbit in a tiger costume. There are these characters who. They. They look ridiculous. But they're based on personalities of real people, you know, they're so, you know, going through, you know, one of them is very headstrong, believes in God. One of his parents are divorced. Lucas, he's autistic. And his brother died a year ago. So they're very, very different personality types that are very dealing with very real things children deal with today. But where God's truth is woven in and kind of who God is and based on Scripture and prayer and really the reality and the love of of Jesus Christ. Yeah, I love that. Especially when I looked at your games, those characters, and just how real a life, in the situations that kids are facing every day. But then you build the spiritual, world or worldview in there. So talk a little bit more about that, if you will, Brent. I mean, so, so much of what kids view and take in today has no spiritual content at all. And like I said, we're we're losing a whole generation in church to understanding who Christ is. And in that biblical worldview, these kinds of games, this kind of entertainment is so needed. How are you building in all of that biblical content, and why is it so, so necessary, needed in today's with today's youth? And this is the second part. First, I think it's needed because unless you take your kid to a Bible teaching church, your kid's not going to get it anywhere. Well, unless you send them to a Christian school, I suppose. But there's there's no where in media. You're not going to turn on Disney Plus or Netflix or download a popular game from the App Store, or frankly, go to YouTube almost at all and have them get any kind of content that's going to grow their faith. Teach them about who God is, teach them the reality of Jesus Christ. Give them biblical underpinnings at least. And there's very there's almost nothing, in fact. And most of the content they're going to get from the most popular, the best done media, the best executed media, entertainment options are going to work against it. And that's what Disney has been doing for years. And that's what, you know, there's there's a company right now called Roblox, one of the very most popular gaming platforms in the whole world for kids. And they're under a lawsuit right now by a group of parents who are saying, well, there was child predatory behavior. And and that's a big class action deal. And so, you know, it's it's as though there's an attack against our children and the platforms and many content creators are are complicit. And that's and you're seeing things that you wouldn't have thought to tell that anybody would be able to say to a child ten years ago there was unthinkable. Is today unquestionable? And as a parent, you know, at TruPlay, we are we have really world class professionals here from industry leading companies that have built probably games you guys have played or feature on Amazon. Everybody uses. But we're also parents and we're also people who believe that, yes, God calls to pray, but he actually calls us to do, you know, too often as as Christians, I think in America. Well, I'll just pray about it, okay? You are supposed to pray, but if you can't take action, you're supposed to act because the Bible is full of stories of people did what God told them to do, and you almost never see a story where the whole story was, oh, they just prayed. And that's all they did. And then they died. No, no, they prayed and then they walked out what God had called them to do. And that's we don't do enough of that. And that's the team that we have here. Now, how do we weave that into the games? Is the other part of your question, Rob? Well, the first is we build some of our games are based on the Bible, King David's battles. You play the story of King David from the beginning, him being a shepherd boy all the way through, stained glass where you're you're solving these puzzles, building these stained glass windows that then the story comes to life and a character tells you their story. And then there's the rim verse where the characters, as I mentioned, your maple, the tiger Bunny and Lucas and my shirt, the skunk in the crocodile rocket suit. Oliver, who's a fox in a in a bear costume? Sure. Those are a it's a fantasy world, but it's a world where God is real. The Bible is true. There's also real evil. And the characters, some are believers in God and some are not really. And they're on a journey. And one of them learns, they get stuck. And Oliver, who believes maybe God exists, but I'm not really sure why anybody why would anybody pray? Why it's so weird to try to talk to somebody who's not even there? And so they want hurt. Maple and Oliver get stuck, and Mabel goes, okay, well, we're going to pray. Well, what does that mean, Oliver? She's just just take my hand. And dear God, it's me, Maple. We're stuck right now. We need your help. Amen. And Oliver goes. What? That's it. Yeah. That's it. So we. So all we have to do. So it's it's kind of weaving in practical circumstances of where your walk with God becomes real because you're seeing the characters deal with the same issues you deal with in your real life, in a fantasy setting, you know, where there's monsters and swordplay and fireballs and bad guys and spaceships and all kinds of stuff that makes it fun. That's amazing. You know, it's interesting because, we were speaking to someone that does, content, but they're more in the film and the TV area, and they're generating good, wholesome Christian content. And one thing they said is that, you know, it's really important that we compete at the level that the other, you know, the the people that are working against us are at. So your games, I would imagine you said you had world class people working on them. They are at the level that you would see with some of these other games. Right. Because that's going to be really important if we want to get our kids engaged with these things, they got to be fun. They've got to be engaging, and they have to be on the same level. Right? Yeah, you're right. And it's borne out in our in our statistics where, you know, we're seeing our top we have 11 games on the platform and counting and the top six games outperformed the top ten games that are on the App Store. So in other words, if your child has one of the top ten games in the App Store on their phone and they have to play, they're more likely to play to want to choose to play our games and come back to it again and again and again. Then they are the popular game on the top of the