Immersology – Structures & theories of immersive theatre

January 2, 2024

Scene: a definition

It’s the end of the gift-giving season, and I’d like to offer the kind of post that might spark some fireworks for creators in the new year.

Let’s define the word “scene.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. What’s the difference between a gripping scene and a scene that people tune out?

I think with The Man From Beyond, we wrote scenes based on instinct, without a firm definition of “what makes a scene.” A fair amount of what writers do I think is instinct based on osmosis from years consuming storytelling across all sorts of media.

To quote the artist-musician Brian Eno, intellect is often catching up with intuition.

But when you do have a firm definition and can stand back, do the intellectual check (not just the gut check), to see if you have written a scene, your work will achieve true consistency.

Basic definition

Merriam Webster: a scene is: “one of the subdivisions of a play,” but also potentially “the place of an occurrence or action,” as in “the scene of the crime.”

Oxford: a scene is “a part of a film, play or book in which the action happens in one place or is of one particular type.”

A scene is a discrete part of the continuous action of a story. It is often defined by a particular place, changing when the location changes, or when someone enters or exits. Something certainly is happening in a scene. Note that both of those definitions include a nice little word, “action.” Maybe begins to suggest movement.

But a two minute bit in which I make oatmeal is not really a scene, now, is it?

But what if… I’m signing a song to the morning sun, open the pantry to make my oatmeal, but discover that it’s gone, I forgot I ate it all yesterday. I break down sobbing on the kitchen tile floor because I fear I am beginning to lose my memory.

Now that’s a scene.

A scene is…

Change.

It’s that simple. The scene begins, your character expects one thing to happen, but then: SURPRISE! Something else happens instead.

If nothing changes in your scene, you have a wheels-spinning-in-place or slice-of-life bit that, unless you’re dedicated to some serious post-modern story-telling project, should be cut from the final edit. No one wants to watch me make oatmeal when it doesn’t at least overflow.

Put even more simply: you should never see a scene of someone knocking on the door and being cordially let inside.

I see this mistake a lot in all sorts of media: nothing changes by the end of the scene. Everything goes exactly as you expected, or worse, they TALK, and nothing happens. It’s boring, just like life. This mistake is being made at all levels of professionalism, beginners and Hollywood pros.

I prefer to call moments in which nothing changes “vignettes” rather than “scenes.” It’s a snapshot, a static moment, rather than an event. Vignettes are fine, you can make a whole show out of vignettes if you want, but events are more interesting.

Start looking for scenes as you consume your stories. Ask: did something change? Or did everything end just as it was when it started? You’ll find the scenes you enjoy the most involve change.

I sometimes like to say “a scene is surprise” because “surprise” is a bit more specific than “change.” Change is a little nebulous, but surprise is a more concrete box you can check. In a scene, someone needs to experience surprise. Something someone didn’t expect to happen, happens. In an immersive or in an escape room, the character can be surprised or your players can be surprised. Either one works! But you need to subvert expectations in every scene.

Thwart Your characters

Of course, it’s not enough to have a jack-in-the-box go off in your scene. The surprise has to mean something to someone in the scene.

Your characters need to want something, what is called motivation. The character enters the scene wanting something. By the end of the scene, the character either is thwarted in their desire, or undergoes a redirect—they see a new avenue for getting what they want that they now must consider. One or the other.

Only by the end of the entire story can the character get what they want. (Or not—up to you.)

So let’s say my characters (or players) need to stay hidden in an attic. Then they bump into an old jack-in-the box. And the enemy finds them! STAKES.

Scenes in Escape Rooms and Immersives

What makes escape rooms and immersive theatre great is they deliver embodied surprise. It’s more powerful than the flat surprise happening to characters on a screen. People love discovering new things for themselves, whether that’s what’s in a previously locked box or what’s behind a closed door. Design for surprise, always.

A portal in Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return (Santa Fe). Meow Wolf loves surprise so much, they insist on closed doors everywhere that wreak havoc on their crowded crowd flow.

But surprise should come from more than just set and props. Characters can surprise players, too. You’ll use your non-playing characters best if they deliver unexpected things to the players. Remember that people are wayyyy more dynamic than sets.

And it can go the other way, too: players can surprise characters. Which is really exciting and totally not a thing that can happen in traditional theatre. As a performer, I love nothing more than when a player surprises me. As a writer, I create opportunities for the players to participate in the scene as the deliverer of surprise, the catalyst of change. It can be even more thrilling than “what’s behind that door.”

So if you have a video or voice over in your immersive, whether at the opening, closing, or in the middle, make sure it’s delivering surprise. If you have a live actor… oh, the possibilities! Actors love nothing more than delivering or receiving surprise. It’s really this little thing called drama.

The actor’s favorite element. Maybe everyone’s favorite element, really.

But even if you have no non-playing characters in your world, you still have scenes with your players to write. Write them for movement.

What is story?

Story is scene writ-large. Something BIG needs to change in a story. If the world is the same when I leave as when I entered, what’s the point?

If you’ve played a lot of escape rooms or done a few immersive theatre pieces, you know a big change doesn’t always happen by the end. I’m not a fan of it. These are not the experiences that stay with me.

A Tribute to Sleep No More

Yesterday The New York Times announced that Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More will close on January 28, 2024.

A million masked faces cried out that day.

Dear Reader, you are reading this thanks to Sleep No More. I owe my professional life to Sleep No More. And why I love Sleep No More and always will above all other immersives is because I know I am not alone in saying that it changed my life.

Its legacy is an entire industry called immersive entertainment.

So many ambitions derived from seeing this one ambitious couple.

July 3, 2013

The date is seared in my memory.

No sooner was I off the elevator, but I got pulled into the narrow interrogation room with Malcolm and Macduff. The intimacy of an actor shutting me into the room. The violence of the swinging pendant. The interrogation. The tree! The alliance formed. As a Shakespeare super-nerd, I quickly recognized this was Act 4, Scene 3 of Macbeth, a rather knotty rhetoric scene, as post-modern dance: subwoofers blaring, my life slightly at risk.

Whoa.

I followed Malcolm all the way down to the first floor, and right before entering the ballroom for the banquet, he turned around, pulled me aside, and said “Shhhh…”

I was no audience member. I had an allegiance.

