Every Game in This City

It’s Day 5 and PSG.LGD finally face off against their TI8 rivals, OG (formerly Monkey Business), in one of the most anticipated matches of the International Dota 2 Championships in Shanghai. Luckily, esports researcher and MIT professor T. L. Taylor joins us to discuss our experiences both inside the stadium during an intense match full of cheers and jeers and then outside during an equally intense session of bartering for blind boxes, swag bags, and secret shop spoils. From one of the most memorable matches of the tournament to tournament memorabilia, in this episode T. L. helps us make sense of the monkey business.

In this episode, we put the art back into ARTS on Day 4 of the International Dota 2 Championship. First Yang Jing will tour UnArt Center, a media art gallery that doubles as an esports venue, then Peter will exhibit AutoSave: Redoubt, a Counter-Strike map reconstructing the scene where Japanese and the English first encountered one another in the Battle of Hong Kong during World War Two. But is Dota an ARTS or an art?

It’s Day 3 of the International Dota Championships in Shanghai and the whole cast is back in one room to talk about how we’ve been playing Dota. From the Mercedes Benz Arena and the Super Brand Mall to laptops in our apartment and the night cafe across the street, everyone has their own way of playing. And after catching up with the cast, we’ll interview Murielle "Kips" Huisman, a Dota 2 analyst and the former coach of TNC Predator, Vega Squadron, and Complexity Gaming.

In our last episode Shang Lun was about to narrate his long night at The Late Game, a Dota 2 talk show where he got to interview the cast and crew of the International Dota 2 Championships in Shanghai. So this time we’ll tune in and hear about his adventures with shout casters, camera operators, Chinese translators, TV producers, and a certain buffoonish dad who seems to hate pizza rolls!

24 Histories, 4 Arts, 1 Dota. In this episode we meet our final cast member, Felania Mengfei Liu, who takes us on a tour of Chinese Game Studies, including a deep dive into the etymology of gaming and gambling, sport and esport in China. Then Stephanie, Patrick, and Will tell us about the long history of Dota, from Aeon of Strife to DotA: Allstars and beyond. Finally, the cast recounts a series of adventures around the stadium on Day 2 of the International Dota 2 Championships in Shanghai!

From our local police station to Mercedes-Benz Stadium, we finally watch our first match together at the International Dota 2 Championships...and it's a doozy! After unpacking the hour-long contest between Vici Gaming and TNC Predator, Alex, Shang Lun, Peter, and Yang Jing teach us a little about what they learned on Day 1 before before we take a deep dive into the Dota 2 ecosystem with our first special guest: CEO of Chaos Esports Club, Greg Laird!

The battle begins! In the first full episode of Every Game in This City Season 2, the team gathers at the top of a penthouse in Huangpu, Shanghai the day before the International Dota 2 Championships in 2019 to talk about our Dota pasts, Dota predictions, and the case of the missing tickets! In the interlude Will, Stephanie, and Patrick try to explain the ins and outs of Dota 2 (with sound effects!) before the group reveals the thorny reality of actually getting tickets for a Dota tournament.

We're back! In Season 2 of Every Game in This City eight game designers, researchers, journalists, and curators meet up in Shanghai to try and watch every game in the 2019 International Dota 2 Championships. In this short introduction, Stephanie, Patrick, and Will try to connect the dots between escape rooms and esports: What are we doing? What aren't we doing? And what do we hope to learn as we jump into a new game in a new city with a new cast?

Season 1 of Every Game in This City is over...but that doesn't mean Kuala Lumpur is the last city where we'll try and play every game! In this short conclusion, Stephanie, Patrick, and Doug look back one last time before setting the stage for Season 2 where eight game makers, curators, and researchers are meeting up in Shanghai for a week to try and watch every game at the International Dota 2 Championships!

Sixteen months after leaving Malaysia, the team reunites to reminisce, reflect, and record one final episode of Every Game in This City! Beaming in from Australia, Sri Lanka, The United States, and Malaysia, we takes turns updating one another on new projects and new play experiences that occurred over the past year. Laura E. Hall leads the discussion as we remember our favorite moments, some lessons learned, a few things we missed, and start to think about what we want to do next! Is there another game in another city we’ve set our sights on for the new year?

It’s the beginning of the end and we’re back to our regularly scheduled program after our surprise escape pod experience last episode! This time, Stephanie Boluk does a double take and finally gets a chance to debrief with the team and reflect a little bit on everything that has happened over the course of 7 days and 50 escape rooms (including new experiences we just had at the original Breakout in Avenue K and back at Lost in KL.) In our final interlude, Patrick, Amani, and Chad get tangled up in Mr. Oswald’s Greatest Show, a creepy marionette masterpiece where the players become the puppets and half the team tries out Exit: The Abandoned Cabin in a midnight escaping session. As the Kuala Lumpur trip comes to an end, we’re all starting to feel the Escape Room Effect.

