In a recent announcement from Portland-based escape room designer, Laura E. Hall, the Centre for Immersive Arts (CFIA) has opened. The CFIA is dedicated to collaboratively preserving the history of immersive theater, escape rooms, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), theme parks, art installations, XR/VR, and more.
The project was born of a desire to create an educational history site, but quickly developed into something much bigger. The lifecycle of the internet is incredibly short, and since it’s been around for the last 20-30 years, there have been countless ARGs, puzzle hunts, and online games that have already been lost to time. With old website hosting going dark, and since Wayback Machine can only do so much, the games we know and love today might not be accessible in 20, or 30 years. In fact, we wrote about the difficulty of playing The Crimson Room (2004) in an article that probably won’t stay in date for much longer.
The CFIA’s manifesto is to help preserve and share these resources before they disappear together. The website and the project also hopes to act as an educational resource for creators, practitioners, students, researchers and participants in immersive. If you’d like to get involved, there’s a range of ways to do so from contributing by donating materials, taking part in research and interviews, or joining the community on Patreon.
Photo: Laura E. Hall
About Laura E. Hall
From the CFIA website:
Laura was a dedicated player and forum moderator of several alternate reality games (ARGs) including Perplex City, which ran from 2004-2007. So dedicated, in fact, that even after the game ended, she pursued one of the game’s unsolved puzzles, “Billion to One”, for 15 years, until it was solved in 2021.
After moving to Portland, Oregon, Laura and a group of friends opened one of the first escape room games in the United States, the award-winning Spark of Resistance, and since she’s designed puzzle games, escape rooms, and treasure hunts all around the world. In 2021, she wrote Planning Your Escape (Simon & Schuster), a book about the history of immersive entertainment and a toolkit for new escape room players.
Today, Laura is working to explore and educate people about the history of immersive art and entertainment through the Immersipedia and CFIA projects and archives.
Centre for Immersive Arts Useful Links
Centre for Immersive Arts Patreon
Their most recent post: On Reconstructing Sonheim’s Puzzle Hunts
