We design both escape games and mail-order alternate reality games. In both, providing hints is essential to smooth gameplay. Our Guidelines for Creating Hints in Escape Games Hints must be straightforward. People are using hints because they feel stuck. We’ve been in situations where we ask for a hint and get a riddle back or… Read more →
Last week we took down our escape game to close our physical location. In a weeks time we demoted our magical land back to a plain, soulless office space. We like to think the memories of four years of magic and delight still hides in the walls. But the real takeaway is that with the… Read more →
A ton of research goes into each episode of the Society of Curiosities. Some ideas never see the light of day and some are present in the backstory, but barely visible. We wanted to feature a few more fun facts that we’ve recently come across. Hidden Brain! Some say that Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on… Read more →
Let’s jump right in: The Hawthorne Effect causes people to behave differently when they know they’re being observed. A Little History The Hawthorne Effect was named after a study at an electric plant, Hawthorne Works, in the early 1920s. Researchers wanted to determine how lighting impacted productivity and found that all lighting changes increased productivity…. Read more →
The Society of Curiosities offers immersive play-at-home games. That can be difficult to achieve. After all, we’re not there, in person, to aid players and guide gameplay. So how do we ensure our mystery in a box experience is consistent and exceptional? Well, it’s a lot of work! We do a lot of design work… Read more →
We are launching a new feature this week: a leaderboard! Mission Scores Each player is assigned a mission score upon successfully completing a mission. But how do we calculate missions scores? Hints Requested Whenever a player requests a hint from our online hint system, we take it into consideration for the mission score. If a… Read more →
We got our start commercially as escape room game designers. It was more difficult than we thought to make the jump from escape room designers to creators of game subscription boxes. Here’s how we did it.
