Something new at Arcane
We’re evolving our identity to support you even better.
For several months now, the Arcane Experience team has been working on a major project to give you a truly unique experience.
As you may know, Arcane is 5 years old. Over those years, we’ve welcomed no fewer than 128,314 players with real team spirit, all coming to crack the puzzles and dodge the traps inside our rooms.
More than 56 games, one shared goal
Arcane Experience has created exactly 56 games: quizzes, immersive theatre, escape rooms, large-scale murder mysteries, treasure hunts, board games, virtual escape rooms, creative workshops and team building. We’ve worked with 714 wonderful clients, always with energy and good humour, alongside 26 talented game masters. Building on that success, in addition to Paris, we’ve opened a second escape room in Geneva. This new escape room was created to make working with our international clients easier and to better address your team building challenges.
Arcane has come a long way in 5 years. We felt the need to reaffirm our DNA and bring it to life through everything we’ve built since Arcane began. So we took the decision to rework our identity — a BIG decision that we hope you’ll love.
Arcane Ateliers becomes Arcane Experience
New website, new strapline, new art direction. The aim is to convey the values behind the reputation of our games (escape rooms and team building): modernity, quality and people. Three words that matter enormously, both in our relationships with clients and in the very essence of our team building agency.
Don’t worry: fundamentally, Arcane isn’t changing.
We’ll carry on offering unique escape room experiences in our venues in Paris and Geneva.
We’ll keep growing our catalogue of ready-to-play games for companies looking to offer their employees team building sessions, a virtual escape room for remote teams, or simply a stronger sense of cohesion and belonging.
And of course, there’ll still be pride of place for our bespoke games , which are our speciality.
The Arcane team loves diving into our clients’ worlds to understand every detail of their challenges and objectives.
We’re bringing our expertise in team coaching through team building into line with what we show on the site.
Arcane gets a summer makeover
What drove our decision was the desire to make our team building and escape room design expertise clearer and easier to grasp. We’ve spent 5 years explaining that our job is gamifying corporate events to strengthen team cohesion — but when the client gets it straight away, the message is so much sharper! So let’s go back to the heart of what we do: what exactly is gamification, and why does team cohesion matter so much?
How does gamification boost cohesion?
For us, gamification means putting play (in the broadest sense) to work on our clients’ challenges. We’re convinced that corporate games are a fantastic communication tool, one that brings people together and builds team cohesion. Engie, HP, Eurovia and many others have trusted us to solve their challenges and build memorable game-based tools.
Through these unique experiences, they’ve raised awareness, onboarded new employees, energised events, trained people intelligently, accelerated transformation, sharpened focus and built stronger cohesion between teams.
To show the power of play, nothing beats proof. Every month, on our website and in our newsletter, we’ll share examples of client case studies.
The importance of a shared goal
Arcane Experience is, above all, about a taste for a challenge. We know that within a single team you’ll find very different personalities, and they need to be ready to listen to one another — all in a playful atmosphere. When listening and trust are there, productivity takes off. So we pay the closest attention to your challenges in order to design a corporate and team building game that truly fits. Our experience as game masters helps strengthen team spirit in a relaxed setting.
Beyond guaranteeing a good time, team building is a genuine answer to HR and management challenges. It improves working relationships, reduces conflict and boosts employee retention.
Why the individual is essential to team cohesion
A happy employee is a motivated employee, one who wants to give something of themselves and drive the group forward. They’ll be invested and think long term. An unhappy employee, on the other hand, will be absent more often. They’ll doubt themselves and struggle to see the value of their work. Within teams, the characteristics of individual members have a particularly strong effect. They don’t just affect the individual: the whole group benefits or suffers. There’s a reason we talk about team capability.
A great team is one where every individual counts. Everyone’s skills need to be brought to the fore, and that’s the main purpose of a cohesion offsite.
Beyond skills, you also need to consider an employee’s motivation and emotional state. Managing failure and stress are essential. Teamwork means everyone fulfilling their role and function independently — and doing so extremely reliably and precisely. The image of clockwork describes it well. In teams, independence and personal responsibility therefore play a major role. Anything that increases members’ capacity to act benefits the whole team. Typical measures here include training in time management, self-motivation or work-life balance.
Team management
A manager’s role is to ensure a pleasant atmosphere and effective work within their team. Whatever the size of the company or the team, the manager has to meet the objectives they’ve been set or have defined themselves. Those objectives are reached naturally when the bonds between teams are strong and the synergy is good. The manager has to nurture team spirit, motivate, resolve conflict, encourage collective intelligence and mutual support, make sure company values are respected, communicate clearly and put ideas forward — all while ideally being liked by their team. A real balancing act between authority and empathy. Managers need to show leadership while staying flexible and understanding, to keep everyone together.
What role does gamification play in companies?
The whole point of gamification is to turn an effort that looks tedious into something playful. Someone close to me tells this story:
To teach me to swim, my father took my sister and me to the pool every weekend. I swam like a drowning dog, swallowing water, with it going up my nose. So, to help me improve in good spirits, my father invented a game: line up at the edge of the pool and try to swim further than my sister. She’d beat me by 3 metres, I’d beat her by 4, and so on. Spending every weekend trying to outdo each other, we swam further and further — and, in total secret, my father let a little more air out of our armbands at each session, until the day we no longer needed them and could cross the whole pool with ease.
How is that a team building activity?
This story captures team building perfectly, because that father managed to turn a difficult moment into a playful, collaborative one through a game and a shared project. That’s the essence of gamification: bringing a team together (here, the children), creating a bond (here, family), borrowing elements from games (the reward: beating your sister) while serving a shared goal (learning to swim) through good cohesion between members (the sisters’ appetite for a challenge). A sense of belonging naturally made the goal achievable, thanks to the team’s performance rather than the individual’s alone. Applying game concepts is therefore about encouraging a certain behaviour within a team, in a good working atmosphere. The game master (here, the father) has to stimulate the team and its collective intelligence to keep that cohesion alive.
In a corporate context, gamification can be used to attract customers or mobilise employees. Through a fun activity and within a dynamic team, every employee gives something of themselves towards a shared goal. The manager, meanwhile, sees their teams working together, developing team spirit and genuine human cohesion.
The escape room, a team building classic
The escape room is one of the great team building classics. Its strength? Bringing a team together through teamwork with real synergy. An escape room means solving a shared puzzle, and success rests entirely on how effectively the team works. Fear and a ticking clock both play an important part in this team building activity. The activity takes place in distinctive settings, such as a bunker or a prepared prison cell. Colleagues have an hour to find and decipher every clue hidden in the room. Then they can leave the room again.
Beyond its entertainment value, an escape room is also a way for a team to promote a new product or service at full scale. Inside the room, every member can interact with the new launch or product and discuss it together. The escape room draws on a sense of belonging, mutual support and cohesion.
Want to bring your teams together?
Want to move your group dynamic forward? Ready to unite a team around a single goal? Count on Arcane Experience’s expertise to run your team building offsites, strengthen your team and build lasting bonds.
Arcane Experience is here for you!
