Category: Events (Page 1 of 40)

RECON, Redux: The Virtual Escape Room Con is Back

August 10, 2021 / Michael Andersen

The Cipher Organization is a secret society that hosted annual events for well over a century “to gather the world’s most clever codebreakers, riddle solvers, and conundrum designers for the sharing of knowledge…and clandestine recruitment.” Due to the pandemic, the Cipher Organization created the Reality Escape Convention (RECON, for short) to test the mettle of new recruits through a free, virtual event.

Or at least, that’s what the alternate reality game embedded within RECON’s inaugural escape room conference would have you believe. In reality, the 2020 event was created by the escape room blog Room Escape Artist, and featured appearances from everyone from escape room creators and video game developers to Survivor contestants and cruciverbalist magicians. Starting on August 22nd, RECON will return for another round of virtual programming that can be experienced free of charge. And while it’s too soon to say whether the Cipher Organization will return, it looks like RECON 2021 will also feature a “secret” ARG.

RECON Reconnaissance: An ARG-centric Look at the RECON Schedule
While RECON 2020 is a conference focused on the escape room scene, the schedule is riddled with sessions and topics that should be of particular interest to ARG fans.

Elan Lee – Best known in ARG circles for his role in helping create the genre through his work on The Beast for the film Artificial Intelligence, Lee is giving a talk called Escape Rooms Taught Me How to Build a Booth, discussing his recent work as co-creator and CEO of Exploding Kittens and the wildly creative (and sometimes contentious) way the company has approached convention booths.
Errol Elumir – Although possibly best known for his role as co-host of the Room Escape Divas podcast, Errol is a prolific puzzle designer in his own right, and has run the annual Cryptex Hunt since 2018, hiding puzzles in an impressive array of framing devices including a MUD, magazine, online novel, and most recently, a point-and-click adventure game jam. He was also co-creator of the RECON’s 2020 ARG along with Mike Augustine. It’s more than a little fitting, then, that his talk is on Five Things Designers Should Know About Escape Room Puzzle Creation.
Rita Orlov and Summer Herrick – Their session frames hinting as Fun Insurance, and focuses on ensuring that hint systems help enhance the experience for players. ARGNet previously reviewed Orlov’s upcoming tabletop puzzle game The Emerald Flame as a prime example of what a single-player ARG experience might look like. Herrick, owner of Seattle’s Locurio escape rooms, was part of the running team for the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt, and helped design a personal favorite puzzle for that year, providing additional experience at creating (and hinting) for puzzles designed for larger audiences.
Neil Patrick Harris – Yesterday, the RECON team announced that Neil Patrick Harris would be kicking off RECON 2021. Harris has been extremely active in the immersive space over the years, both on the creative side for projects like Accomplice: Hollywood and BoxONE, and as an active participant in shows like The Tension Experience.

RECON Basic access is available for anything from $0 to $50 (with a suggested ticket price of $30), and offers full access to the full RECON lineup of speakers, in addition to video and voice chat “bars” to encourage socializing with fellow attendees as well as the return of the Exhibit Hall to check out virtual vendor booths.

RECON Pro tickets are available for $100, which unlocks facilitated chats after select talks, Discord AMAs with select speakers and guests in the Discord, “Birds of a Feather” chats with fellow attendees, and active workshop sessions. RECON VIP tickets priced at $500 allow for a more curated experience, allowing for guaranteed access to limited capacity events.

The RECON 2021 schedule and speaker list is packed with a host of interesting people and discussions…which is going to make the allure of the conference’s many opportunities to play escape rooms, puzzle hunts, and ARGs all the more dangerous.

Sneak in Some Free Virtual RECON for Escape Room Con

August 14, 2020 / Michael Andersen

In August 2021, a collective of escape room creators, reviewers, and enthusiasts will converge in Boston for Reality Escape Convention (RECON), a two-day long convention dedicated to the escape room industry hosted by a team of industry leaders. The event promises carefully curated talks from a list of industry leaders, followed by interactive discussion groups with attendees to connect with the community, with early bird tickets priced at $300. The team is headed up by the Room Escape Artist blog, which has previously arranged for a series of Escape, Immerse, Explore escape room tours.

