The official field of practice is "gameology", and I am a gameologist, but I prefer the nickname that one of the clients once gave me and since then appears on my business card: "Experience Architect". 🙂

Broadly speaking, I have two main areas of practice. One is experiences in the field of entertainment, mainly everything related to the large commercial escape rooms for entertainment purposes, although the field of experiences also flows a little from escape rooms to other tangential areas that I get to deal with. I'm the one who designs the escape rooms and the different experiences, from the initial stage until customers play in the room.

The second is the field of gamification (in Hebrew Meshuk), which is everything related to the transfer of knowledge, values, and skills through a game experience. In this field, my clients are usually museums and visitor centers, national parks, high-tech companies and various organizations, large entities such as the IDF or the Israel Police, municipalities, the education system, and more.

Wherever there is content or knowledge (or values) that you want to convey in an interesting way, I am hired and I create a game experience that excites the participants and makes them learn through play.

Escape rooms didn't really exist in Israel until 8 years ago and I'm a little older than that...

But by and large, yes, you can say that I grew up in a home with a game. My father, to his blessed memory, loved games and very much liked puzzles. When I was a child he would constantly bring new board games, invent his own games, and give us puzzles. I grew up as a geek and to this day I am a geek in many fields, including this field.

since it exists in Israel approx. I started by writing puzzles for some of the first escape rooms that opened in Israel, I moved on to start my own escape room complex, and then I started creating for others full time.

I worked in high-tech, I was a programmer. After the army (and the trip to South America) I went to study computer science at Ben Gurion University, I graduated and was accepted by a large semiconductor company, programming chips for communication systems. I worked at it for ten years, very uncreative work, but good income. 

The thing is that in parallel with all this, I created together with a lot of amazing people independent films that ran in festivals in Israel and abroad, stage plays, musicals, amusements and other different large productions.

I have always written things. For the drawer, for competitions, I won all kinds of prizes. Also short stories, also screenplays. Like I said, I'm a pretty big geek, and the Israeli science fiction and fantasy community is huge. There are large conferences several times a year, and an Icon festival every year in Sukkot that is attended by tens of thousands of people. I connected to this community and started creating within it. During the day I worked in high-tech, at night we produced huge productions. That's where all this work was done.

The guys in high-tech kept telling me that I was wasted there, that I should work in screenwriting or something in that field, but there was no money in it. I knew that even in Hollywood screenwriters are waiters, and in Israel in general there is hardly any work in this field. 

For ten years, the writing and creation of plays, films and plays were for fun, for the soul. While high-tech was for having something to live on.

Only when the field of escape rooms entered Israel, it was actually the first time I saw that I could make a living from creating experiences.

Hmm… not really. A huge company bought the company I worked for and laid off all 1500 employees worldwide.

First time after ten years that I found myself without a job. Everyone who worked with me went to look for another job in programming. I said "well, if not now then when?", I took the compensation money and founded the "Knights of the Round Table".

True, but I don't know if I would fully call it "courage". Courage is if I quit my job to go set up an escape room. In the end, getting out of your comfort zone is a very difficult thing, so it was just good timing that they kicked me out of my comfort zone and at that point I really decided to go for it. It could be that if they hadn't closed the company I would still be in hi-tech in a simple diplomatic way. It's hard to know.

First of all, for the record, it is important for me to say that technically this was not one of the first rooms in Israel, the Knights of the Round Table was room No. 135 opened in Israel. Together with another 100 rooms that were opened at the same time within a few months when the field exploded here, during that time we went from 30 rooms in Israel to some 180 rooms in a very short time.

It was among the first rooms of the new generation, you can say that. Decoratively, playfully, it was relatively innovative at the time.

And as for going independent, yeah, it's pretty crazy, I've learned a lot from it. In everything related to the creative side of the business, I came with quite a bit of experience, but the whole business part I had no idea, and I had to learn on the go. Happily, there is also a very supportive and encouraging community of escape room owners in Israel and there is always someone to consult with in all these matters.

Not much. Mainly social conditions. Insurances of various kinds and training funds that we used to get through work and all that. Days off, illness, etc. Self-employed people don't get anything...

Love the most? I don't know, it's hard to answer. I guess it's a cliché probably, but seriously, what I like the most is seeing people enjoy something I've created. It's also about getting satisfaction from the work, but also mostly seeing and knowing that it does good for people. Getting people to spend even a little time in escapism that takes them out of some kind of depression they may have been in and they are enthusiastic and have fun, or a family that suddenly sees how it brings them together, one of the reasons I really like being at rooms sessions, because you see how good it does people.

Well like I said I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek so those are probably my favorite genres to write. But I also really like comedy and I try where possible to introduce an amusing side to the rooms.

I have a lecture on this, it will take an hour, I don't know how many pages you have to write but it will be too long, like most of my digs about the creative processes of a room (does anyone even read this? If so, write the word avocado in the comments).

By and large, difficulty level is a Sculbilly matter that can be changed quite easily, sometimes even while playing, but the main method for refining difficulty levels is running. Examine the room as much as possible. 

Either way, I think we should stop referring to this concept of "easy puzzle" versus "hard puzzle" and talk more in terms of "fun puzzle", "unfun puzzle", which is much more correct. The fact that a puzzle is easy does not necessarily mean that the general public will enjoy solving it. You need to create puzzles that everyone will enjoy solving, regardless of the difficulty level.

Whether it's an escape room or any other type of gaming experience, the first step is characterization. Who is the target audience? What is the size of the area designated for the experience? What is the appropriate format, what is the execution budget, the budget is the most important, I need to know whether to write a rotating ceiling and special effects or just boxes with locks. You can write for many different budget levels. There are all kinds of other questions, but by and large, yes, we start with a characterization because each experience is written in a way that is tailored to the abilities and budget of whoever hired me. Only after the characterization do we move to the content.

the biggest? Not to repeat myself, I think. After over 200 escape rooms I've written it's not easy, and sometimes I have an idea that I think is genius and original and I put it in the room and only later find out that five years ago I already used it somewhere else and I didn't remember. The owners of the rooms don't really care about it because it doesn't really matter but I always prefer everything to feel new and fresh.

But in the end even if it happens and there is a similar enigmatic concept, then its execution that is different in different places is enough to set it apart and make it feel like something completely different.

First of all, the field abroad is a somewhat broad concept, each country has its own character and it is difficult to compare rooms in Spain with rooms in the USA for example, these are completely different worlds.

But if you have to emphasize general differences, I would say that abroad there is less emphasis on "success" in an escape room than in Israel. Here there is no such thing as half of the groups not being able to finish the room and there it is more common. 

In Israel, there is no clock that runs backwards in almost any escape room, and abroad it exists in almost every room. This really emphasizes the fact that there it is a matter of "winning" or "not winning" the room, and with us it is more a matter of coming to enjoy the adventure, the fun.

And there is more emphasis in the rooms there on a dark atmosphere, even in non-scary rooms, compared to in Israel where the rooms are lighter in atmosphere and much more intended for families and children than in most countries abroad.

There isn't anything in particular that I can think of that I specifically lack, other than simply "more rooms", "more games". I've played everything there is to play in Israel and they don't open fast enough for my addiction.

Well, everything related to AI is probably already having an effect. Escape rooms have already been opened here that we used in Midgerani for the graphic design and there is a lot of use in the field of AI for designs as well as for writing. This is going to be a significant change, which I believe by the way is for the better and will only make it easier for us to create more cool things.