Mysterium 2016 Location Announcement

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Back in August, we told you the dates for Mysterium 2016, but not the location. This goes against our usual policy of announcing both at Closing Ceremonies, but unfortunately there were some logistical issues we had to work out before we could announce. But now those are settled, and I am happy to announce that Mysterium 2016 will take place in:

Salt Lake City, Utah – August 5-7 2016

That’s right, we’re taking Mysterium to a new city! It should be an exciting year, and we hope you can join us.

That just about wraps up my tenure as 2015 con chair. It has been a pleasure chairing for you (yes, it’s a verb…). Thank you for helping to make Mysterium 2015 such a great success.

-Taniith, Mysterium 2015 Con chair

Mysterium 2015 Wrap Up – Part 3

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We’re getting to the end of our post-Mysterium blog posts. I have a few things for you today.

First up, we’ve uploaded all of the videos we recorded this weekend. You can find the Youtube playlist here.

Next, we’ve put together a survey to help us get feedback from all of you. You can find it here. All questions on the survey are optional, but please be as detailed as you can. The more you tell us, the more we can tweak Mysterium to be a great experience!

The survey can be taken both by people who attended this year, and by those who couldn’t make it. So, please spread it around to any of your friends that might be interested in attending Mysterium at some point.

Finally, a reminder to please send us links to any photo or video albums you may have from Mysterium 2015, so that we can share them with everyone.

-Taniith

Mysterium 2015 Wrap Up – Escape the Age

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If you followed Mysterium this year, you know we put together an activity called “Escape the Age”. This idea came out of a much smaller scale activity from Mysterium 2013, in which attendees were put into a room that had been converted into an ‘age’ and had to find the linking book home. Both were, in part, inspired by so called “Escape the Room” games that exist both online and in the real world.

For 2015, we wanted to take the concept and throw a real budget at it to make something that could really react to the players and provide fun and useful feedback. It wasn’t perfect, it occasionally broke, and it was too hard to solve in the time allotted… but still, every single person who played told me that they had a ton of fun. The main thing that they asked was that we release the documentation online so that they could see how it all worked. So that’s what is happening here.

A small disclaimer before I start: most of this documentation was written weeks or months ago, and the game changed in various ways since then. As with all game design documents, it was obsolete the moment it was typed up. If you read through the documents, you will find discrepancies and errors. I have tried to make small annotations here and there, but for the most part they are as they were originally written.Continue reading→

Mysterium 2015 Wrap Up – Part 1

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Greetings, friends

And so, another Mysterium comes to a close. We had almost 140 attendees this year! That puts us firmly in the top 5 for attendance count. It was a daunting prospect as a con-chair, but (with the exception of a few technical difficulties) I think it went extremely well. Thank you to everyone who attended, everyone who donated time or objects/prizes, and everyone on my amazing con-staff. It has been a pleasure chairing for you all.

Contact Info

Sometime in the next few days, I will type up the ‘Real World Contacts‘ board that people filled out on Sunday, and email it to everyone that pre-registered. Unfortunately, we don’t have contact info for those that registered on-site, and I don’t want to just post all of it publicly, so hopefully you will be able to find each other one way or another.

I also wanted to give out contact info for the members of the narrative panel:

I also promised that I would give out a link to Samantha Rabbitt’s online portfolio, which you can find here: http://www.samantharabbitt.com/. Despite having never even looked at a Myst game, Sam volunteered many hours to layout our conbook and create the map for Escape the Age, so this is the least we can do.

Feedback

At Closing Ceremonies on Sunday, it was proposed that we should open a space for attendees to provide feedback and event ideas for future Mysteria. We are trying to figure out the best way to do that, but for now we have opened a section of our forum for that. You can find it here: http://www.mysterium.net/forum/

We will also be emailing a feedback form to all attendees when we send out the contact list, which will hopefully help us get a better idea of how your weekend went. Please fill that out in the week or so after you get it, while everything is still fresh in your mind.

Photos

As usual, we have opened a Flickr group for people to post pictures of this year’s Mysterium. You can find that here: https://www.flickr.com/groups/2846629@N24/

If you don’t use Flickr, please drop us a line and let us know where we can find your pictures/videos/trip logs/whatever. We will try to compile everything we can find into one post or page somewhere.

Mysterium 2016

Mysterium 2016 will be held on the weekend of August 5th-7th of next year, in keeping with our rule of holding the con on the first full weekend in August. As was announced at Closing Ceremonies, we can’t yet announce exactly *where* Mysterium 2016 will be held, except to say that it will be on the western side of the continental US.  I know that this is frustrating to people, and we hope to have everything resolved on that front within a month. So please stay tuned.

Other Things

I am in the process of compiling all of the materials from Escape the Age and will release those once I have finished. Similarly, the videos of various on-site events will be released once we get them cleaned up and uploaded to Youtube.

The 2015 conbook is now available from our MagCloud page. The digital version is free, and the print version is sold at-cost.

If you ordered a t-shirt to be sent to you off-site, those should be mailed within the next week or so.

That’s all for now!

-Taniith

Twitch Streaming

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I forgot to mention in the last post that we will be streaming parts of the convention on Twitch! You can find our channel at http://www.twitch.tv/mysteriumcon

We won’t be streaming all weekend, but we at least expect to stream all major events (opening/closing ceremonies and scheduled presentations). If you can’t make it, be sure to pop into the stream now and then and say “hi”!