Magister Ludi

"Magister Ludi" is an online game and installation that puts a twist on the escape-the-room genre with a wry narrator and design that interrogates our role in needing to escape. It is about the thought-processes that stay with you long after the problems aren't around anymore, and so you don't truly escape until you deal with them.

The title is an allusion to Herman Hesse's Nobel-prize-winning novel "The Glass Bead Game," and Magister Ludi plays with the idea of the conceptual game depicted in the novel.

• Commissioned as an installation for Experimenta's 2015 International Biennial of Media Art: Recharge
• Official Selection for the 2014 Freeplay Independent Games Festival's Parallels event at ACMI
• Finalist for the 2015 New Media Writing Prize
• Finalist for the 'Digital Narrative' category for the 2016 Western Australia Premier's Book Awards

Christy Dena – writer, designer, director
Marigold Bartlett – visual artist
Trevor Dikes – sound designer & composer
Cameron Owen – programmer
Iain McManus - port programming