Later that night I saw the tragedy of youth in Macbeth’s ambition, in a way no spoken-word actor had ever conveyed, as he danced with the imaginary dagger through the cemetery. I tried to help Lady Macduff when she stumbled at the ball, and she held me close in her closet as she, in her drugged delusion, called me her lost child. She left me with an origami pocket filled with salt, the paper ripped from a Bible, to keep me safe. Reader, I have it to this day.

*I keep a collection of my Sleep No More souvenirs under my jewelry case*. *The mask collection goes elsewhere*. If this feels like bragging, rest assured it is. This is theatre you can brag about.

For the first time in my life, I left a play and refused to talk about it. How could I even begin to talk about it? Silence was the only conceivable answer.

True to the show’s name, I did not sleep that night.

The turn

Returning home, my theatrical endeavors now felt hollow. Actors sometimes sneak a sideways glance at the audience, live for the rare Friday night when there are laughs in the house, hoping against hope that someone out there “gets it.” We are so hungry for connection. But in truth, there is an impenetrable wall in the theatre.

No connection. No immediacy. No relationship.

I was dreaming of the McKittrick Hotel, still haunted by the people there I couldn’t help, the mazes within I hadn’t seen. I became that person (who first told me about the show), proselytizing for a solid half hour about the sheer wonder of the experience, only to forget and say “Oh yeah, and it’s all told through dance.”

But no one minded my proselytizing, and friends were booking tickets. They did not respond to this show like when I say I’m directing The Merchant of Venice or performing in yet another Blithe Spirit. They booked tickets willingly and often came back holding court about it just like I did.

Theatre has been trying to justify itself ever since film came out. The argument usually boils down to the fact that theatre is live and therefore supposedly more exciting. In Sleep No More, I saw what film could never do, leaning into live-ness so much that I had been to the McKittrick Hotel. The place was mine to explore, and the camera was my eye. The story I witnessed was no story, flattened out by a stage, screen, or page, but a memory in my body.

Whoa.

That Christmas, after my second visit, Cameron and I dared to ask, “Could we make something like Sleep No More?” It seemed impossible. No way could Houston support a year-round audience in the hundreds, nor could we handle the scale. But we enjoyed brainstorming a show anyway.

Along came Then She Fell: 8 actors, 15 audience, 3,000 sqft. A scale we could attain in Houston. Then we got serious. While developing show pitches, we played Trapped in a Room with a Zombie, something that Houstonians were buying tickets to. Then those pitches turned into escape room pitches. Escape rooms, to us at least, seemed to be begging for context, connection, immediacy. The rest is Strange Bird‘s history. I still don’t sleep well, because come morning, there is so much possibility.

Would we have gone to those two experiences and seen our vision without Sleep No More to frame them? I am not certain. The scale makes it impossible to ignore. Its confidence always gets me, 22 actors across six floors, perfectly synched. The massive statement that is Sleep No More makes a paradigm shift like we experienced seem almost inevitable. Assuming I would have bought tickets to these experiences at all (something of an assumption), I suspect I would have dismissed Then She Fell as a performance art dance project and escape rooms as cash-grabs aimed at nerds. Instead, I saw kin of the thing we loved the most.

Cameron described Sleep No More as “Mozart in the Stone Age.” When it opened in 2011, the United States had almost no exposure to immersive theatre.

Say what you want about “Tony and Tina’s Wedding”: it did not spark a sea change.

Here lands this insane production, so far advanced in its understanding of immersive craft that it is almost outside of history. It was shocking. I think it still is shocking.

Attention must be paid.

The legacy

I’ve told my story above as a synecdoche. Mine is but one testimony. There are countless more out there. 450 people a night chasing actors in and out of the Gallow Green shops, staying with Macduff as he cradles his dead wife, witnessing Macbeth consumed by the trees. For twelve years.

I have spoken of the epicness, but its stability is as much a source for its influence. I relished Sleep No More‘s stability, to have a work of genius to point people to at any time. “Go to that. Then you’ll understand.”

I’d wager something like 80% of immersive theatre creators in the United States would say Sleep No More was their first and primary influence. The percentage is fewer for escape room creators, but I’ve met several (and their work is excellent).

And how many audiences were created by Sleep No More? People with no interest in creation, but still dreaming of the show nonetheless, hungry for the chance to turn a story into a memory. They started putting “immersive theatre” into Google and took chances on smaller and local productions, helping the industry grow. They probably now play escape rooms, chasing after a taste of Sleep No More.

Neither immersive theatre nor escape rooms would be where we are without the colossus that is Sleep No More.

And that is the true source of my grief. I grieve for the creators and consumers of immersive entertainment who will never be born because they cannot stumble into Sleep No More anymore.

But hey! They can still go to The McKinnon Hotel in Shanghai!

In 2022, we hosted about 3,000 guests at The Man From Beyond. That’s one week at the McKittrick. Us small fry can’t begin to aspire to having the same cultural impact. (Or revenue, for that matter.)

These are giant shoes to fill.

What’s next?

Something new will move into those six floors in Chelsea. I’m hoping for theatre, not a night club. I’m hoping Punchdrunk still has a part in it. Maybe they will make something as insanely precise as The Burnt City, which blew me away with their use of modern lighting and controls. Maybe they will fulfill their promise-threat of a cutting-edge non-masked structure.

Whatever comes next, the closing of Sleep No More marks the end of the First Age of Immersive Entertainment. I do not think it is the Death Knell, but the death of a colossus shrinks us more than the closing of the small scurrying mammals.

It is right to mourn the loss even as we turn to the new.

Thank you Punchdrunk for Sleep No More and to co-producer Emursive for giving it the stability to influence so many of us. This show will be missed.

It’s not Too late…yet…

If you’re reading this blog and haven’t gone to Sleep No More, what are you doing? Book tickets before it’s too late! It is both past and future. It will ground you in the essential history of immersives and still offer you a glimpse of what this form can be.

Check out my First Timer’s Guide: some prep and framing will benefit you greatly going in. Also note that you’ll need to be aggressive with other audiences. They’ve been overfilling it for years, and the final shows are likely to be packed with die-hard fans (who are a bit obnoxious, honestly). Some people are very turned off by that aspect, to the point of not enjoying it at all, so consider yourself warned.

Me? I like the aggression part a touch too much. It is my hope against hope that another show will come along in which I can unleash my true self: the hyper-aggressive weasel.

