Immersive & Interactive Experience Design

Hollow Medium
Immersive Experience Designer / Co-Writer
Granville House Productions

Scriptwriting and immersive experience design for Hollow Medium, an award-winning “recovered-audio” ghost story produced by Granville House Productions. The five-episode series is framed as an “investigation” into the 1926 haunting of a speakeasy bartender in St. Augustine, Florida. Lenora Bowen recorded her personal account onto a collection of wax cylinders in an attempt to make contact with the perpetrator of this haunting: her dead brother-in-law.

These first-person diaries are presented as “archival audio”, fictionalized as being “recently discovered” in an antique steamer trunk ... which was on display when the project was announced at the 2022 Midsummer Scream convention in Long Beach, California. The Hollow Medium booth hinted at the wider, more immersive scope of the project, allowing the audience to examine a selection of artifacts from Lenora’s trunk, and even listen to her voice on an authentic wax cylinder playing from a hundred-year-old phonograph.

Alongside the weekly release of each episode, additional world-building artifacts were featured on the Hollow Medium website. These items contained hidden clues pointing to a larger mystery that even Lenora was not aware of, but astute listeners were able to successfully decode together. Some of these mysteries still remain to be discovered ...

Through its confessional tone and dark historical mystery, Hollow Medium is a tale of grief, told through an exciting new format that invites the audience to uncover more of the story for themselves.

Meiji Gekken: 1874
Puzzle Designer
Crunchyroll

Meiji Gekken: 1874 is an original anime series for which I designed a puzzle hidden in background art. As a linear trail (created 4 years & regimes ago) with a final metapuzzle requiring the previous solutions, I am relieved to find that it is solvable in the final cut!

The show is historical fiction, and all of the cyphers used were chosen to be era-appropriate. Each solution was intended to offer a research rabbithole that complements its respective episode, with the final result revealing a piece of lore viewers might be curious to know.

It's a deep cut, for an already obscure series, but it delights me that we were able to offer it. Most campaigns like this live alongside a show, often on websites that eventually disappear. Having this one embedded within the show itself is a particularly satisfying milestone.

Mesmer & Braid: The Alternate Reality Game
Writer / Experience Designer
Aconite

The Mesmer & Braid alternate reality game was a six-week, real-time immersive experience leading up to the launch of HoloVista.

Players uncovered the secrets of a mysterious architecture firm at the heart of the game's story by interacting with characters across social media accounts, websites, phone calls, and video content, all woven into a compelling narrative puzzle hunt. The game’s framing character, an urban explorer with the username blurbex49, went viral on TikTok with one of his videos garnering more than a million views.

In addition to its live rollout, the game was uniquely designed to be repayable in perpetuity, with its greatest secrets still hidden for new players to unlock. Join Mesmer & Braid in their quest to create the perfect home at MesmerAndBraid.com.

Overlook Immersive Game
Writer / Experience Designer
Overlook Film Festival

Krewe de Gras was a weekend-long immersive alternate reality game experience designed for the 2018 Overlook Film Festival. This annual game has become a mainstay of the festival, and for the first time we sent players on a narrative mystery which took them across New Orleans. They interacted with live performers who guided them through an escalating series of narrative puzzles which helped them explore the thriving city.

“In the chaos of the French Quarter, playing an immersive game—part scavenger hunt, part interactive theater—whose actors cause screaming scenes in the middle of festival parties (all part of the show, folks, nothing to worry about) makes sense.”
– Katie Rife, A.V. Club

“The overall message of the game’s narrative – that a mix of the old and new is the way to proceed – even fit the festival’s aesthetic.”
– Brian Collins, Birth.Movies.Death.

Bureau of Multiversal Arbitration
Lead Narrative Designer
Aconite

Writing and narrative design for the "Bureau of Multiversal Arbitration", an experimental narrative game that used image generation as a core mechanic to unlock creativity, collaboration, and emergent storytelling.

The BMA inside the game was a fictional, interdimensional agency that assists multiverses in crisis. Players took on the role of an "Arbiters" for the BMA and were asked to find solutions from across the multiverse to solve each client's unique problems.

Structured as a series of weekly events, the game's three phases involved players collaborating to submit solutions, voting on each other's submissions, and receiving video updates documenting the consequences of their actions.

Stop Plus Ultra
Experience Designer / Writer / Producer

Stop Plus Ultra was a real-time piece of multi-platform fiction that spanned digital and physical spaces. In tribute to the fictional world of Disney’s TOMORROWLAND, this alternate reality game explored the thematic implications of the film’s fabled society of historical figures.

To the surprise of many, this ambitious experience was also a player-created piece of interactive fan fiction. Inspired by Disney’s 2013 Alternate Reality Game “The Optimist, Stop Plus Ultra expanded the narrative world established in that isolated experience during the months leading up to the film’s release.

Taking place from March through May of 2015, Stop Plus Ultra immersed thousands of players in an original, interactive story that spanned the globe.

Endgame: Ancient Truth - The Alternate Reality Game
Puzzle Tester / Assistant Experience Designer / Staff Writer
Google’s Niantic Labs

As a Writer and Experience Designer for Endgame: Ancient Truth, an alternate reality game produced by Google’s Niantic Labs, I helped shape the player’s immersive story experience for nine months of the game’s run.

In addition to writing email responses, blog posts, and shooting scripts in the voice of the lead character, “Stella,” I took the lead crafting the game’s finale in the weeks leading up to its untimely cancellation. Given a tight timeframe and limited resources, our team was successfully able to construct a finale that involved direct player actions while justifying the impending cancellation with an in-fiction urgency.