charts, on the App Store, on iOS. Another example is we have daily active usage rate. So the percentage of people who use it every day is higher than these multi-billion dollar kids. Educational platforms. So we know kids really enjoy it. We know they want to play it. You know, you you in 2024, you as a parent, you know, it's hard to give your kids Robitussin, right? What is Robitussin? I know this tastes awful, but need a drink. It'll help your cough. What we have to do is serve them chocolate cake with vitamins and calcium and protein. So the kids try to eat chocolate cake for breakfast, and you look at the box, you're like, well, actually, it's better than the cereal. Was going to give them a full look at the side of the box and the nutritional facts to go ahead and eat chocolate cake that has vitamins. That's what we build at TruPlay, right? Is is they love it, but it's actually better and more nourishing for them then the secular alternative, if you will. Yeah. I mean, and that's so important. I mean, kids have to have to love this and have to play it. They're going to do something anyway. They're going to be on there and they're going to be playing something. Brent, what about the parents? How, you know, you mentioned that at the opening. You know, how have they received it? What kind of feedback are you getting from parents? Are they wanting more and more of this? Yeah, we're getting a lot of great feedback from parents. You know, there's there's two groups of parents that we serve. One group is, predominantly, you know, Christian families, and they're, they're fed up with what they're getting. And but they know they can't tell their kids, hey, go play outside and chew tree bark for eight hours a day. They can't they can't say that. Right? There's not going to happen. Their kids going to grab a device. In fact, I spoke to a woman recently, who's very, very successful. I'll just say, in the entertainment business, very successful Christian. And she had a situation where one of her children, download a game that's very innocuous. And then there were some very inappropriate ads. And so this, this, this mom I'm speaking about, you know, she feels betrayed because it's like, you know, I we download this is an Oculus game. I remember what it was. Might have been a ballerina game or whatever, or some silly game about puppy dogs. Fine. But then you get an ad where it suddenly you have to have a conversation about some sexual topic you didn't want to have with a six year old. Right? You know, there's other games where they sneak in, you know, sexual content or very violent content and look at, look, we have sword fights in our games. We make a game about King David. Right? But there's a way where there's so much gruesomeness and gore and dehumanization, where it goes too far. You know, the again, the glorification of drug use, I mean, and even demonic stuff, you know, witchcraft and all this garbage is becoming popular and in a suddenly appealing or they're twisting the story of of who God is and who Jesus is and all this other stuff. So I would say that we're having parents say, we're so glad we can trust it. My kid loves it. You know, it was a story. A kid was scared in the dark to go to the bathroom in the middle of night, and he wakes up and he says, God tells me to be strong and courageous, which is the punch line for our character. Maybe a little girl who's a tiger bunny who's very brave. That's her line. God tells me to be stronger, courageous. So he says, if he goes to the bathroom wall at night. Now, you know, I didn't we didn't start to play to help kids, to penetrate. But but that's just one example that God used, right? Another story somebody wrote in and they said we were riding bikes. We ride bikes as a family, you know, outside. And I like to do that too, with my family. I said, I think it's great. And there was these hard hills and my child was getting discouraged. And then suddenly he said, well, God told me that I can be a brave fox. Well, that's Oliver, Oliver's our boy. Who? The one who was needed to be taught how to pray, because in his story, he learns more about his relationship with God and he becomes more power empowered, more brave because God's calling him to be brave and courageous. And so he does that. And so this kid says that, and they're they're using that as a way to not complain during the family bike ride. Now, again, you may laugh. We may I'm, I'm, I'm laughing too at those examples that seem innocuous. But, you know, again, we live in a world where kids, they're so beaten down, there's so much depression, there's so much feeling of helplessness, or, hey, are you sad? Take a pill or do you feel awkward about your life? Maybe you have a different identity than you thought to say no, no, no. Maybe you're just a teenager and you feel awkward because all of us did when we were teenagers. I digress, but the point is, it's building these foundational beliefs now. We didn't make it up. God made it up. God. God gave us his word. We just try our best to incorporate that and then do it in an artistic way that that families and kids and and we're finding parents love it because they know they can trust it. There's no ads, there's no in-app purchase. There's, you know, pay a subscription and that's it. There's no hidden charges, there's no chat room. So nobody's going to be talking to your kid. And the kids love it. And so they just. And and there's a ton of content. There's new stuff all the time. We just added a new game on Friday. King David Battles comes out next month. We have some awesome stuff in the works that I'm really excited about. New games. That one of one game is pushing the boundaries on kind of praise and worship. I don't think anybody's ever done a game on praise and worship like this game is going to be. So it's it's just different artistic and fun game experiences, all about, you know, the beauty of who God is. It's amazing. Oh my goodness. You know, and you brought up a really good point because I think a lot of parents that we talk to, you know, they're very conscious about, you know, protecting their kids from seeing pornography online in different places. But I think we forget that there's a back door. I think we forget about the games. I think we forget about when you download these apps, that the advertisements are out of our control. And there's so much that we have to be aware of. So I love this idea of a safe place that parents can have their kids engage with technology. It's protected, it's safe, it's fun, and it has