See you on the stairs. I’ll be the Woman in the Red Dress, running the Malcolm marathon on my tenth and final visit.

August 7, 2023August 7, 2023

Know What Motivates You

As the date for this year’s virtual Reality Escape Convention approaches, I am getting HYPE by remembering my biggest take-away from last year’s in-person convention in Boston. It’s been in my head ever since. If you bumped into me in the past year, I probably waxed on a little too long about the idea. I love this idea. Time to share it more formally.

In a workshop entitled, “Reflecting your Business in your Brand,” Stuart Bogaty of Trap’t challenged us with the question of why we were in business.

He said there are typically three root whys…

In it for the money
In it for you
In it for them

Stuart then asked us to rank these Three Whys by priority. Different businesses have different priorities, and ranking the three from most motivating to least motivating clarifies decisions that you’ve made—or will make.

Let’s dive in…

for the money

Money is the most obvious why. Most people labor for money. It’s a bonus if they enjoy the labor, but money is usually the primary goal. Small business owners are no different. Many start with the dream they might just strike it rich. The rest at least dream of replacing or surpassing the income of their more boring job.

It is not exactly a glamorous why. Who wants to be a fat cat capitalist when you could be a starving artist? *Commence wild eye rolling*

Let me push back against that idea. Money is an important why that (I swear) some people prioritize too low.

Yes, there can be a certain commercial sheen in a work created just for the money: it can feel shallow, passionless, rudderless, baffling the viewer into asking “Why does this exist?” Such experiences usually exit through the gift shop. But valuing profit does not guarantee that fate.

Profit and art can not just coincide, but should. Artists who neglect profit either stop being artists (we have to eat, too, you know), or depend upon a patron or outside source of income that, again, makes them and their work extraordinarily vulnerable. I abhor the notion that to make something that is profitable—that “the people like”—is to bastardize the purity of your artistic vision a priori. But I digress.

The degree of devotion to money can vary, from “maximize profit at all costs” to “as long as we’re in the black every month.”

Of course, go too far into maximizing your profits, and you diminish your product. That’s the story of most escape room chains. They prioritize growth to the point of destroying their product and thereby risk the entire escape room industry with their broken games and lost-at-sea game masters not even empowered to take a freaking SHARPIE to a prop where the Sharpie marks have completely faded!!!

“You can do it—fix it now! I’ll just stand here and wait! What do you mean, no?”

Not that I’m speaking from an explicit experience or anything.

The Escape Game is a great example of a business that has money as its primary why, but hasn’t sacrificed the quality of its product in that pursuit. They understand that the best way to make money is to deliver a consistent product that delights a wide range of guests with best-in-class customer service. Rather than create new games for each of their locations, they perfect the ones they have—a cost-saving measure if there ever were one in this industry (I don’t know about you, but working on something new is so damn expensive). I recommend their games to locals and traveling enthusiasts alike.

You can tell that money is their goal because they went back to public bookings after the pandemic, which we all know makes for a weaker product but a better bottom line. But rumor has it if you contact them that you are an enthusiast who is (coughcough) likely to ruin other people’s games (cough), they may offer to make your booking private. Enthusiast money also speaks, apparently.

The Escape Game’s games will never top TERPECA, but they shouldn’t. That wouldn’t be in service of their top priority.

For you

Most small businesses owners could make more money working for somebody else. But that’s not what they want the most. They want something more—a challenge. They start a small business to serve themselves: to be their own boss, to do work they enjoy, to give themselves the space to showcase or grow their talents.

Maximizing profits rarely requires maximizing human potential, leaving so many of us bored and unexplored.

The world is crowded, and people are so creative. They have to claim their own space if they are to explore their creativity fully.

That is one of the things that made me fall so hard for the immersive arts. While the barrier to entry is not as low now as it once was, the immersive arts promises careers that previously were under lockdown, with only Hollywood and Broadway producers holding the keys. Start your own business, and look who’s holding the keys now?

Ever played a game where the creator wants to show you something in progress that they’re working on? Or give you a backstage tour? They always have such joy in their voice. I love it. That’s someone who is in it for themselves. Their self-exploration is what drives the business.

These types of businesses are called lifestyle businesses, as they exist to yield a desired lifestyle to the owner. Such owners may reach a point of contentment with their business, where it’s enough for them to maintain what they have. They don’t need to open new locations because adding more of the same work for more money isn’t a bargain that sounds attractive to these types.

Or they’ll go the opposite route, and it’s never enough. They will be always working on something new and something more ambitious than, quite frankly, it needs to be. But if you are ultimately serving yourself with your ambitious build, then maybe it is as ambitious as it needs to be.

If Felix Barrett’s recent press statement is to be believed, Punchdrunk has produced their last masked show with the closing of The Burnt City and will pursue new structures ahead. Which I think is wild—they have a model that works. But that’s what a business in it for the owners would choose to do. They’re bored. They crave what is new.

Look, Felix, but I’M NOT BORED. The Burnt City is exquisite.

For them

Finally, we come to those who are externally motivated by them, whoever they are: the audience, viewer, player, customer. These creators will spare no expense to deliver something that truly wows the receiver. The sky is not too high.

It’s as if they are in the business of gift-giving.

Are they in love? I wonder.

These owners will be especially keen to receive feedback and adapt the product accordingly. They will want to make sure it works for the gift-receiver. They will often act irresponsibly when it comes to money.

People who prioritize their audience are how we get such indulgences as Molly’s Game and The Dome. Rumor has it neither will make their money back, but rumor has it the creators just don’t care. That’s not what they set out to do. They set out to blow your mind. That’s what matters.

Probably most TERPECA owners are them-motivated people. The games that make that list are irresponsible and off-the-hook.

Enjoy the gift.

My ranking

It will come as little surprise to my avid readers. For my part in Strange Bird Immersive, I am motivated by…

Them.
Money.
Me.

I want to move people. I want to connect at the heart. I want to make my audience feel violently alive, aware of the full span of their lungs, flush with possibility. I want to do that so badly. And I will rewrite it if you don’t get that.

Perhaps the order of 2 and 3 was surprising to you? Where I ranked money surprised me, too. Fiscally, we’ve always structured our business to run a responsible profit, but I’d like to go further still in pursuing that value. Lucidity was designed at the outset to counter the fiscally questionable structure of The Man From Beyond—without sacrificing quality, of course.

