Creating Transformative Experiences with cityHUNT
group of people completing a cityHUNT experience
When I started cityHUNT over 20 years ago, I was obsessed with a question: How do we help people reconnectâwith themselves, with each other, and with the world around themâthrough something as simple as play?
Inspired by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyiâs work on flow theory, I wanted to bring the magic of immersive, joyful moments into corporate environments that too often forget the value of laughter and creativity.
My co-founder and I constantly tweaked the game mechanics around the principles of flow, trying to create experiences that would be meaningful and transformative.
What began as a simple idea has evolved into something that drives everything else I doâfrom nonprofit work to my upcoming book.
Our Mission: Positively Impacting Companies
The Three Pillars: Playfulness, Connection, and FlowPlayfulness
Designing for All: Diversity as a Superpower
What Makes cityHUNT Different
The Evolution of cityHUNT
Lessons from the Early Days
Impact Beyond Participants
Our Mission: Positively Impacting Companies
At its heart, cityHUNT is about positively impacting companies.
We aim to help organizations through our unique team-building experiences. The more people we can reach and introduce to cityHUNT, the further our mission spreads.
This isnât just about business growth; itâs about creating more abundance that, in turn, helps us fund other events and projects aimed at making a positive difference.
The Three Pillars: Playfulness, Connection, and Flow
Playfulness
As humans, we naturally play as children, just as animals do.
But we often forget how to play as we get older, even though itâs one of the best paths to joy and bliss.
At cityHUNT, we create space for adults to reconnect with that childlike playfulness.
Play doesnât need an end result; the play itself is the point. This contrasts with the productivity-focused mindset many of us develop.
Ironically, when we make space for play, our ability to produce actually blossoms rather than narrows.
Connection
Our second pillar is about fostering meaningful connections.
Iâve come to understand connection as a three-layered concept:
Connection with other people
Connection with nature and the world around us
These connections work like a pyramid. You need to build that inner work first so that you can truly connect with others without needing anything from them.
When youâre fulfilled within yourself, you can connect with others from a place of openness rather than manipulation or coercion.
At cityHUNT, we create opportunities for all these levels of connection, but especially focus on human-to-human interaction.
While you can have fun by yourself, playfulness is typically a shared experience that strengthens bonds between people.
Flow
Flow occurs when people engage in activities that are challenging enough to be interesting but not so difficult that they become frustrating.
We design tasks to hit this sweet spot for different personality types.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyiâs research on flow states was foundational to how we developed cityHUNT.
We wanted to create experiences where time seems to disappear and people become fully present in the moment. Thatâs when true transformation can happen.
Iâm grateful for thinkers like Catherine Price, who has spoken deeply about the science of play, and Jamie Wheal from the Flow Genome Project, whoâs expanded how we understand peak experience.
Their work continues to influence how we design our experiences.
Designing for All: Diversity as a Superpower
cityHUNT events are crafted to celebrate differences. Some people thrive in social challenges, others prefer mental puzzles.
We ask clients about their team dynamics upfront and design experiences that allow everyoneâfrom the CEO to the quietest team memberâto shine.
For extroverts, we include challenges like singing a song to a stranger or doing a TikTok dance.
For introverts who might enjoy solving puzzles, we include more cerebral challenges. This ensures everyone has their moment to shine.
I come from a theater background, so I think of our events almost like plays, where each person gets to be the star in their own way.
We create moments where different strengths are valuedâa maintenance person might know something crucial that a CEO doesnât, highlighting how everyone brings unique value.
Our teams are specifically designed to be four to six people.
Itâs the magic number for team buildingâintimate enough to build real connections and big enough to harness diverse talents.
With fewer than four people, you lose the diversity of thought and skills needed to solve challenges effectively.
With more than six, some participants start to disengage or form smaller subgroups.
What Makes cityHUNT Different
Our approach isnât about high-tech gamification for its own sake. In fact, only one person per team uses a device.
The rest is face-to-face, voice-to-voice.
Our job is to remove friction and invite people to be present. If weâve done our job, they forget itâs a team-building exerciseâtheyâre just laughing, solving, and seeing each other.
One thing weâve mastered over 25 years is how to create team-building experiences for very large groups.
Once you get beyond 30â50 people, most team-building activities become unwieldy. But weâve developed the expertise to run events for hundreds or even thousands of participants.
Weâve perfected the art of routing teams through geographical areas that are neither too small (where teams are on top of each other) nor too large (where it becomes physically exhausting).
We create an arc where everyone starts together as a large group, then breaks into small teams for intimate bonding experiences, and finally reunites to celebrate as a whole.
The Evolution of cityHUNT
The company has evolved significantly over the years.
When we started in 2000, we could only provide 10 clues because we only had 10 Polaroid pictures!
As technology advanced to digital cameras and eventually smartphones, we were able to scale and enhance the experience.
We were paper-and-pen for longer than weâve been digital, which is amazing to think about.
Technology has helped us scale while staying true to our mission.
Having immediate feedback is a crucial part of flow, and as technology evolved from Polaroid cameras to digital cameras to smartphones, weâve been able to provide better, more immediate feedback while still keeping the focus on human interaction.
Whatâs interesting is that weâve used technology to connect people instead of allowing it to separate them.
Weâve harnessed technology to scale our experiences to thousands of participants without losing the personal touch.
Lessons from the Early Days
We didnât get it right from day one. Early on, teams got lost, no one had cell phones, and we overcomplicated everything.
But the intention was always there: to make something beautiful happen when people come together to play.
Looking back, we made many mistakes.
Weâd overthink everythingâcreating multiple variations of each clue (easy, medium, hard), adding complexities that didnât enhance the user experience but just seemed âcoolâ to us as designers.
We had to learn through trial and error what actually worked.
Over time, Iâve spent considerable effort studying positive psychology, gamification, and mindfulness to refine our approach.
I started with gamification, then dove into positive psychology, and finally added mindfulnessârealizing that participants could have moments of personal realization and self-reflection during our games, something I hadnât initially thought possible.
Impact Beyond Participants
Our mission is to positively impact over a million people, and the math works out.
First, the game itself requires participants to interact with strangersâhelping someone, opening a door, singing a song.
Then, participants share their positive experiences with family and friends. And those strangers who were impacted during the game also share their experiences.
Itâs like ripples in water or the Big Bangâan initial positive interaction spreads outward exponentially. With technology and social sharing, the impact multiplies quickly.
We even have YouTube videos with over 100,000 views. When you think about it this way, reaching a million people isnât that difficult in our connected world.
Conclusion
Everything I doâcityHUNT, my future book, the nonprofit workârests on this foundation: abundance through connection.
cityHUNT is how we fund it all, but itâs also how we live our mission. We help people help themselves by creating spaces where joy and collaboration are possible.
In 2019, my perspective shifted significantly.
Before that, I spent most of my time working on external things and building material success.
But starting in 2019, I began focusing more on inner work and developing a new understanding of happiness and fulfillment.
I realized that all happiness comes from within. The external stuff is great, but when I lean into it too much, it causes suffering.
I also realized that no one can actually help meâthey can only help me help myself. Similarly, I canât directly help othersâI can only help people help themselves.
This three-layered connection approach has transformed how I live and how I approach my business.
The inner work serves as the foundation, enabling me to better support my community and the larger world through cityHUNT and all my other endeavors.
Learn more about this philosophy and upcoming projects at benjaminpeacehoffman.com.
