Play Playground from Play Social Inc., a fantastical and immersive attraction designed for competitive socialising, opened at Luxor Hotel and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip on 18 January as Luxor Hotel and Casino continues to expand its entertainment experiences.
The 15,000-square-foot Play Playground features more than 20 larger-than-life tactile, memory, puzzle, and team games. It also includes two bars, VIP mezzanines, and private event spaces. The games focus on nostalgia, competitive socialising, and fun, affording adults a chance to revisit the childhood joy of play.
Luxor is known for its iconic pyramid shape and offers a casino and live entertainment. Play Playground is part of the destination’s strategy to become the Las Vegas Strip’s ‘most dynamic hub for immersive entertainment and experiences’. Award-winning immersive Las Vegas attraction Particle Ink is set to open at Luxor imminently. During this trippy experience, interactive and projection mapping tech will allow guests to feel like they are inside a living graphic novel.
“We are always looking to develop new entertainment experiences for our guests,” said the Luxor Hotel and Casino’s president and COO Chuck Bowling.
The Luxor is already home to the HyperX esports arena, Discovering King Tut’s Tomb: The Experience, Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, and Bodies… The Exhibition.
Bringing a new brand to Vegas
Jennifer Worthington is a co-creator at Play Playground, which has a mission to bring people together through magical, immersive and gamified theatrical hospitality experiences. She told blooloop about the project.
An entrepreneur and author who began her career as a film producer before forging a path in developing successful nightlife and entertainment operations, Worthington graduated from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and attended Harvard Business School’s ‘Women Leading Business.’
“I was a film producer with Jerry Bruckheimer for ten years, I came to the Las Vegas strip and opened Coyote Ugly, the last movie I produced for him. I have a lot of experience operating brick-and-mortar concepts on the Strip. They were all ‘immersive’ experiences. Nobody used that word back then, but we were creating cool, magical environments as a way to sell hospitality.”
Vegas is the ideal launching pad for a new brand, according to Worthington. “It was where we wanted to launch Play Playground.”
Describing the concept’s inception, she adds:
“First of all, we like to play games. My family plays games almost every night, whether with the kids or without. We believe games bring people together. You only have to look at the competitive entertainment space, whether it’s Topgolf or TOCA Social, to see that adults want to play.”
“We came up with the concept of creating the most playful bar in Vegas.”
Competitive socialising meets immersive experiences
The approach fused immersive experiences and competitive entertainment concepts with an adult playground, bringing the childhood joy and exuberance of running from a slide to the jungle gym with friends to the adult space:
“Our idea was to put it in a highly branded, very elevated experience from an interior design perspective and create large-scale games that make you feel like you’ve been dropped into a game show.”
Initially, Play Playground opened as a family-friendly attraction by day, pivoting to an adult-only crowd at night. Now, however, the decision has been made to focus solely on a 21+ visitorship.
“We found we were inundated with kids, and the adults were coming in and not wanting to stay,” she explains. “We can’t be all things to all people, at least in the Las Vegas market, and we wanted to cater to the underserved crowd, the adults looking for something to do. Creating an environment solely for adults made a lot of sense.”
Encouraging play at Play Playground
In place of the VR, AR, and arcade games that are becoming ubiquitous, Play Playground offers tactile, memory, puzzle and team games:
“We want people to put their phones down,” Worthington says. “We are so addicted to technology.”
Play is built around the notion of putting phones down and interacting face-to-face:
“We want people to laugh together, interact with friends and colleagues, and make new friends. We’re finding that people are walking out of here with new friends, new relationships, exchanging numbers. I like to say that we’re the new Tinder: you get a sense of who somebody is after playing games with them, so it’s the best place to meet.”
Additionally:
“The tactile elements of the games go back to our childhood, so we’re tapping into that nostalgia. We’re living in scary times. If we can take people out of their everyday lives for an hour and a half and get them to laugh, high-five, and interact together as humans, that is how we measure our success, particularly in a post-Covid world. We were all so isolated for a couple of years.”
Human interaction, she asserts, is of crucial importance:
“According to the Surgeon General of the US, loneliness is at an epidemic level. Two out of three people say they don’t have one true friend. This notion of bringing a community of people together through play is extraordinarily important to us.”
A wide demographic
Initially, the Play team envisaged the playground would attract a visitorship composed predominantly of Gen Z and millennials. However:
“At night, we turn very millennial, but during the day, we see many older people. At noon, when we open every day, there is a line of people in their forties and fifties, along with every other demographic.
“It’s fantastic, and we’re loving it. Because most of our games are built for up to eight people, we find that older people and younger people come together to play a game. Then, they’re high-fiving and walking to the bar to drink together.”
Games include Ringer Run, where guests, distracted and delighted by the designer mood lighting, attempt to guide a ring along a rambling track without allowing it to make contact; Perfect Popper, an oversized take on a toddler shape-sorting game with the added pressure of a timer measuring out an unspecified countdown; Doctor, Doctor – a surgical emergency requiring steady hands and steadier nerves – and many more.