Boo! Instead of sitting down to tape a new episode, this week the recording studio is haunted by the ghosts of escape rooms past! Shang Lun and Patrick trick and treat the team to a series of sweet and spooky surprises based on our experiences of playing over 50 escape rooms together. From crunching on rock candy in Unlucky Mummy to sneaking peanut M&M’s in Classroom Murder to drinking Dutch Lady chocolate milk in Annabelle, the team will have to come together one last time escape Every Game in This City. Trapped within an escape room about escape rooms inside a podcast about escape rooms—will we ever find our way out of this mise-en-escape?

What if we decided to escape differently? What if we escaped without talking, without touching, or without even seeing the room? Instead of hitting the wall at Codefactory in Sunway Putra, what if we tried to scale it? This week Chad Toprak chats about game development and community building in Malaysia with our final guest, LeeYing Foo, a game artist and UX designer at Kaigan Games as well as the co-organizer of WiGout Malaysia, a hangout space for women and underrepresented folks in KL. After that we head to Codefactory at Sunway Putra before Goldie, Stephanie, Patrick, and Doug break down Classroom Murder, the high school mystery room that inspired us to start designing our own quirky constraints, traitor mechanics, and teen drama! Then the team takes turns playing the same escape room but each time with different voluntary rules: an escape room where no one could speak (except Doug, who was taking notes) and an escape room where no one could touch anything (except LeeYing, who was blindfolded)!

Locked in a bathroom, trapped in a museum, handcuffed together, and wearing clown makeup, after five full days of escaping, the team finally hits a wall at the Fifthroom in MyTOWN. Patrick LeMieux tries to hold it together while introducing our second special guest, Clarissa Lee, a research fellow at Sunway University, who had the dubious pleasure of joining us for her first (and our 30th) escape room. During the interlude, we listen in on Doug and Patrick’s personal audio diaries recorded in a food court immediately after each of their teams had escaped yet another Egyptian-themed room, the Unlucky Mummy. Then we laugh, we cry, we try and read fingerprints off dirty bandages, while slowly losing a sense of what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and what escape rooms even are.

With the whole cast assembled, Goldie Bartlett introduces our first special guest, Teddy Dief, who helped develop Hyper Light Drifter, co-founded Glitch City, and hosts his own podcast on the Idle Thumbs Network, Playscape LA. Teddy joins the team at Nu Sentral to explore the cinematic worlds and role-playing systems of the escape rooms at Breakout Nu. Then Stephanie, Jey, Shang Lun, and Doug peel off to get sweet and salty about the blend of story and puzzle in "Materia Medica," a Chinese medicine-themed escape room. Clearly feeling the effects of four full days of escaping, this episode culminates in a feverish jam session where we brainstorm dozens of escape room ideas.

Laura E. Hall hosts day three where we meet our final team member, Chad Toprak, and talk about global games from Melbourne to Malaysia. Afterwards Patrick joins Laura and Chad to chat about what happens when you lock ten people in “The Tomb of Life and Death,” an asymmetric, architectural escape room. Then the team gets physical with the cramped crawls in Mission-Q and creepy dolls at Lost in KL, two of the most intense escape room parlors we’ve ever encountered yet.

On our second day, Douglas Wilson introduces new team members Laura E. Hall and Jey Biddulph before comparing and contrasting their work at Meridian Adventure Co. in Portland with Alex and Shang Lun’s Earthrise One at PlayReactive in Melbourne. After that, things fall apart when we go to Ecurve, where Goldie, Stephanie, Shang Lun and Amani do a walkthrough of "M&M'S® The Big Escape," a candy-coated escape room at Amaze Escape. Finally, the episode ends with vestigial puzzles, broken props, and the mysterious case of a closed escape room at 1 Utama.

Let the games begin! Lee Shang Lun leads our first full episode where we meet the team, talk about the origins of the podcast, and tease out some possibilities for playing well. During a short interlude, Alexandra, Laura, and Doug introduce the ins and outs of escape rooms before the group debriefs about their first day playing together at the Escape Room franchise in Berjaya Times Square—a parlor where we sped through art galleries, split up in haunted houses, and tried to steal some chocolate milk. Five down, fifty to go.

Every Game in This City is a podcast about ten game designers, researchers, and curators who met up in Malaysia to try and play every escape room in Kuala Lumpur. In this short introduction, Stephanie, Patrick, and Doug set the stage and describe the motivation and methods behind the project. They talk about what the podcast is, what it isn’t, and speculate on some of the challenges that await as the group embarks on their journey to play too many escape rooms! Will the team learn how to play well together?