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.
Introduction 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.
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!
(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.
** 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.
Introduction
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.
Introduction 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’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 4thEcsite, 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.
International Tinkering Education Conference I’ve been fortunate to be involved in the fantastic GEEK play & games festival 3 times now. Once at Dreamland in Margate, last summer at the Singapore Science Centre in (you’ve guessed it) Singapore and I’ve just come back from GEEK in Beijing! This time we were part of the inaugural – International Tinkering Education Conference at the Soong Ching Ling Science & Culture Center for Young People.