The Reality Escape Convention may be coming to Boston next year, but the wait for RECON content is much shorter. Next week, from Sunday August 23rd to Monday August 24th, the RECON team will be putting on a virtual version of their conference. For free. While the convention originally planned on holding their inaugural Boston con in 2020, they postponed for a year out of consideration for the safety of attendees. However, recognizing that the unprecedented challenges the escape room industry is facing is exactly the right time to assemble the escape room community to connect and share knowledge, the team pivoted to a free virtual convention to help facilitate the sharing of knowledge to set the stage for next year and beyond.

Registration for RECON Global remains open, and over 500 people have already expressed interest in conducting some virtual RECONnaissance in the coming week.

Huntception and the Art of the Meta

February 1, 2016 / Michael Andersen

Once a year hundreds of MIT students, alumni, and puzzle enthusiasts converge in Cambridge for a weekend of almost impossible puzzles, tied together under a light narrative theme. In the five years I’ve been participating in the MIT Mystery Hunt, teams have been asked to turn to puzzles to put on a Broadway musical, rob a bank, save Wonderland, and explore the ocean’s depths. Progress at the Mystery Hunt is driven by tackling meta-puzzles: puzzles that leverage solutions from a group of puzzles as elements of a larger puzzle. The 2016 Hunt prominently featured its elegantly crafted meta-puzzles, delivering a master-class in solid puzzle design.

This article will explore some of those puzzle design choices. In order to discuss those choices, it will be necessary to “spoil” the answers to quite a few puzzles in the Hunt, so read at your own risk. If you want to try your hand at the Hunt spoiler-free, stop reading now and explore the 2016 Hunt website, which conveniently features detailed solutions to every puzzle in the hunt alongside the puzzles themselves.

Theming and the Meta-Puzzle: The Red Herring
Every MIT Mystery Hunt starts with a kick-off event that introduces the year’s theme. This year, kickoff attendees were informed that the 64 participating teams were competing for the top spot in a Dog Show. Sure, there were a few glitches during kickoff. Slides showing scores to future football games…PowerPoint slides responding to questions from the presenter…all clearly red herrings. The 2016 Mystery Hunt was going to be all about cute, adorable puppies competing.

ARGFest Hosts 10-Year Reunion for Bee Enthusiasts in Portland

June 8, 2014 / Michael Andersen

argfest-portland

Ten years ago, the website for Margaret’s House of Bees started acting strangely. Many of the site’s images were glitched beyond recognition, and nonsensical text covered up articles about the Napa Valley-based apiary.

While many of the people who gathered to troubleshoot a bee enthusiast’s website refer to themselves as “Beekeepers”, a passion for the cultivation of honey wasn’t the only reason over half a million people flocked to ilovebees.com over the next four months. I Love Bees was an alternate reality game that introduced Halo fans to the first-person shooter’s rich backstory through over a five-hour long audio drama released into the world through pay phone calls, blog posts, emails, and websites in bite-sized chunks.

Between Thursday July 31st and Saturday August 2nd, many of I Love Bees‘ creators and some of its most dedicated players will gather together to celebrate the anniversary in Portland for ARGFest, an annual conference, festival, and meetup that brings together the creators and fans of alternate reality games, transmedia storytelling projects, and serious games.

On Thursday July 31st, ARGFest is adding the IDEA Symposium, with a series of speakers focusing on the business of creating interactive entertainment and transmedia. Serial game designer Mike Selinker, whose recent projects include the narrative puzzle book Maze of Games and the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game will be headlining the day’s events. Joining him for the IDEA Symposium are indie game developers, platform creators, event producers, and experience designers behind everything from Cards Against Humanity’s game design reality show Tabletop Deathmatch to Disney’s The Optimist, a historical fiction retrospective of Disney Parks’ history.

The I Love Bees Anniversary festivities start on Friday August 1st with an interview between ARGNet founder Steve Peters and Jordan Weisman, the chief creative for the alternate reality game, and more recently creator of Shadowrun Returns and Golem Arcana. Friday’s Speakers will also provide a closer look at the state of transmedia in Europe, the climate change serious game Future Coast, and the transmedia thriller Phrenic, guided byÂ GlitchhikersÂ creator Lucas Johnson as Grand Inquisitor, charged with kicking off the Q&A sessions by asking panelists challenging questions. The evening’s keynote will be followed with a performance by The Doubleclicks, who recently raised over $80,000 on Kickstarter to release an album of songs about dinosaurs, tabletop games, and binge-watching Netflix.

