Inside ‘The Wandmaker’s House’ with Laura E. Hall (Q&A)

by Kathryn Yu
Kathryn Yu
•
December 4, 2018
•
8 min read

We chat with the author and puzzle/escape room designer about Portland’s newest immersive experience

Laura E. Hall has been straddling multiple genres in the immersive world for more than a few years now — from helping to create the first escape room in Portland, Oregon (the award-winning Spark of Resistance) to building pop-up immersive installations at festivals like XOXO to creating alternate reality game experiences for big name clients. And her book Katamari Damacy was recently published by Boss Fight Books.

We interviewed Laura over email about her company’s family-friendly interactive art experience The Wandmaker’s House, which recently announced an extension through January 1, 2019.

No Proscenium (NP): Tell us a little about you, your background, and Meridian Adventure Co.

Laura E. Hall (LEH): I’m Laura E. Hall, and I’m a writer, artist, and game designer based in Portland, Oregon.

I first started formally working in the field of immersive art and environmental narrative in 2014 when I launched Portland’s first escape room game with five wonderful and talented friends. I’ve been a part of the adventure design community since I was rabbitholed in 2004 by I Love Bees and got hooked on playing ARGs. And well beyond that, I’ve loved puzzles, mysteries, treasure hunts, haunted houses, and lore ever since I was a little kid.

Now, with Timberview Productions, I work with agencies, theme parks, television shows, festivals, and brands to develop engaging, immersive games and interactive experiences. In my personal work, I create interactive installations that explore gameplay and narrative.

Meridian Adventure Co. is my latest venture here in Portland. We’ll be launching new, narrative-focused escape rooms and other, new types of playful games and experiences in early 2019. The goal is for it to become an immersive hub in the city and region, so that we can build community here, support and develop people’s talent, and create new work together.

NP: What, in a nutshell, is The Wandmaker’s House? Is it an escape room? An art installation? A selfie factory?

LEH: The Wandmaker’s House is a mix between a puzzle game, a scavenger hunt, a selfie museum, and an art installation. The closest industry term for it would be walkthrough attraction, although you’re moving around and in the space rather than through it. One of our visitors called it “a space between, neither here nor there, an interactive art exhibit meets escape room,” which I thought was lovely.

The narrative is that the Wandmaker stole a powerful spellbook, which blew up in her face and broke her magic wand. The Wandmaker’s disappeared, and now magic is spilling out of the spell book and twisting up the rooms of her house. So you as a visitor need to conjure up a spell that will help you contact the Wandmaker and figure out what’s happened. Or you can just take pictures in the spaces, if you want.

NP: How did the project come about and who are your collaborators?

LEH: When we build escape rooms, we make detailed environments that a few people spend a really specific amount of time within. In my 2018 Immersive Design Summit talk, I discussed how those environments are utilized to shoulder the weight of worldbuilding so that people can focus on the game path. That’s especially important when people are working against the clock.

Really fleshed-out, detailed narrative environments are my favorite kind of work to make. But it’s a lot of floor space to devote to a small amount of throughput. If you look at haunted houses or theme parks, they’re moving hundreds of people per hour through their space. Compare that to escape rooms, which average about eight people per hour. The narrative experience in a haunted house or a theme park is obviously very different to an escape room, but it’s something I’ve been really interested in exploring.

Last summer we did a big midwest road trip to take in all the experiential attractions that we could (including the City Museum in St. Louis and the House on the Rock, wow!) We visited Wizard Quest in the Wisconsin Dells, which is a big interactive scavenger hunt game in a built-out fantasy environment. We were really excited by how many people were playing or experiencing many different tracks simultaneously, all in the same overlapping spaces. Being around other people becomes a part of the experience as much as the game itself, like when a little kid gets really excited to show you a secret passageway you might have missed.

We also had a similar experience at Meow Wolf, where wandering through spaces, observing the crowd, and meeting people is part of the fun. And the fact that both of those were very family friendly was really intriguing.