It’s wonderful to create things, the sense of purpose I have every morning shoots me out of bed like a rocket, but at the end of the day, I am very open to replicating our experiences in other locations (that is, to make money), rather than always pushing the boundaries of what I can do. Opening other locations some day also serves my primary goal of reaching more people.

How to measure a successful business?

Once I had this lens at my disposal, I started to understand the wide variety of businesses out there. It has made me far less judgy of other people’s approaches. There are many ways to define a successful business beyond maximizing profits.

I’ve always resented immersive experiences that can afford to abandon all hope of making the investment back, as it makes those of us who don’t have that funding look weak in comparison. But nowadays, I feel less angry with the ones who can throw profit to the winds and more grateful that they choose to spend their money on me. So now I simply say, “Thank you.”

I also understand businesses that stop making new things, are not in the most optimal location, or are not doing particularly marquee-worthy things but are perfectly happy as they are. The owners are pursuing a life that makes them happy. Is that a bad business? No!

So next time you play a game or attend an immersive show, speculate on what their why might be.

And I encourage you to make your own list. Maybe it will surprise you, like it did me. It will help to step back and understand yourself—and may help you make your best business decisions yet.

Recon 2023

One of the best decisions you can make for any escape room business is to attend Recon this year, August 19-20, 2023. It’s virtual, so it’s easy to attend. I’m not paid to promote it or anything; it’s just a phenomenal professional opportunity I look forward to every year. The talks will be gold, but the connections more so. I would love to meet you at one of the extended “happy hours” in the wee hours of the morning and hear more about what motivates you.

June 13, 2023June 13, 2023

Mapping your Experience

Time to close out my series on Bookends and Bottlenecks with a gift.

In order to take control of your structure, it helps if you can see it. This is where a map comes in handy.

You can call this visualization a number of different things: map, diagram, experience flow, puzzle flow, flowchart. There are many different ways to make one and many different tools to get you there. But make one, and you’ll see your experience in a whole new light.

This post will walk you through how I create an experience flow from the player POV.

THE layout

As my physics teacher taught me, time is always along the x-axis, so that’s what I do here. This translates into a long landscape instead of a long portrait, but I think they are easier to read this way. I like to print these, so if I find myself running out of x-axis space, I snake the rest of the flow down below the first part or spill over onto a second page.

The y-axis represents paths through the experience (over time), with shapes along those paths for what are a variety of events.

The shapes represent…

Scenes: a passive beat with no “solve” action, so this can be narrative beats or out-of-world hosting by a Game Master.

Starting Point: this is a easily-discovered prop or set piece that delivers a clue. (If a starting point is a hard-to-find item, I’ll pair it with a solve action symbol).

Solve Action: represents the brain time (“aha!”) plus the physical action taken to unlock a new thing. I like to delineate these into “Plug-in Action” (perform this task or put this key into a keyhole somewhere) and “Decode Action” (anything that is harder than a simple task). Every action in an escape room is something a team can get hung up on, so it makes sense to map any action that may need a hint. Plug-in steps are green squares—”green for go!”—and decode steps are red squares for “this one’s gonna slow you down.”

Result: like a Starting Point, a Result is typically a prop, set piece, or other kind of information, but is gated behind an action. It can be the starting clue to a new action or a meta-level object that ends a path.

Here’s a look at the shape legend I use…

I also include room breaks (where applicable) and act breaks (which don’t require room transitions, but a room transition will most likely be an act break), noted via lines and labels. I break our shows down into: Act 1: inciting incident (usually scene-heavy); Act 2: escalation; Act 3: turning point; Act 4: climax; Act 5: fulfilling finale (usually scene-heavy).

I’m betraying my Shakespearean background here with a preference for five acts. Three is fine. But you really ensure your middle has movement by breaking it into three parts rather than lumping it together as one. Just saying.

I draw arrows, always going left to right, between shapes to represent the connective tissue of how a key (starting point) leads to unlocking a drawer (plug-in action), which leads to a paper clue (result/new starting point). Some arrows are short, where other arrows stretch all the way across to the end (say, if players can gain something early that they need at the end, but gaining the rest of the items take more complicated paths). To make it most legible, I keep my paths as in-line as possible.

Lastly, I include text labels on or beneath each of these shapes to identify what precisely it represents. Putting a label inside the shape itself works best, which some programs allow you to do. Important to keep labels succinct, but the map loses a lot of its communicative power without them.

It can prove impossible to be fully comprehensive. You don’t need to be. I know I don’t include a shape for every required action (solve cryptex, figure out how to operate cryptex, fish out tiny note inside, read tiny note, etc.). Remember this is for you and your team to best communicate the guest experience.

simple experience flow

Here’s an example of what a (silly) two-puzzle escape room might diagram like:

Table Maze…? Okay, yes, I confess I’ve been watching a lot of Survivor. (Designed in Whimsical)

At a glance, you can see a lot about this experience…

While there are multiple path lines, it’s ultimately a linear experience, as everything found feeds a single path. (A more proper open-path would have multiple steps per path line before funneling down.)

However, people won’t necessarily be standing around waiting for the Table Maze crew. There are other rewards in the environment happening. But once the two cards, ball, and the poster have been found, then teams might grow more impatient.

There are two major solve moments: table maze (assuming a challenging one) and the 4-digit lock. Finding the objects, reading the poster, and unlocking a crate should be quick actions. Hence my classification of this as a two-puzzle game.

Players will need to have found a fair amount to get past the 4-digit lock: poster, two cards, and the final card from the solved maze path. If any one of these items is missing when they hit this point in the experience, players can’t progress. Ideally, players have everything by the time they finish the table maze, but not always! The diagram helps GMs keep things straight (say, if the poster hasn’t be read yet, they’ll want to be on stand-by with the poster hint ready).

It has weak gating. The flowchart does a nice job of showing “There are things you can find immediately, but they don’t become useful until later.” You can find the ball but until you discover the table maze, you’re absolutely baffled by a ball. As a design choice, weak gating isn’t inherently bad, especially if players don’t puzzle over it for too long. It can be fun in that there’s an “Aha! So that’s what this is for!” moment, much like foreshadowing in literature. But it can also be a time sink. Like all things, watch and see what works.

