Last December the curators of Denver Immersive Summit asked Puzzah! to create an activity related to puzzles and immersive experience. Our offering was Love Potion no. 13, a live action puzzle experience presented last night at our Lower Downtown location. Marilyn Dorn and I created the activity and performed it along with Nick Lawson and Deirdre Lee.
Eighteen attendees agreed to be subjects in a social experiment by sampling a dose of the compatibility enhancement drug LP-13 and then participating in a speed-dating exercise to find a perfect match. The speed-dating activity drew heavily from the structure created by Jeff Roberts for a similar event presented at the MIT Mystery Hunt in 2017. Subjects who found perfect matches learned there was more to the experiment than first advertised, and all participants eventually worked together to bring the story to a happy conclusion.
The participants included artists, musicians, designers, educators, and members of the escape room industry. The group worked well together and dispatched the puzzle set in about 20 minutes. The activity was followed by a 40-minute discussion that covered puzzles (a little) and ideas about immersive experience (a lot). My highlights of the evening were meeting new members of Denver’s immersive community and hamming it up as the nefarious Dr. Adam Rue of Blind Data Laboratories.
I hope we can reprise Love Potion no. 13 either for a DIS event or for Puzzah! but no definite plans have been made.
life as a puzzle 