Context

During my internship I worked at Museum Escape, a company that builds immersive escape experiences inside museums. Their current experience, A Night at the Museum, runs in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden and drops visitors into a story where the fictional company, TimeLabs, has invited them to partake in the launch of their time machine; the TimeGate. When the activation goes wrong, visitors' ancestors get stranded in the museum, and the group has to solve puzzles tied to real museum objects to recharge the TimeGate and restore their ancestors' memories before time runs out.

The experience is run by a mix of actors, game coordinators and TimeLabs staff who guide the guests. Because it's a constantly evolving pop-up experience, my internship consisted of both helping run the event, and working on redesigning parts of the experience.

My role

During the event itself I worked as a game guide, where I helped guest and observed how they played while being in character as TimeLabs employee. Alongside that I did hands-on production work: redesigning puzzle props (researching historically accurate materials, rebuilding with more durable materials), small graphic design tasks like a battery-charge icon for the TimeGate, and ongoing web-app tweaks.

Improving puzzles

I made puzzle improvement more systematic by analyzing app data (time spent, hints requested) to find where groups got stuck. I used this process on a Cluedo-style puzzle. Data showed it averaged on 25 minutes and two hints, both too much. After analyzing the data further, I came to the conclusion that the hint's weren't the problem, but the complex story was. It had two overlapping mysteries told through unreliable narrators. I simplified and re-tested the writing over seven rounds until it played smoothly, and wrote up a repeatable process for the team to use on future puzzles. 

Analyzing & redesigning the experience

The core of my internship was improving the whole experience. Because this is quite a vague goal, I started with analyzing visitor data gathered by surveys. These showed that most people didn't understand the goal until very late into the game, while puzzles and actors scored very well. After analyzing the experience, I found that the goal of the game was only explained once and completely undivided To try and give players more moments to pick up on this information I designed a paper logbook the guest could read at their own pace. However, this did not make the goal more clear.
By using the SNAP model to analyze the experience again, I traced the problem to the TimeLocks (the cryptex-style puzzle that returns memories to ancestors) feeling disconnected from the museum and lacking visible progress. Working with design principles we had set up, I generated and evaluated a set of new concepts. These concepts focused on incorporating the museum, feeling cooperative and feeling like an adventure. The concept we moved forward with reframes TimeLocks as small time machines TimeLabs uses to pull artefacts from the past, giving both a narrative reason for their existence and a way to show visible, physical progress toward the ending.