This puzzle flow also reveals to me that there’s a potential for players to spin the final digit on the four digit lock before the table maze has been solved. I’d want to swap out what the maze dispenses with either two cards (and remove one card from the beginning), or potentially have the maze reveal the ordinality. Jumping the flow is bad, mmmkay?

Complex Experience Flow

Here’s what a whole game might look like in my style, unlabeled. Don’t worry, this is based on nothing, I promise. (Besides…can you have an experience spoiled by staring at an unlabeled map anyway?)

Completely made-up experience flow, featuring the five-act structure (Designed in Google Drawings with direct arrows instead of elbow connector arrows, suit your fancy)

At a glance…Act 2 has two paths, Act 3 has three paths, Act 4 is all linear/bottleneck. The structure is relatively simple, so there won’t be a sense of chaos in this game. There’s one meta puzzle that requires four items/pieces of information and actually requires an item gained from Act 2 (so if that’s in the previous room, players may have to run back to get it). There are nine decode actions and three simple plug-in actions, which may be a little light for 60 minutes, but it depends on the puzzles, of course.

Here’s a more complex flow, that I made in 2015 after playing my first escape room that I ever loved. This game is now closed. No act breaks here, because it was all one messy, joyous experience. Imagine arrows in place of lines, please; apparently I started my mapping journey in Illustrator (?!?), which I’m an expert in and would recommend as a mapping program to no one.

At a glance…the game has two objectives with completely independent paths (so you could get the door open, but not yet have the MacGuffin, an unusual structure). Lots of gathering of similar items, like puzzle pieces or all the things you need to get a clue from a DVD. The main meta—the HBG combo lock—requires the completion of four different paths. Each path ends in a letter, which gives a sense of progress towards the end goal. Lots of “search” items (as befits a game from 2015), where the “starting point” symbol is paired with a “plug-in action,” since finding something cleverly hidden can’t be taken for granted.

With so many starting points and paths available, you can guess that this game would keep a large group occupied. 9 decode actions and 23 plug in actions. Wow. That’s a lot of quick hits!

Looking at this map makes me miss old-school games.

Which program?

I started making Strange Bird’s maps in 2015 in Google Drawings. Like any illustrating program, Google Drawings is frustrating. It wasn’t built for flowcharts, but I got it to work for me. Google Drawings is available as a document type through Google Drive, so you’ll need access to that. I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone, but after all the suffering, the result is a very clean map. Main pro: it’s free and stays free.

There’s a wide array of programs to choose from these days. A critical feature you’ll want is arrows to snap to shapes, so that when you move the shape, the arrow follows it. It’ll also help a lot if you can label the shape itself, so that your labels also follow as you move shapes. Test before you dive deep into a program.

For this post, I’ve tried out some other programs…

Online subscription programs (Whimsical, Miro, etc.)

For shared accounts, you only get three free flowcharts before they flip you to the dreaded subscription model. But for a solo private account (and probably there’s only one person in charge of these charts anyway?), you have unlimited boards. You may encounter additional BS like low-res exports on the free tier. The ease of use is superior to Google Drawings.

Of all the programs I tried for this article, I liked Whimsical best for its sheer speed. I created its chart the fastest. It also doesn’t look hideous.

Flow from the somewhat slower Miro. I formally apologize for that choice of green.

Draw.io

Available online or even offline. Unlimited, open source, not going anywhere. I liked this much better than Google Drawings, although it still presented a couple moments of sheer rage. Not as fast as Whimsical but earns bonus points for not being subscription BS.

Offline Programs

I’ve heard from folks in the community that Visio from Microsoft is their preference. Apple has a program on Macs called Freeform, but the arrows didn’t snap to shapes, so I noped out of there fast. Illustrator is also a hard pass. There are many more options I don’t know about. This rabbit hole is deep.

The Why

When I played my first dozen escape rooms, I mapped them by hand afterwards, trying to make sense of the chaos: why did this game feel frustrating? Why did this game feel fun? Answers were often in the structure: poor gating that gave us stuff well before we could use it or brilliant meta-puzzles that gave the whole team a sense of progress. It helped jump-start my education.

Once you start mapping your experience (imagined, designed, or already produced), you’ll see many benefits…

Maps help you identify your bottlenecks. Bottlenecks are a neutral tool, and a flowchart ensures that you have bottlenecks where you need them and not where you don’t.

You can see clearly which moments are open-path and which are linear. When only one path remains, expect escalating player frustration the longer it takes, so it’s a good time to be hint-ready.

You can clearly see your meta-puzzles (puzzles that require multiple parts to proceed).

It allows you to count your puzzles and gauge your difficulty. Remember each shape is a step needed to win.

Gating issues and other issues of complexity show up, such as: they have to carry this prop into the next room.

Once out of the design phase and your project has been built, the map is far from dead. I use our experience flows when I onboard new employees. It reveals what is needed for each solve plus the order of the solves, making game mastering a touch easier. We don’t refer to the map regularly, as we internalize it fairly quickly, but it’s indispensable in those early days when they feel overwhelmed.

Mapping beyond escape rooms?

Yes, of course! Puzzle games benefit greatly from flowchart clarity, but diagrams can clarify a wide-range of genres. The maps above are event-based maps from the guest POV, but you could produce maps from character or GM POV. Whenever Strange Bird gets around to designing a sandbox like Sleep No More, I’ll map characters in places across time. I once made a map of Madame Daphne’s Le Coq levels of tension, which is fun. Come up with different categories! You can make just about anything a diagram.

Get creative with your visuals. They can communicate like words never can.

Bookends and Bottlenecks

This how-to post wraps up a longer series dedicated to structure. Be sure to check out the rest of the articles:

Bookends & Bottlenecks
Bookends: Inciting Incidents
Bottlenecks: Designing for Focus Mid -Experience
Bookends: Fulfilling Finales

December 19, 2022December 19, 2022

Bottlenecks: Designing for Focus Mid-Experience

In Bookends and Bottlenecks, I explored the structure Strange Bird Immersive uses to tell stories within the chaos of an escape room. I then specifically investigated the value of an inciting incident, and then dove into what makes for a fulfilling finale. (Hint: it’s not your game master asking “Did you have fun???”)

Today I’m exploring the trickiest part of the structure: bottlenecks.