Move It tests concentration as you twist, plunge, slide, and kick on command, trying to keep up with prompts that come faster and faster. Meanwhile, Frolic requires you to get up on the dancefloor, following coloured sensors that flash faster and faster. Word Up asks you to show off your wordy prowess. In Bullseye Bounce, you become a Velcro-clad projectile in a game of human darts, jumping from the trampoline to hurl yourself as close to the target as you can.
Play Playground and the Luxor
Corporate events are another facet of Play Playground. While the experience is essentially a tactile one, it is supported by sophisticated technology:
“This means we have the ability to create teams and allocate points for teams within the context of the experience.”
Addressing the partnership between MGM Luxor Hotel and Casino and Play Playground, Worthington comments:
“We love MGM. They are probably the best partner a company like ours could have on the Las Vegas Strip. Luxor is an exciting property with an emphasis on attractions. On the atrium level, our co-tenants are Blue Man Group, Titanic, Bodies, and King Tut’s Tomb.”
Another attraction, Particle Ink: House of Shattered Prisms, is scheduled to open at the Luxor in April:
“Luxor has focused strongly on creating a destination for daytime and nighttime attraction-based entertainment. So, it seemed like a perfect fit for us. The president and COO, Chuck Bowling, is a huge proponent of this. We love competition because business begets business.”
Since opening, the 15,000-square-foot Play Playground has enjoyed enormous success, drawing people from the entirety of the Strip:
“People are getting in cars and coming to see Play Playground.”
The guest experience
She outlines the visitor experience:
“We are a ticketed attraction. For $37 plus service fees, you get a lanyard. We invite our guests – all adults – to ride the slide to enter the experience, which they love and which gets them in the mood.
“Then, because we think discovery is part of the journey, there is no mapped, preset experience. Unlike many other immersive experiences, we don’t want people to go from A to B to Z. The games range from memory to physical to word games: we have something for everybody.
“We are finding that people are going bananas for our bounce experiences, which include a Velcro wall on a trampoline base and an adult bounce house.”
There are two one-person games, but most are made for groups. This, Worthington explains, is intentional:
“We want people to come together through play, so we have built games for up to eight people.”
Two bars are contained in the experience:
“We have an unbelievable cocktail and mocktail program. So, people play games, then go up to the bar, chat with their friends, and run to the next game. We expected initially that the experience would be about 90 minutes in duration. In fact, we’re finding that people stay for around two hours during the day, and later on, they stay for the whole evening.”
A great music program enhances the experience:
“It’s just the most fun place to hang out on the Las Vegas strip. In a world where people don’t want to go to a nightclub at one o’clock in the morning, stand behind a red velvet rope and then spend $5,000 on a table, nothing compares to this.”
Creating Play Playground
Worthington defines what the term ‘immersive’ means in the context of Play Playground:
“We have created a world that is like being dropped into a cross between Alice’s Wonderland and a Wes Anderson movie.”
The design is by global interior design storyteller Paul Bishop:
“We tasked him with creating an immersive experience which felt, from the second you entered, unlike anywhere else in the world. We wanted to bring you into this playful environment so you’d feel like a kid again. That was very intentional. Kids get all the fun.”
In contrast to the type of cut-rate popup experiences labelled ‘immersive’ that have given the genre a bad name – such as the notoriously underwhelming Glasgow Willy Wonka experience – she adds:
“From a quality perspective, we invested heavily to create a luxury brand. The guests walk [or slide] into a place that has taken an enormous amount of money and expertise to create. We want people to have a luxury experience within the context of immersive entertainment.”
She envisages that the competitive entertainment sector will continue to grow over the next few decades.
“I think there’s no question. People are tired of going into a bar and standing around as a way to meet people. People in their twenties and thirties are not dating, something dating apps have noted. Environments facilitate meetings, and fun interactions will grow and grow. And who doesn’t like good, old-fashioned competition? It’s fun. We like people to laugh with and at each other in our space.”
Looking ahead
In terms of Play Playground’s reception, Worthington adds:
“Our biggest complaint right now is the crowds, which is a great problem to have. We have been phenomenally well received.
“People genuinely feel the experience is like being dropped into your own game show—and the Instagram shareability is huge. Influencers are getting 5 or 6 million views, and 240,000 shares after only two and a half weeks. The reception on TikTok and Instagram has been extraordinary. A concept where your customers are doing your marketing for you is the best of all worlds.”
As far as growth is concerned, the future looks bright:
“We are really excited about opportunities in the Middle East. Plus there are key markets in the US we’re also excited about. After that, London is on our roadmap. We never set out to build just one Play Playground.
“We want to connect people and break down social barriers through play. So, the idea of connecting the locations is important to us. That technology has already been built. This means that when we open Play Playground London, London will be competing against Las Vegas.
“We love this idea of being able to create a community around play.”