all of our Christian values built in. So talk to us a little bit about how parents can find this. I know you mentioned it's on the App Store, but I'm assuming you also have a website where people can learn more about your company and your founding, and you know who who you are and how you got started in this industry as well. Yeah. So go to true, play Gamescom true, play Gamescom TruPlay games, and you can read all about us. You know, again, we have a team of just tremendous people, you know, that have built products and games you've probably played, including running the Farmville franchise. One of our guides, one of our guys built the algorithm at Amazon, where you split this order into multiple packages. This this package, you'll get here faster. But we're also all parents, and we're also all committed to the mission. And so again, we were we were fed up with what we were seeing and decided to take action. And God called us to it. But, you can read about our story and some of the results that our parents are getting. We've been endorsed by tremendous people, the Billy Graham Association, which is a huge honor. Promise keepers, Sam Rodriguez, Pastor Sam Rodriguez, Dean Cain, Kevin Sorbo, Candace Cameron, Mike Huckabee, just some really tremendous leaders in this space. And I think, more to come, more, more people are kind of hearing about it and getting excited to see something that, kids are really enjoying that's truly done with beauty and excellence, but that it contains God's truth. And our goal. If you're listening as a parent, I think too often parents get blamed. Oh, it's your fault, your kid. It's your fault. No, no, it's not your fault. It's the fault of the platforms and the content makers. You can't look over your kid's shoulder all day, every day. That's obviously why you guys, this is covenant. You can't stand over somebody's, you know, shoulder every single waking minute of your day. You have other things to do. So I don't like to blame the parents. We like to come alongside the parents and hopefully at TruPlay. By the way, a lot of our parents enjoy playing our games to that, to our little secret is parents enjoy it too. They like the storytelling. We try to write the stories in a way you would enjoy it, like maybe some of your favorite animated movies you might like. I like to watch Lion King with my kid because I think it's actually a good story, and I enjoy some of the humor. The 1994 version. So we try to write in that way that people enjoy the characters, they enjoy the stories and get a little joy out of it, too. And and so hopefully it's really a blessing, for families and parents and, and encourage you guys to check that out. You play games and and look, this is a movement. Our goal right now only 30% of kids believe in God. What if that goes to 40 or 50 to over half it? Change the whole generation to change the whole world, to get kids believing in God and walking that out. And that can happen over time. And media has been the culprit. Entertainment's been the culprit of declining. It can absolutely be part of God's plan to take it in the right direction. So it's going to take a movement of people signing up, subscribing, sharing it with their friends. You know, movements are never done by one, they're done by many. And, with God's blessing. So, I appreciate you asking about it. We'll put those, those links in our show notes, but, we are of, like, mind, you know, Covenant Eyes. And you guys, we're on the same page in terms of just helping families, helping individuals be protected on what they're viewing and what they're doing. But the reason we do that is to draw people closer to Christ. And, that's the bottom line. And so we're so thankful to to have you on and talk with you today. If you haven't seen their games, check it out. It is high quality. It's first class. Brent, if you had just kind of one of, just a quick final word to, to our viewers, what would that be? I think what my my word, I would say that at TruPlay, one of our mottos is we think parents make the best parents. In other words, I think that a lot of parents we're hearing from we're tired of having media companies make content most, by the way, a lot of people making the content, they don't have kids themselves, but they're making content to try to change the minds and hearts and souls or your kid. We don't agree with that. And and we hope that this is something as parents, as Christian parents, that blesses your family and something that that changes generation. And for those of you listening and look, by the way, you guys have been doing great work at Covenant Eyes, and we have a ton of respect for you because you are taking on a very, very, very serious problem in our country that frankly, most people don't have the courage or even the knowledge to deal with, by the way. So so kudos to you guys. And and so as a result of that, it can seem depressing sometimes as a parent. Well, gosh, you know, anxiety, suicide, depression rates all time highs and pornography exposure which you know, you guys, you know and and and only so many kids believe in God and look at what they're teaching in schools and look at what happened the last time I took my kid to a an animated movie. But the one thing I want you guys to know if you're listening is God's not done. He is not given up on us. He is not left us alone. He has a plan and he's using people like Covenant Eyes. He's using people like TruPlay. There's other people out there too, and there is a movement happening where, God's truth is the light is shining because there's there's so much darkness right now that the light shines through. What is John? It's John. John one five and the light shines in the darkness in the darkness does not overcome it. And that's where we are today. So that's my encouragement for you as a listener. God's not done and be part of the movement. Absolutely. That's a great way to bring today's episode to a close. And listeners, you have a clear call to action. Today. I want you to go check out TruPlay. I want you to get that on your kid's devices. We we have to be intentional with our parenting. We have to make, you know, choices about what content our children are getting exposed to. And TruPlay is one of those resources that you can trust, and you can lean into that, and you know that your kids are going to be taken care of. So get out there, check it out, download it, subscribe, support our friends at TruPlay and thank you all for tuning in to this episode of The Covenant Eyes Podcast. Take care. God bless you.