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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”!

One Day Left & Guidebook

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Greetings Myst Fans!

Tomorrow is the big day! We committee members are getting everything packed up today and heading over to the hotel. You can most likely find us (and other Myst fans) hanging around the hotel lobby.

Tomorrow morning, registration will open at 10AM (as it says on the schedule). We will be setting up the meeting room in the morning, so the doors will be unlocked, but please do not come in until we are official open (and you have your badge). It helps us set up faster if there aren’t extra people in the room.

Some people have been worried about internet access. Worry not! There will be free wifi in the meeting space, and we’ll have that information for you tomorrow.

guidebook-poster-no-handsAs you can see in the picture above (click for a larger version), we’ve once again partnered with Guidebook to provide a mobile version of the schedule, in addition to maps and info about the area. If needed, we will update the guidebook throughout the weekend. You can download it to your Android or Apple device by scanning the QR codes above. If you don’t have a compatible device, you can also access the guide from any web browser through this link.

This is sure to be an exciting year. I’ve had a sneak peek of what Cyan has planned (exclusively for people on-site), and you don’t want to miss it!

Until tomorrow (or tonight),

-Taniith, Mysterium 2015 Chair

Game Design Panel Update

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Only 10 days until Mysterium!

First, I would like to clear up some confusion we’ve been seeing from people who aren’t familiar with Mysterium. Generally speaking, all events take place in one large meeting space at the hotel. Because Mysterium is a relatively small convention, we have no content ‘tracks’, and there is no lining up to get into an event. You just need to be in the room at the time an event starts.

This year, we do have our side activity called Escape the Age which sometimes overlaps with things going on in the main room. This is a small group (~15 people) activity that will be repeated throughout the weekend. There will be signup sheets to choose your time slot on a first-come first-served basis.

Also, you don’t need to print out a ticket and badges aren’t being mailed out or anything like that. We will have a list of attendees at the registration desk, and you will be able to pick up your badge on Friday morning by giving us your name.

As always, please feel free to contact us with any other questions. If you want to know the answer, it is likely others will too.

With that out of the way, I would like to introduce you to our third (of four) panelists for the narrative/writing game design panel that was mentioned in the previous post.

ODonnell_2009_pic

This is Dean O’Donnell holding some sort of vegetable. Dean is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Interactive Media and Game Development major at WPI, where one of his focuses is storytelling in games. For instance, in his freshman course, students learn improv acting, play and write Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, and even have to design and run a small-scale alternate reality game (ARG). In addition to working on narrative and level design for games, Dean is a novelist, a playwright, and a screenwriter. You can undoubtedly look forward to some amusing stories from him, and possibly a hidden puzzle.

Or a vegetable. Who can say?

Remember, we can’t make this panel a success without your input! What narrative/game design topics do you want to hear these crazy folks discuss? Let us know! Ideally, email your ideas to info@mysterium.net, but if you post them as comments to this post or on our social media, we will probably be able to track them down too. The power is yours!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to soldering if the Escape the Age activity is ever going to be finished in time.

-Taniith, Mysterium 2015 Chair