The main Beekeeper reunion will take place on Saturday August 2nd, with panels reflecting on the game from players, as well as I Love Bees creators Elan Lee, Sean Stewart, and Kristen Rutherford. The festivities will conclude with FestQuest, a puzzle hunt designed to show attendees the city of Portland in a different light before leading them to the final mystery location to close out the evening. This year’s hunt was created by Puzzled Pint.

Tickets for the full three days of ARGFest are available for $200 through July 2, although attendees are able to purchase tickets for select events at a discounted rate. Check out the ARGFest 2014 website for the full list of speakers, conference schedule, or to register.

Ingress Anomalies Mix Live Events with In-App Gameplay

April 24, 2014 / Michael Andersen

Ingress Recursion

Disclosure: Google paid for my flight and lodging for the Recursion event.Â

The morning of March 29th, two rival factions gathered at Los Angeles’ Grand Park in anticipation for a pitched battle. As noon approached, it became obvious to any passerby that something was going on. Hundreds of people prominently wearing blue and green streamed in through the park steps, conspicuously segregating themselves into colored clumps: blues to the right, and greens to the left. To any random passerby, it must have looked like the staging area for a flash mob. But look a little closer, and you’d see the telltale signs of the virtual battle about to take place. Headphones tapped into private communications channels to coordinate movement. A row of cyclists primed and ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. Pennants proudly bearing faction insignia. And more smartphone chargers and batteries than people.

This gathering was an Anomaly event, one of the live events organized by Google’s Niantic Labs team for players of their geo-locative mobile game Ingress. Since early February, 25 Anomaly events took place in countries including the United States, Mexico, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Croatia, Egypt, Israel, and India for a series of events collectively referred to as the Recursion Anomalies. Los Angeles was the final Anomaly event in the series, and Google invited me out to Los Angeles to experience Google’s approach to designing a live event for a massively multiplayer game. Previously, ARGNet explained howÂ IngressÂ is played at a more casual level. This article explores how gameplay changes for its most ardent fans.

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A Puzzling Prelude to FestQuest 2013

July 24, 2013 / Michael Andersen

boomthemoon-shareholder

Last year, William Sawtooth III embarked on a great experiment: he sold off 100 shares in his personhood in exchange for a billion dollars. Being a savvy investor, I managed to secure a 6% interest in Sawtooth prior to his untimely demise at the hands of a masked henchman from the Secret Games Society.Â Yesterday, I received word from Sawtooth’s legal counsel informing me that Sawtooth’s death was confirmed after a thorough investigation, and my shares were reverting back to the Mega Hard Wood Group Board of Directors. As a courtesy, the Board sent me a framed certificate commemorating my brief status as a Majority Stockholder. They also unknowingly sent out an invitation to this year’s FestQuest, an annual puzzle hunt held during ARGFest.

Sawtooth’s misadventures in personal corporate governance were the focus of the alternate reality game Boom the Moon, an extension of Steve Peters’ crowdsourced alternate reality gaming thought experiment World Without Helium by Synth-Bio Productions. For two weeks, players tricked Sawtooth’s silent investors into handing over their shares to prevent a plan to use Sawtooth’s newfound wealth to solve the impending helium shortage by detonating a nuclear bomb on the moon’s surface. Players secured a majority stake in William Sawtooth III, and staved off plans to blow up the moon. While celebrating the win, Sawtooth was shot and presumed dead. The correspondence from the Mega Hard Wood Group only served to confirm that presumption, pronouncing his death a suicide.

After closer inspection, I discovered an invitation to FestQuest 2013 slipped in between the certificate and the frame’s backing. The secret message cordially invited me to join the Sawtooth Circus in Seattle on July 27th. Sawtooth also offered his handwritten assurance that “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” It also included an introductory puzzle to whet players’ appetites for the main course this weekend. The return of William Sawtooth III should be an exciting one for ARGFest attendees, as Sawtooth is one of the most colorful characters in alternate reality gaming to break the fourth wall I’ve seen.

Synth-Bio Productions is resurrecting Sawtooth through their role as host of this year’s FestQuest. Pre-registration for FestQuest is mandatory this year, with groups of 10 asked to provide their email address along with a “Circus Name”. The experience is only available to ARGFest attendees, and is expected to take approximately 2 hours to complete.