Since I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with miniatures. Not dolls, per se, but what my mom called “setups:” arrangements of tiny furniture and items to create little scenes. As a child I made them from popsicle sticks and polymer clay, received them as gifts from relatives and friends. One year, on my birthday, my coworkers replaced every object on my desk with a miniature version; I still keep the tiny laptop near my real one.
Beyond being generally adorable, small things are almost totemic to me, representations of the infinitely larger and messier whole, rendered in select specifics. There’s certainly an element of control in play — how appealing, to arrange things exactly as you’d like — and also one of possibility, how the smallest corner of the world could be, even if to outside observers it just looks like a pile of junk.
These obsessions led me to create the The Keeping House, a blend of handcraft, electronics, narrative, and game design that I exhibited publicly for the first time last month.
It’s a game set in a dollhouse — a miniature escape room meets IRL point-and-click adventure, (if you play video games, you’ve likely heard about last year’s Blue Prince, a major point of inspiration). Participants are invited to reach in and touch, grab, open, and otherwise interact with the dozens of tiny handmade objects contained inside. Before play, you’re presented with a note from the house’s absent owner (an abstracted version of me), with a request to turn the power back on while they’re away. In order to do so, you must unlock a series of locks to reach the house’s attic, where many of its secrets are contained.
The primary interface, beyond touch, is a magnifying glass I built containing an inductive coil, which lights up little wireless LEDs placed around the house. About halfway through, many players discover another tool that illuminates further clues. Throughout, little breadcrumbs of information are scattered about the house and its owner, revealing a narrative in fragments about hopes, anxieties, and memories.
I more or less entered a fugue state while working on this thing. I became obsessed with it: how to design it modularly, so that I could rearrange rooms and objects easily; how to make a series of custom electronics that could be swapped in and out; how to make items that struck a balance between feeling precious but not too fiddly, inviting but not indestructible, that could ideally survive hundreds of handlings.
Above all, I wanted to make something that felt like a true experience: not just a cute, static object to pass by and remark upon, but a piece that would draw audiences in and reward them with layers of interaction and discovery. I wanted it to be an actual game.
I was, I think, successful on these counts. To date, nearly 500 participants have played The Keeping House. Almost all playthroughs were completed in around ten minutes. And while some people found the directions too opaque, and others just wanted to look at the little furniture, for most it seemed to land. People gasped at the points I hoped they would, and described it with words like “magical” and “delightful.” Not a single piece was broken or went missing over the course of the two full days it was on public display, a satisfying testament to the game’s sturdiness.
It’s been incredible to show The Keeping House to real people and get their feedback, and I’d like to do more of that. If you’d like to see it (or have ideas for a space that might be interested in exhibiting it), hit me up!
For my next game design project, though, I want more people than the ones who can make the journey to me personally to experience it. So next up, my thesis: an entirely digital game. I want to play around in the possibilities of a virtual space, now that I have a sense of what I can create within the constraints of physicality. Paradoxically, maybe, this game feels like a blueprint for the next — it’s all about building a little world, and inviting players in.
This is my dream! You are amazing.
Is there a way to still play this game?