Escape rooms and immersive entertainment are wild, over-stimulating experiences with so much happening all at once. That’s why we love them. Bottlenecks, however, offer moments where one and only one thing is happening, and that moment of focus offers the designer the best opportunity to deliver surprise (narrative, scenic, puzzle, or otherwise).

Defining Bottlenecks

Bottlenecks are moments in an open-style experience where nothing else can be done BUT this One Thing. The One Thing could be a puzzle, or it could be a scene.

At bottlenecks, you have the complete attention of all the players. Immersive entertainment struggles in not having control of the camera lens like a film director does, but for the length of the bottleneck, you have camera-like focus. What would you like to bring into focus?

Wait, Aren’t Bottlenecks bad?

You’ve probably heard escape room enthusiasts gripe about bottlenecks. They complain about having only one puzzle to solve, and disliked it either because: they were left out of the solve, or the solve took too long, or both. (I’m looking at you, Mayan Sudoku.) It’s a common mistake to encounter in the genre.

But a bottleneck is neither inherently good nor evil. It is a neutral tool, and its moral qualities depend entirely on how you employ it.

Unlike traffic, which is always evil (please, let’s all learn how to Zipper Merge)

If you have a bottleneck puzzle (or what designers call a linear moment in gameplay), try to involve as many people as possible. If you do, the time to solve your bottleneck puzzle can expand. A cutscene should also engage everyone present.

If you can’t involve everyone in your bottleneck puzzle, then keep the puzzle short and simple, so people don’t begin to notice that they’re standing around while someone else tackles the puzzle.

If it’s a bottleneck scene, it should be under two minutes. A rule I’ve derived from experience: we used to have a bottleneck scene that was three minutes. Attention held much better when we cut it down by thirty seconds. It’d be even better if it were two minutes. Think of scenes at bottlenecks as cutscenes. You can’t go on for long, or the player will press X to skip.

Designing both for team engagement and time spent will reduce its villainy. And a bottleneck can be used for so much good…

Plan Your Bottlenecks

Unlike beginnings and endings, bottlenecks do not happen naturally. They are not easy to slip-in after the fact. Plan your bottlenecks as early as you can in the design process.

When you begin structuring your experience, you probably have a few surprises, wow moments, and unexpected turns in the story line. Great! That makes things memorable. You’ll want to make sure each and every one of those turns is placed properly at a bottleneck.

In an open-world experience, if an amazing moment is not at a proper bottleneck, some guests will miss it. Maybe they were pages deep into a logic puzzle across the room or even in a totally different room. And hey, not everybody gets to see every cool thing in an experience—it’s okay if some players miss anything that is nice-to-know. But it’s not okay to miss anything need-to-know. Big reveals, and especially plot twists, are must-see moments. If you do not deliberately structure the experience to have a bottleneck at that moment, you risk leaving some of your players behind.

Not properly structuring wow moments is such a common problem in the escape room industry, that on their escape room tours, Room Escape Artist made a player rule that if you suspect something really magical is about to happen once you input a solution, you call out to everyone in your team, “HEYYYY EVERYONE!!! I’M ABOUT TO ENTER THE CODE, AND I THINK SOMETHING COOOOOOL MIGHT HAPPEN!!!!” The fact that I have adopted this rule whenever I play tells you how structurally broken so many experiences are.

But I know we can get it right.

Built-In Bottlenecks

Good news is many escape rooms have built-in bottlenecks. The end of every game is a guaranteed bottleneck, so send a team off with a wow!

Games with multiple rooms also have built-in bottlenecks. Often when a team enters a new room, they have completed all the puzzles in the previous room (although not always). When they are working on the last puzzle in a room, they are at a bottleneck.

At the end of each room, I recommend…

Create a final puzzle in the room that the other puzzles funnel into or unlock (this is often called a meta-puzzle). Make this bottleneck puzzle a memorable puzzle, and involve as many players as you can. (But make sure it doesn’t overstay its welcome).
Reveal something magical when it’s solved.
Have a scene, whether via live actor, video or voice-over that progresses the narrative, preferably in a surprising way. (But make sure it doesn’t overstay its welcome).
Reveal the entrance to the next room, preferably in an epic way.

Okay, yes, this is more a wish list than a checklist, and plenty of fantastic games don’t do these things. Even Strange Bird doesn’t do all of these things. But it’d be really cool if we did.

The order of the wish list matters. Note that Event Number 3 “Cool Scene” does NOT come after Event Number 4 “New Room Revealed.” If you reverse that order…guess what you get?

A bunch of hyped-up players yelling over your epic villain escalating the stakes. I love narrative, but even I struggle to have the discipline to listen and “SHUSH!” everybody when we enter that new room. Nobody likes being shushed.

Don’t squander your moments of perfect focus by putting beats in the wrong order.

Whenever I hear escape room creators claim that players don’t care about their story, I always suspect the game is not structured so that players can follow the story.

It takes a lot of discipline to get right.

Bottlenecks within a room

You can design bottlenecks within a single room, although it’s trickier than working with room transitions.

Even if players are at a proper bottleneck, and nothing is left for them to solve, how do they know it? If a player doesn’t feel they are at a bottleneck, whether they are or not will not matter: they will keep playing.

A progress meter—whether literal or metaphoric—can be useful here. If players have been collecting things, and they know they need three of those things, and they just got the third, and they finally get to use all three things (OMG!!!)—you’ve got a great moment for a Bottleneck Wow-Surprise. When the progress meter hits 100%, players know that they have done the task, and they can safely focus on only what’s in front of them.

Linear Gameplay

Some escape rooms are structured where one puzzle leads to another, which unlocks another, etc. We call this a “linear game.” I haven’t played many purely linear games. Most games employ moments of linear gameplay and other moments of open-path gameplay, where multiple puzzles are available at once. A good mix provides a good balance.

Deploy a linear structure when you have puzzles you do not want players to miss—whether because they progress the narrative or are just ridiculously cool.

An early play test of our upcoming game Lucidity revealed that we needed to restructure a room. The room initially was fully open-path, but when play-testers argued we had both “Wow” and narratively crucial moments inside the puzzles, we restructured the room to a more linear format. Of course, that led to redesigning puzzles from 1-2 person solves to 4-person solves, since linear puzzles just aren’t fun if you’re left out.

Can you artificially create bottlenecks?