As far as The Wandmaker’s House goes, we knew we wanted to try our hand at a puzzle game that involved more people, something around Halloween and the holiday season. The Meridian Adventure Co.’s new game experiences have been under construction, so we had been keeping an eye out for available spaces nearby. One of the upstairs tenants in our building wasn’t ready to move in yet and expressed interest in letting us utilize the space for an art installation. We leapt at the chance to build something temporary, family-friendly, and for a larger scale audience than an escape room. It was an impossibly short timeline, but we made it happen.

For this project, I collaborated with awesome Portland artists Jey Biddulph on design and fabrication, David Dowling for sets and construction, and Ben Richards for fabrication. We also have an amazing team at Timberview Productions, including our producer Nora Ryan and our executive assistant Jeffy Denight. Our wonderful illustrations were created by Marlowe Dobbe.

NP: How is the audience incorporated into the work and how are you designing around audience agency and safety?

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LEH: I care a lot about accessibility in puzzle and game design, and I’m always trying to find ways to make our work more inclusive. I’ll be the first to say that we have a long way to go, as does the industry.

For this game, we wanted it to be fun for children as well as families playing together. That meant incorporating a lot of searching around the space and tactile experiences, as well as more puzzley-type puzzles to anchor the game. It also meant putting most things within reach or eyesight of children.

In our puzzles, we always try to design for accessibility. Red-green color blindness is really common, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen puzzles that ask you to distinguish between the two colors. We also don’t use stairs or crawling in our spaces, and use subtitles when there’s audio. I think that should be the default in our field.

As far as safety goes, we’re held to the same standard that haunted houses are, in terms of fireproofing, being able to move through the space, exiting, and so on. We take it very seriously, of course, and Portland is also in an earthquake zone, so that’s always in the back of my mind whenever we’re building anything.

I think most patrons probably don’t have a sense of how drastically those constraints affect what you’re able to make, and the spaces you’re able to utilize. I’m very interested to see how work in the immersive community responds to new fire codes and restrictions that have emerged in the wake of the Ghost Ship fire tragedy.

NP: Who is the ideal audience member for the Wandmaker’s House?

LEH: I’ve been really excited to see kids playing the games with their parents. Designing games and puzzles for children is a long-term goal of mine. I think the ideal audience member for The Wandmaker’s House is a family group who are all keen to be in the experience together. One of my favorite visitors was a mom who was super into the game. Her kids were taking turns helping her solve parts of the puzzle, running back and forth between the spaces to play with the props, and helping offer strangers clues (or spoil them, depending on your perspective) to things the kids had already found.

NP: How have audiences reacted to The Wandmaker’s House so far?

LEH: People are really excited by it! We knew going in that people wouldn’t necessarily know what to expect when they bought a ticket. There’s just nothing else like this in town.

One of our goals with Meridian Adventure Co. is to introduce more playful experiences like this to Portland, and to create puzzles and games that spill out into the city in various ways. We wanted to play around with form and function, to see what worked for us and the audience, and to see what felt fun to make. So this is just a little taste of that.

NP: What has surprised you during the development of the project?

LEH: Even though we’ve been building games and experiences since 2014, every project has new surprises and lessons. This was an exercise in working with constraints — space, time, budget, everything.

Something we found surprising is that people are coming in and playing the game so intently that they don’t actually stop to take photographs of themselves. We thought it would be more of a meandering game that let people stop and pose for selfies or group photos, because the spaces are designed to be visually appealing. But even though there’s no timer, the urge to complete everything is strong enough that most people focus entirely on the game part and don’t take any photographs at all.

NP: What do you hope people take away from the experience?

LEH: I try to design experiences to transport people into new worlds. My hope is always that people come out of our games feeling like they’ve visited a new place, even if only for a short while, and that they can carry those new eyes with them after they leave. I think that’s a gift that immersive experiences give to people. And that’s what we’re aiming to do with the work at Meridian Adventure Co.

Further, the reason I’ve been drawn to treasure hunts, ARGs, and now immersive work is because it transforms the regular, mundane world into something magical. A street you’ve walked down a million times can suddenly have a layer of meaning or mystery. Once your eyes have been opened in that way, you start seeing everything as potentially full of magic.