RECON is for those who believe in the future of the escape room industry and want to shape where it goes. This event is all about bringing the community together with the shared goal of getting better at what we do and improving the quality of the games and experiences we produce. To that end, the RECON team has assembled a carefully curated set of speakers and talks that will each provide substantial, actionable information to benefit escape room business owners, creators, and suppliers, as well as interested player enthusiasts.
So today we are shining a spotlight on our speakers for RECON Boston 22.
We are proud to present this group of experts and industry leaders. Click on each speaker’s name for more information about them and their RECON talk. And please follow RECON on social media for the latest updates and announcements.
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Get your ticket now with the early bird discount of $100 off. This discount only lasts until May 10.
Host
Peih-Gee Law
RECON MC
Peih-Gee is best well known for being a fan favorite contestant on the reality show Survivor. Peih-Gee is also co-host of the Reality Escape Pod, a podcast exploring immersive gaming, escape rooms and interactive theatre. This will be Peih-Gee’s third time as RECON host.
Speaking on Sunday Morning
Lisa & David Spira
ROOM ESCAPE ARTIST
David and Lisa will discuss The Player Journey – Maximizing Opportunities Before, During, & After the Game. They will explain that while escape rooms are your product and the reason to visit your business, the game itself is just one part of the overall experience that companies provide.
Each player goes through their own journey of discovery, booking, arrival, game-play, and processing – for every single game. In this session, they explore opportunities to excel or fail in each step of the journey, and how to turn more players into repeat players.
Haley & Cameron Cooper
STRANGE BIRD IMMERSIVE
Their talk, The Magic Circle – Delivering Game-Changing Immersion, will explain that the foundation to an immersive experience is not scenic design but commitment to a threshold. Learn where to draw your Magic Circle and how to keep the magic unbroken. With this one tool, you’ll unlock a whole new level of customer experience.
Haley E. R. Cooper and J. Cameron Cooper are the artistic directors of Strange Bird Immersive, based in Houston. Their inaugural production The Man From Beyond: Houdini Séance Escape Room has ranked as the #1 game in North America by TERPECA three years in a row for its union of escape room and immersive theatre.
Caro Murphy
STAR WARS GALACTIC STARCRUISER
Caro’s talk, Acting for Participation, focuses on interactive characters as an essential part of a live experience; they can model how to play and engage with the world around us as well as be important vessels for storytelling. In this talk, Caro will walk through both conceptual models and practical exercises for creating engaging, inviting interactive performances that place focus on the participant’s experience.
Caro Murphy is an Immersive Experience Director on Disney’s Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser. They are co-Executive Director at the Playable Theatre nonprofit, whose mission focuses on enabling creators of participatory works, including immersive and interactive theater, LARP, VR-theater, and more.
Speaking on Sunday Afternoon
Mayor Gary Christenson & Kevin Duffy
THE CITY OF MALDEN
This talk will teach Lessons in What Government Values in Escape Games. The City of Malden, Massachusetts, has prioritized creating and cultivating The Malden Gaming District to attract visitors. The mayor and Malden’s Strategy and Business Development Officer will share what they value and how they work with immersive gaming businesses. They will provide ideas for working with your own local officials. Plus, at the conclusion of the session, we’ll be heading to Malden to experience the Gaming District firsthand.
Mayor Gary Christenson has dedicated himself toward serving the public since high school, when he was elected Class President in his junior and senior years. Kevin Duffy is the Strategy and Business Development Officer for Mayor Christenson. While his total number of play hours per week is way down, Kevin is still an active gamer and room escape aficionado.
Speaking on Monday Evening at Level99
Matthew DuPlessie
LEVEL99 & 5 WITS
Matt DuPlessie will talk about Future Play and Scaling Up Interactive Experiences. He’ll address looking backward and looking forward, and exploring ways to break the mold – moving beyond current traditional escape room experiences, thinking to the future of location-based, social play. Matt is thinking about games that don’t yet have a genre description.
Matt founded 5 Wits, arguably the first “escape room”-style attraction. It first opened in Boston in 2004. For the last eighteen years, 5 Wits has designed, built, and operated award-winning walk-through “adventures” like Tomb, Espionage, Drago’s Castle, and Deep Space, in five states, enjoyed by many millions of guests.
In 2018, Matt launched his newest project, Level99, designed to bring challenge-based physical and mental entertainment experiences up to a new level. The prototype location opened in Natick, MA in June 2021.
Victor Hung
BOXAROO & LEVEL99
Victor’s talk is entitled Technically an Escape Room. In this talk, he will discuss how the strategic use of technology can not only be used to provide a cohesive experience for the guests, but also to relieve pain points for the operations staff and the installation team. He will highlight some of Boxaroo’s successes in experimenting with technology and some of their most notorious pitfalls, to save you that precious time and energy.
Victor Hung is the founder of Boxaroo, an interactive entertainment company in Boston, Massachusetts. After earning a bachelor’s in computer science and electrical engineering from MIT, Victor worked in the user experience design industry for several years. He later returned to MIT to teach product design. While most of his time is now devoted to other interactive-entertainment related activities, he carries his experience from product design and electro-mechanical engineering over to his productions, hoping to put more delight into the world.
Workshops on Monday
You’ll select from 2 workshop options:
Marie Huber
RED FOX ESCAPES
Work on Upping Your Game – Beyond the Basics of Game Design with Marie Huber. In this workshop, you will develop your game design skills to optimize the player experience, while considering constraints such as budget, floorspace, durability, and your audience.
Marie’s path to puzzle creation came via a long career solving puzzles: childhood in the English countryside, 2 biochemistry degrees from the “other” Cambridge, a couple of years as a management consultant at McKinsey & Co, and then falling in love with and moving to New York City. One day Marie may write a book about the next chapter; it’s the one that led her to meeting her partner Nico, and deciding to start something new from scratch. And thus, Red Fox Escapes was born.
Stuart Bogaty
TRAP’T
This workshop session is all about Reflecting your Business in your Brand. Stuart will discuss ways to improve your overall brand using real-world escape room examples. The focus will be on how your name, logo, website, lobby, decor, staff and more should all work together to form a more cohesive and unique experience for your customers.
Stuart is the owner of trap’t Escape Room Adventures in Stamford, CT, and Panic Room in both Stamford and Norwalk, CT. He founded the business with his wife and three daughters. They currently have 8 escape rooms and more than a dozen VR escape experiences open across 3 locations, and are building another 3 escape rooms over the next 12 months.
Prior to opening trap’t, Stuart had a successful career as a well-respected, results-oriented media/ marketing/ ecommerce executive with proven successes as CEO, CMO, EVP Global Managing Partner, and Managing Director. Over the course of his career, he managed multimillion-dollar accounts for Fortune 500 clients including Johnson & Johnson, Unilever, Intel, Brown Forman, IBM, Cisco, Yahoo and SAP. He is an almost 30-year media veteran with 25+ years in the interactive advertising community.
Experience all of these terrific talks and so much more at RECON Boston 22 on August 21st and 22nd. Get your ticket now at realityescapecon.com.
See You at RECON Boston 22
We can’t wait to experience these RECON talks with you. We hope you’ll take advantage of the early bird discount and get your ticket today.
