This week, The Reality Escape Convention (RECON) announced Hillary Manning & Aaron Gold, two professional gamemasters, as speakers at this year’s digital global Reality Escape Convention.
Hillary and Aaron will share amusing moments and hard truths from years as gamemasters for multiple escape room companies.
Gamemastering is one of the most important functions of the escape room experience. Combining customer service, performance, and execution, the gamemaster is the face of an escape room company to their customers. They set the stage and can either elevate or harm the experience.
Hillary and Aaron are veteran escape room gamemasters who will share their insights and truths about the job and how to better train and empower a gamemaster for success.
About Hillary and Aaron
Hillary Manning is a New York-based designer of puzzles, costumes, and other interesting things. She has gamemastered with two different escape room companies. Last year we worked together on the children’s television program Create The Escape, which really highlighted her abilities as a creator as well as her skill in interacting with people.
Aaron Gold is a working actor appearing in stage shows, cartoons, and commercials. He has found that gamemastering is a great job for his particular blend of skills, and has worked for multiple New York City-based escape room companies.
Join us at RECON
RECON ’20 is a free digital event with curated talks covering aspects of experience design in physical and digital media.
RECON is less than one month away. Pre-register today so that you receive all information about registering to get your virtual badge, the full schedule of talks, and how to meet other folks at RECON. All this information will be available to pre-registrants really soon!
The Reality Escape Convention (RECON) believes that collaboration grows our industry and the community around it. To that end, RECON recently announced that the annual UK Escape Room Industry Conference (ERIC) would present two featured talks:
Charlie Bond and James Hamer-Morton of Deadlocked Escape Rooms in Reading, England, will talk about diversifying escape room business offerings.
David Middleton of Bewilder Box in Brighton, England, will interview Sera Dodd, one of the two most experienced escape room players in the western world. (She is tied with her lovely partner Sharan.)
ERIC is the UK’s annual escape room conference. Last year, David flew to the UK to speak on the ERIC stage and host a panel.
While there, he fell in love with ERIC’s energetic, community-focused approach to escape room conference production.
The folks behind ERIC love and support this industry as much as we do.
Diversifying Your Puzzle Products
Charlie & James of Deadlocked are actors and escape room owners. Over the past few years they have created games in multiple media including:
Real-life escape rooms
Escape room puzzle books
Digital games that blur the lines between escape room, alternate reality game, and light puzzle hunt.
They will be sharing the lessons that they learned designing for each medium, focusing heavily on how these differ from one another. The session is both funny and informative.
Charlie & James
Charlie and James are the masterminds behind boutique escape room chain Deadlocked – the pioneering powerhouse of the hit episodic online escape rooms The Insiders and The Cyphstress. They created these two experiences in a lab specifically for the world of immersive experiences. While cutting their teeth starring in art house films and moonlighting as games level designers, they soon turned their hand to the world of ‘alternative reality games’, devoting their lives to transporting their audiences into the center of their own artisan adventures.
A Conversation with the Western World’s Most Experienced Escape Room Player
The title says it all. Together David Middleton and Sera Dodd will explore the observations and evolution of a player through 1,500+ escape rooms.
Sera & David
Sera Dodd has played just over 1500 rooms. This makes her almost certainly the most experienced escape room player in the Western world alongside Sharan, with whom she’s played every single game. Together they have a 99.8% escape rate, have played in 17 different countries, and once played 615 games in a single year. Sera has been a member of Team UK during both Red Bull Escape Room World Championships, co-founded the UK Escape Room Industry Conference (ERIC), worked as a UX and Design Consultant within the escape room industry, and has generally been a pillar of the UK escape room community. Her real hobbies include bouldering and befriending wild animals. In her spare time, she’s a doctor.
David Middleton is co-founder of both ERIC and the Brighton-based escape room company Bewilder Box. Bewilder Box has produced an assortment of highly regarded games ranging from traditional escape rooms to online puzzle video games, and a beachside pop-up escape room in a box.
Join us at RECON
RECON ’20 is a free digital event with curated talks covering aspects of experience design in physical and digital media.