Let’s say you already have an experience but, try as you might, can’t rewrite it with proper bottlenecks (restructuring is hard, I know.)

But if a bottleneck only works if players think they are at a bottleneck, can you fake a bottleneck? Yes. Yes, you can.

We ran into this problem in The Man From Beyond when we had a scene at a moment that was not a true bottleneck. Many players played over the scene.

Then we took the lights down. It didn’t work. Then we got a new dimmer pack to isolate in light the thing we wanted in focus and and then took the rest of the lights WAYYYY DOWN. It worked. Much to our surprise, lights can direct player focus. It’s not perfect, but it helps patch over a missing bottleneck. Take note that we found this only works if you are insanely aggressive with the look (if you’re pulsing an object, it needs to be seriously strong; if you’re picking out an object, literally black out everything else.) Go big with the look, and then go one step bigger.

Video is even better than lighting. If you black out a room and use a video, you can mostly claim player focus. Mostly. A handful of folks still won’t take the hint, though.

Unfortunately, we can’t report in our experiments that sound can hone player focus. It’s too easy to yell over.

Now an actor…an actor in a spotlight (thus: combined with aggressive lighting) may be able to hone attention during gameplay…but it’s still not going to be one hundred percent. It’s not an experiment I am eager to run.

And if you have a true bottleneck, video, live-actor, spotlights, and sound can also help enhance focus, so employ these tools generously.

Fake a bottleneck if you must—and we do—but at the end of the day, being interrupted while you’re exploring something else will never be as fun as all the threads coming together in a proper bottleneck.

Check your structure before you wreck your show.

Bottlenecks in immersive theatre

Immersive theatre has more wide-ranging structures than escape rooms. Some experiences are linear (like dark rides), so directing attention is easy, whereas others are fully open-world, which poses more challenges for mid-experience focus. While strong bookends are a common tool in immersive theatre, bottlenecks are rarer.

The industry’s go-to touchstone of Sleep No More has some clever near-bottlenecks. While they are not guaranteed to capture everyone like the finale does, the Banquet and the Rave typically capture every audience member at least once per show, via the magic of the sheer number of characters present at the scene. Rather than collecting interesting objects for a puzzle, they are collecting interesting people for a scene. It’s clever.

TL;DR

Games are chaotic. Bottlenecks are your besties. Bottlenecks are the best tool for creating player focus mid-experience. (Lights and video are okay, but consider them as band-aids). In an escape room, involve everyone in bottleneck puzzles, and keep bottleneck cutscenes under 2 minutes.

And remember this is not the moment for your villain to start a monologue.

Plan bottlenecks as soon as you can in your design process, and you will get perfect attendance at your Wow-Surprise.

So…what do you want to bring into focus? I can’t wait to see it.

August 18, 2022

Bookends: Fulfilling Finales

In Bookends and Bottlenecks, I explored the structure Strange Bird Immersive uses to tell stories within the chaos of an escape room. I then specifically investigated the value of an inciting incident in an escape room. Giving players the motivation to act will make their achievement at the end of the game all the more valuable.

Let’s look now at that moment of achievement: the fulfilling finale.

Did you have fun?

Escape rooms have myriad goals: you need to escape the room, or get the McGuffin, or change something in the space, like lifting a curse. But no matter the goal, the ending is almost always the same.

Your Game Master opens the exit door and says…

“DID YOU HAVE FUN???”

No matter how on-point our GM has been through the experience, I absolutely loathe them in this moment.

Why?

They just cut my adventure short. They broke the magic circle of the world, signaled the end of the fun—not two seconds after the most thrilling moment of the game!

Imagine you’re riding a roller coaster, but right after the highest drop, the train suddenly stops, and the park employee says “Get out, its over.”

Escape rooms are phenomenal vehicles for emotions. They thrill us. We need time to come down from the climax.

THE WORLD MADE RIGHT

Something is wrong with the world in the game. (If you deliver an inciting incident like you should, the players will even see how the world gets all wrong). You then ask the players to make things right.

To be explicit, making things right feels great!

They feel like heroes, just without all the spandex.

Players need time inside the world to enjoy their accomplishment.

If they helped a character out, show how things are now better for that character.

If they just saved the world, have the hint-mechanism character report back to the team the vast significance of what they did.

If they obtained the vaccine, maybe they disperse it into the air. Maybe they hear on a radio, walkie-talkie, or in-world TV about how many zombies are turning back to humans.

If players are escaping a serial killer, maybe you give them the opportunity to call the police at the end.

If players just got the key to escape the room (the simplest escape room story), let them open the door and rush into the hallway.

Find a way to remind the players of what was at stake and show the impact of their efforts. A conclusion will elevate your game from just another escape room into a froth-worthy adventure.

You know. Like that thing you sell on your website.

The blurb is the product you are selling. Deliver on the promise of your premise.

Take the time

The concluding bookend should be off the game clock. The players achieved their goal, and now they get to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

You can take as long as you want to end the story. It can take thirty seconds or much longer. I think the end of The Man From Beyond from climax to player exit is 15 minutes long.

I know this industry’s greatest pain point is throughput—we all have ceilings on how many games we can run on a Saturday. And I admit The Man From Beyond is too damn long for what we charge.

But concluding your narrative adventure should not be optional. I promise, you can do it without adding 15 minutes between your game times.

What about losing?

Readers of Immersology know by now that I have a very strong bias for designing escape rooms to be won by the vast majority, if not all teams.

But even The Man From Beyond has a losing scene. We hate running it, because the world is not made right again. But we do take the time inside the world to bring players out of the game, to come down from the high of “there’s one minute left on the clock!” In fact, one of our characters is made quite happy by the losing condition.

Write a losing ending. Don’t cheap out and have the Game Master come in. Maybe you can find a way to make losing fulfilling—often horror escape rooms are more interesting when you lose them than when you win! Yes, losing is no fun, you don’t get to feel like heroes, but a losing scene will bring the adventure to a close. Players will appreciate your commitment to the story.

A resolution by any other name would smell as sweet

In literary studies, endings go by many names.

Fans of the linear Aristotle’s Poetics call it the denouement (French for “unknotting”). The world was knotty, but the conclusion unties the knot, re-stabilizing the world. It brings a quiet moment of peace.

You probably learned this map in English class

Fans of the circular Hero’s Journey call it The Return: the moment the hero goes back home, but home is now different, after the hero’s transformation.

