How a game design studio uses Grist to turn stories into structured data
Databases like Grist help users organize, analyze, and make sense of structured data, or data with “a standardized format for efficient access by software and humans.” When most people think of this type of data, they typically think of information that is ordered and numbers-based. Lab measurements, budgets, financial reports, CRMs – records that can easily be sorted, aggregated, and analyzed in a standardized way. Put another way: boring stuff.
What about something more dynamic, like war stories? Real-life tales of historical battles, special operations, and missions? The kind of information you’d expect to see in a movie, not a quarterly report.
Savage Game Design is a game studio whose mission is to create historically accurate Vietnam War-era video games. The team works with Special Forces veterans to collect primary source material and create interactive storylines based on real battles and missions.


Turning stories into structured data
At first glance, the type of “data” that the Savage team collects – war stories retold by veterans, battlefield operations and missions recounted in memoirs, video and audio recordings from the front, books and documents published across decades – doesn’t seem to fit the definition of structured data. But when you strip each of these stories down to their core, that’s exactly what you’re left with.
Be it a campaign, a mission, or a battle, every war story is made up of structured data. Each story involves specific battalions and companies and soldiers. Each story is grounded in a specific place and happened at a specific time. They involved common combatants and happened in the pursuit of broader goals and objectives. Links – relationships between data points – are crucial in assembling broader narratives.
Callum Spawforth, a Grist developer who is also a member of the Savage team, first proposed the idea of using a Grist database to supplement the team’s existing tools like Google Docs and basic spreadsheets.
“Originally, the team was planning on using Google Docs for all this,” Callum said, “And they’re talking about, ‘Oh, we need to know who was where, [and] when.’ This sounds a lot like structured data. So, I proposed using a database tool for it.”
Once Callum showed Grist to the team, they were quickly sold on it. Adapting their data to a relational database not only provided a better organizational backbone but let the team work with their data in ways that their existing tools couldn’t support.
“It was the querying,” Callum explained, “It was the fact that we could actually go and ask questions of the data…and we could take it and project it in whatever forms we need[ed].”
“A veteran might say, ‘I’m pretty sure we did this in the summer of ‘68.’ How do we turn that into something we can sort by and categorize? … We could say, ‘What happened in June ‘68,’ … so [Grist] pulls out every summer event, as well as anything we know happened in June.”

Querying the database allows the Savage team to quickly identify all their source material from specific time periods or locations or involving specific units or battalions. Using powerful filters and linked references and sorting through structured data empowers the team to establish connections between their sources that could never be accomplished by a simple Control-F.
It was the querying. It was the fact that we could actually go and ask questions of the data.
– Callum Spawforth
The team can use table widgets filtered by time, location, combatants, or any other parameter to begin shaping their storylines out of the larger database without losing a connection to that original material. Keeping a single source of truth not only helps the Savage team maintain historical accuracy across their stories, but it provides a basis to use their data in multiple different ways.
Beyond video games, the Savage team aspires to use their data for more creative endeavors like books and documentary films, as well as ways to provide information back to the Special Forces veterans that the team works with.
“One thing that we’re interested in is giving veterans a copy of their own personal timeline… and that is entirely doable once you’ve modeled it and done it in Grist.”