The RECON team is excited to collaborate with ERIC, and have them present these two talks on the RECON stage. This collaboration furthers our goals of community and building a sustainable industry together.
RECON is less than one month away. Pre-register today so that you receive all information about registering to get your virtual badge, the full schedule of talks, and how to meet other folks at RECON. All this information will be available to pre-registrants really soon!
If you have a product or service that you’d like to put in front of the escape room community, we hope you’ll consider a booth in the RECON ’20 Exhibit Hall!
With more than 500 people pre-registered for RECON ’20, and more signing up every day, this is the perfect opportunity to share your product with owners, designers, and players.
This is the last chance to secure your spot as an exhibitor!
Fill out a form here or email Theresa (theresa@roomescapeartist.com) by THIS Friday, July 31.
The Digital Exhibit Hall
The Digital Exhibit hall will be a collection of pages linked on the RECON event website. Each exhibitor’s page includes a lead capture field, a link back to the exhibitor’s website, and information about the exhibitor and their products. RECON will provide each exhibitor with a dedicated channel in RECON’s communication platform so that they can chat with attendees in real-time.
It is only $100 to exhibit at RECON.
Exhibitor Profiles
Our exhibitors include companies that provide the following products and services to the industry:
Escape room software
Booking software
Game creators selling their services
Boxed puzzle games the players can buy to play and/or companies can buy to sell wholesale
Online puzzle games that players can buy to play and/or companies can license
Business services: insurance, HR, consulting, legal contracting, SEO, SEM, email marketing
See You at RECON!
We look forward to learning more about your products and services at RECON! It’s only $100 to grab an exhibitor booth this week, while they are still available.
This week, the Reality Escape Convention (RECON) announced the trio of Kim Belair, Ariadne MacGillivray & David Bedard of Sweet Baby Inc. as speakers at this year’s digital, global RECON.
Escape rooms may be real-life entertainment, but the industry’s roots rest in video games.
With that in mind, we found 3 brilliant video game narrative designers to sit down and explore what else the escape room world could learn from the medium that birthed it… and in turn, explored some aspects that video games could learn from escape rooms.
We just recorded this session a couple of days ago, and we cannot tell you how excited we are to share it at RECON.
About the Sweet Baby Inc Trio
Kim Belair is a writer and narrative designer who has worked with companies including Ubisoft, Rocksteady, Square Enix, KO_OP, Valve, and JuVee Productions to bring games and stories to life.
Ari MacGillivray is a community developer, writer, and producer with a passion for storytelling and team building, with diverse experience from writing and production to management and scouting.
David Bedard, “dbed”, is a brand manager and narrative designer who has helped to define and expand the narrative worlds of IPs including Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Rainbow 6, Sleeping Dogs and more.
RECON ’20 is a free digital event with curated talks covering aspects of experience design in physical and digital media. The RECON team is excited to welcome Kim, Ariadne & David to the RECON stage.
RECON is about sharing knowledge and building community. You’re invited to join in strengthening a sustainable escape room industry that recognizes creators, players, and the challenges of 2020.
Harrison is a comedian and magician who has been featured on many shows, including NBC’s America’s Got Talent, NBC’s Last Comic Standing, TBS’s Conan, Comedy Central’s This Week at the Comedy Cellar, AXS.TV’s Gotham Comedy Live, and National Geographic Channel’s Brain Games.
Additionally (and the lengthy bio on Harrison’s website won’t tell you this), he isn’t just another world-touring comedian/ magician with a degree from Harvard… Harrison has played a lot of escape rooms.
There are only a handful of folks in the US who started playing escape rooms before we did, and have been playing them continually ever since. And Harrison is one of these people.
Join us at RECON
RECON ’20 is a free digital event with curated talks covering aspects of experience design in physical and digital media. Harrison will be introducing the speakers, and we couldn’t be more excited about this.
RECON is about sharing knowledge and building community. You’re invited to join in strengthening a sustainable escape room industry that recognizes creators, players, and the challenges of 2020.
