The Evolving Business of Escape Rooms
Escape Rooms, one of the fastest growing sectors in games, has always been a site of bold innovation. The pandemic created upheaval. This was inevitable for a medium formed around the idea of physical, group interactivity. While early adaptation allowed escape room businesses to survive, creators continued to evolve the online medium to explore new areas: creating new styles of interaction and broadening accessibility. This panel of accomplished escape room designers, players, and researchers will discuss what has been lost, but also how these creators are pushing their industry to thrive in a future that is both online and in real life.
Join us on Zoom with the link from your passholder portal!
Speakers
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David Spira
“Since 2014, Lisa and David Spira have published well-researched, rational, and reasonably humorous escape room reviews, design tips, player tips, and industry commentary on Room Escape Artist.
Their mission is to share their love of exploring giant puzzles and to push the makers of those giant puzzles to create the best experiences they can. They strive to grow the community of amazing people who love solving the puzzles together.
They host Escape Immerse Explore, curated escape room destination tours for groups of 24-60 people. They also host The Reality Escape Convention (RECON), the premier event for escape rooms and immersive games, hosted digitally in August of 2020.
David is an experience designer and product manager who strives for a deeper understanding of how things work, and the ways people interact with their world. He holds degrees in communication and history from the University at Buffalo, and a masters in communication and information science from Rutgers University.”
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Juliana Moreno Patel
“The Wild Optimists began when Juliana Moreno Patel & Ariel Rubin, combined their theatre degrees and writing backgrounds with their lifelong love of gaming to create the Kickstarter sensation Escape Room In A Box: The Werewolf Experiment, the first game in the tabletop Escape Room genre and winner of Game of the Year at the Mattel Inventor Awards. That game was also chosen as a finalist for Indiecade in 2016 and featured at the Indiecade Booth at E3.
Since then The Wild Optimists have created immersive gaming experiences for a wide variety of clients including Sony, Fox, Universal, the CW, AEG, vampire.pizza, and the Santa Monica Pier.
Their goal is to design new ways to play, creating memorable interactive experiences for tabletop games, virtual games, theme parks, music festivals, historical sites, marketing activations, and more.”
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Lisa Spira
“Since 2014, Lisa and David Spira have published well-researched, rational, and reasonably humorous escape room reviews, design tips, player tips, and industry commentary on Room Escape Artist.
Their mission is to share their love of exploring giant puzzles and to push the makers of those giant puzzles to create the best experiences they can. They strive to grow the community of amazing people who love solving the puzzles together.
They host Escape Immerse Explore, curated escape room destination tours for groups of 24-60 people. They also host The Reality Escape Convention (RECON), the premier event for escape rooms and immersive games, hosted digitally in August of 2020.
Lisa is an onomastician who turned her lifelong obsession with names in a career in language technology. She currently works as Head of Content Intelligence at Persado. Lisa holds a degree in linguistics from Syracuse University and also works as a private baby name consultant.”
Local Time
- Timezone: America/New_York
- Date: Oct 22 2020
- Time: 12:00 pm - 12:45 pm
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