12/27/2023 0 Comments Video escape room portland oregonBut grisly imagery-violence, guns, bodies - is not in her playbook. The Uncaged Experience, a pop-up room designed for Adidas, promoted the UltraBOOST sneaker line through puzzles that demanded speed and teamwork.įor many people, Hall says, the thought of being locked in a mysterious, dimly lit room with a timer evokes horror movies or haunted houses. In 2016 Hall, a former strategist at Wieden+Kennedy, founded Timberview Productions, a company that creates temporary escape rooms as team building events or product showcases. Responding to the surge of interest, the game industry is diversifying - and taking advantage of new monetization opportunities. “It’s easy to use a body to create fear, but I want to do something different” -Laura Hall.Īs the ills of online addiction garner more scrutiny, people are gravitating to in-person entertainment. Inside, participants scoured the room for secrets, matching up fingerprints and rifling through a bookcase filled with censored titles - Catcher in the Rye - that were banned by real-world governments. Players posed as freedom fighters impersonating a government official, then talked their way past a guard to enter a censor’s office. “But not everybody can weave in an engaging narrative.”Ĭonsider Spark of Resistance, an Orwellian dystopia she created for her first escape room, 60 Minutes to Escape (the venue is now closed). “Everybody can put furniture in a room,” Hall says, speaking from her workspace in the collaborative open offices of Oregon Story Board, a digital storytelling nonprofit. Her escape rooms are inspired in part by alternate reality games - blends of online gameplay and real-world experience ala Dungeons and Dragons - and unfold as a cross between a scavenger hunt, an IQ test and an improv play. “You’re placing yourself into a painful situation and then you get to free yourself.” “You have this huge mystery in front of you that you have to consume,” Hall says. Mary’s University in San Antonio, and later formed a competitive puzzling team, a spinoff of bar trivia in which players compete to solve logic puzzles. She fed her interest in narrative as an award-winning student journalist at St. Raised on classic detective novels - Sherlock Homes and Agatha Christie - Hall says she began designing puzzle, board and card games when she was a kid. You’re placing yourself into a painful situation and then you get to free yourself.” “You have this huge mystery in front of you that you have to consume. “It puts you as a player in a position of power,” Hall says, paraphrasing the book PuzzleCraft as she describes the freedom unleashed by the escape-room experience. and 60 Minutes to Escape, a Southeast Portland venue featuring four escape rooms and other types of physical gameplay. (Eugene is Oregon’s true gaming epicenter.) But escape rooms are her top priority, and if all goes as planned, this summer she will launch a new venture: Meridian Adventure Co. The 32-year old enjoys video game design and is active in Portland’s small but thriving gaming community. Laura Hall designs real-world puzzle gamesĪ fixture on the indie game speaking circuit, Hall, a quirky creative type, is no Luddite. 1 most funded item on Kickstarter in 2016.) The venues have become popular activities for young people they also attract companies seeking team-building activities for employees and are part of a nationwide resurgence in physical games, evidenced by steadily increasing sales at board game stores. A group of players are locked in a room, and they must piece together clues to solve the puzzle. You very quickly enter a ‘flow’ state.”įor the uninitiated: An escape room is an in-person version of an online puzzle game. Laura Hall, founder of Portland’s first escape-room company, offers a real-world antidote.Įntering one of her escape rooms, she says, “is like the theater, crossing the threshold. As we spend more of our waking hours online, human beings are becoming more isolated, anxious and distracted.
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