It’s 2025 already! How did that happen??? I was showing my website to someone at a networking event recently and was already feeling a little apprehensive - knowing I hadn’t updated my website since 2023! However, imagine my horror when the first page that popped open greeted me with a large 2021 logo! Turns out that my last proper update on my work was not even 2023 - but in fact 2021.
I know it’s not quite the end of 2021 - but realistically I’m not going to finish any more projects before the end of the year. And since I’m trying to take it a bit easier to catch up on business admin - this seemed the right time for this post!
Am I a Workaholic? I’ve been very fortunate to mostly keep working during COVID. In fact, despite a small blip at the beginning of COVID - where a bunch of projects were cancelled - I’ve had too much work.
…and this time it’s online! Back in 2019, we toured ‘A Moment of Madness’ to a number of UK festivals. AMoM is an immersive experience with live actors and Escape Game style puzzles where the players are on a stake-out in a multi-story car-park tracking politician Michael Makerson (just another politician with a closet full of scandals!).
We were hoping to bring it back in 2020/21 – but a worldwide pandemic got in the way of real-world experiences. So, instead it has been re-imagined for the post-COVID world.
This blogpost discusses a Zoom-based Escape Game Experience developed in collaboration with Newark Museum of Art.
We built a one-hour experience that allowed large groups of players (50+) to work in small teams to solve puzzles related to the Ballantine House and it’s history. The game has a single host (a member of the education team playing the character of maid or butler) that allows them to manage the entire experience. The game premiered at Newark Museum’s ‘Game On’ public community day where we ran 3 games with ~25 players in each game. It attracted attendees from all over the world, not just Newark. Overall, I’m delighted with what we produced as a team in just a month and the feedback from players was very positive.
Last year, I worked with the amazing National Trust property The Workhouse in Southwell.
I was reminded of this project recently when talking about how I work with Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums (+ other art organisations) and that it’s one of many that I had failed to blog about!
Often people come across my museum-work via my free DIY tutorials (either online or through word of mouth). As I’m sure I have mentioned elsewhere these are all open-source – please use & improve! Many museums use these resources without contacting me. Others will drop me an email with questions or just to let me know that they’ve used them successfully somewhere in the world. I’d rather people did email me than get stuck and abandone the tutorials all together – and these questions get added to the general FAQ
(This is really part 2 of a blog post about the ‘different ways I work with museums’. You can read this on it’s own or start with part 1 first.)
For this project Outside Studios found me (I think via the free tutorials). They were doing a large redevelopment over the entire Workhouse site and I would chip-in with the Digital Tour Guides.
Visitor feedback I’m sure NT have better visitor feedback but I thought I’d just take a few quotes from Trip Advisor. Some that mention the full redevelopment work of Outside Studios and some that focus on the Digital Tour Guide.
** This post is to encourage you to go and play a museum-themed online Escape Game I built. So, you can skip the rest of this article and head straight here to play!
Now, you may have already seen that I have a brand new tutorial which shows you how to create your own online Audio Tours. This means your visitors can use their own devices to view / listen to the content #BYOD. It uses a new webapp that I’ve built call YourMuseum.guide. You can read the extensive tutorials here – although the whole point is that it’s super quick and easy to use – so you might not even need to read them!
A Moment of Madness is a project that I’ve been collaborating on with Katie Day of The Other Way Works for over 5 years now!!! In fact you can even see some of the earlier blog posts on it here:
In 2014 back when it was still called ‘Agent in a Box’ In 2016 when we had some ACE support to build and show a prototype (AiaB reboot) Anyway – now it’s out there I wanted to write about it some more (doing my best to avoid giving away any spoilers) and also to mention that Katie and I are running a FREE 2-day Immersive Theatre workshop this September in Birmingham.
This is a loooong overdue post about a collaborative, strategy game I built last summer (2018), SCOOT3. ‘Super Computer Operated Orchestrations of Time 3’ is a hybrid board game / videogame with Escape Game and Strategy elements designed to be played in teams of up to 10 and takes ~45 mins. It is one of my theories of where we might see Escape Games go next.
Brief History For a long time I’ve wanted to build games that are hybrid digital / physical experiences, and was fortunate to meet Martyn Ruks, owner of Chronyko, builders of ‘Immersive Training’. I’d be aware of some of the amazing projects they were delivering using Escape Game / Immersive Theatre ideas but focusing the Corporate Sector.
I’ve just returned from a fantastic week in Copenhagen at the 2019 Ecsite Conference – Pushing Boundaries hosted at The Experimentarium in Hellerup. It was my 4th Ecsite, having contributed to previous Ecsite conferences in Graz, Porto and Geneva. Here’s some details from Ecsite 2017 in Porto where in 2 days we built an Audio Game, Darwin’s Rabbits for their Botanical Gardens.
Here’s a list of my Ecsite involvements over the years.
We’re jamming! Ecsite has always had a big appeal for me – not only due to the exciting talks on the Main Conference but also for its pre-conference. These are the two-days before the conference-proper begins where people can pitch to run 1- or 2-day workshops. Normally at museum conferences workshop sessions are limited to 45 minutes or maybe an hour and barely enough to scratch the surface of a topic. The Ecsite pre-conference is a fantastic way to get much deeper into a subject and allows us to run more crazy events which are more akin to GameJams!