A less well-known dramatic structure map worth studying.

I like to call it the Fulfilling Finale. This phrase makes it clear what you need to do. I like the image of feeling full after a meal, not rushing up from the dinner table the moment you cleaned your plate. I also like alliteration a lot, and it pairs well with the pithy “inciting incident.”

At the risk of hubris, here is my map…

Note that the entirety of this map happens inside the imaginary world (aka the Magic Circle).

Whatever you call it, make sure your resolution accomplishes two goals:

One factual: How the world has changed.

One emotional: Come down from the climax.

A strong ending turns a game into a memory your players will carry with them. Stick the landing.

For more on escape room finales, check out Richard Burns’s article on Room Escape Artist, “Untie Your Escape Room Stories.” Let the reader note, Richard and I are actively searching for something we disagree about.

May 16, 2022May 16, 2022

Bookends: Inciting Incidents in Escape Rooms

In Bookends and Bottlenecks, I explored the structure Strange Bird Immersive uses to tell stories within the chaos of an escape room.

The bookends of the experience are off-the-clock and where you can invest the majority of your story-telling, since there is no game to compete for player attention. I’d argue the beginning bookend is more crucial than the end, and could be the difference maker between just another escape room and an immersive adventure. Let’s focus on that beginning.

Most escape rooms take the easy way out for beginnings: they tell you the opening part of the adventure, whether through a game master reading a script or through a polished video. “You were wrongly imprisoned for a crime.” “You got lost in a cave.” “You awoke the tomb’s curse.” “The cat stole your keys and ran into the neighbor’s backyard!”

Wow, that sounds exciting. But note that word tell. No one likes being told.

The right is a far more exciting thing to experience than the left.

What if we follow the mantra of all writing—and show rather than tell?

Most escape adventures start in Act 2 and skip Act 1. That’s like skipping the foundation of a house. It takes more work, but imagine how magical experiencing an inciting incident could be!

The game master takes you down a dark hallway where your team stands trial. An actor—or large projected video—of a judge sentences your team to life for murder. You have no idea what she’s talking about! You didn’t do it! Nooooooo!

Too late. You already had your right to a fair trial!

The game master, now a warden, ushers you into your game: a jail cell escape room.

How much more motivated are you now to break out and find the evidence that ensures your innocence?

What if you’re touring a cave with your GM-turned-tour-guide, your lanterns flicker off, there’s sound effects of a cave-in, and when your lantern is restored, they’re gone? The GM yells through the “cave-in” (entrance door) and implores you to find another way out!

What if you’re poking innocently around a tomb door, and awaken the curse? You had no idea this place was cursed! (There’s so much magic in that moment when the supernatural first reveals itself.)

What if a cat-puppet appears from a tree hole, seduces you into petting it, and then steals your keys? Now you need to break into your neighbor’s backyard!

Mischievous Mr. Mistoffelees strikes again!

Are you having fun yet? I am, just imagining these games.

The inciting incident is the moment where something changes in the world that spurs our heroes (the players) to action. Without that moment, they could go about their lives, but with it, they must do something to right the world that will transform them into heroes.

All of these moments are moments of surprise. Escape rooms are all about surprise. And so are stories!

Showing the inciting incident makes escaping, obtaining the McGuffin—whatever the game goal is—meaningful. Telling the inciting incident results in a conclusion that has no weight. I can’t tell you how many games I’ve played that ended in “Yay…we got the…thing…that somehow helps a problem I’ve forgotten about…?” Things that happen to us have a lasting power that things told to us do not.

What about in media res?

In media res is a storytelling technique that plunges the reader/viewer into the middle of a story that has a long chain of events preceding it. It challenges the viewer to piece together what has happened before and gives the opening a strong sense of urgency. (Note that usually in media res still has an inciting incident for the plot. Think Luke finding the droids on Tatooine in Star Wars—the story doesn’t begin with the Empire takeover.)

In media res works if you are using the players as viewers. Think of Sleep No More: there’s no inciting incident for you, the viewer. You are not called to be heroic, nor is there anything you can do to help. The characters do experience an inciting incident…

The witches’s prophecy in the Hotel Lobby (Sleep No More)

But inciting incidents are necessary for the characters, not you, the guests. Immersive theatre can use in media res when the audience is purely passive, but escape rooms cannot, as the players are far more than viewers.

That’s what’s so cool about escape room stories. They are second-person narratives, first and foremost—you are at the center of the story, and what happens to the world depends on you.

You can encounter characters that are in media res in escape rooms, and that can make things exciting. But if you cast the players as previously-motivated characters rather than giving them the spur on the spot, they’re going to have trouble feeling properly motivated.

Where to begin the story?

In The Man From Beyond, Strange Bird invites you to a Houdini séance hosted by Madame Daphne. Then something goes wrong in the séance that has never happened before. You see it happen, and it is surprising. And because you are the ones who happen to be there, you have to do something.

The Man From Beyond starts at the beginning of your story; before arriving at Madame Daphne’s, your life was normal. We like to craft stories that hew close to reality. But what if you want a more complicated casting of the players and a less reality-based world?

In Hatch Escapes’s Lab Rat, you are cast as rat-sized humans in a human-sized rat world. How did the world come to be this way? They don’t show that—they don’t even tell that. But an event does happen that starts you on the adventure to save yourselves. That works great!

You can start at the moment that a usual world becomes unusual or from within an unusual world. Just because there’s been an apocalypse does not mean you have to show the apocalypse (although that would be very cool!). But at the very least, show the threat of the present world and then the moment of discovering that if we do X, the world will be better. That will really make me want to do X!

Whatever the role of the players, give the players the motivation to play—a narrative motivation that goes beyond “win/lose.”

How long to spend on the inciting incident?

The Man From Beyond spends 30 minutes on set-up and inciting incident (Act 1 in our five-act structure). That’s insanely long and a large part of what makes us a premium escape room. We specialize in immersive theatre, and our professional actors are exquisite.

I would not spend that much time on the inciting incident without live actors. Live actors (or live puppets—puppets are AMAZING—see cat puppet above) can hold attention better than any other story-telling vehicle. If you’re not using actors, keep your openings short.

It could be three minutes, or even thirty seconds. Just long enough to 1) set-up a normal world, and then 2) deliver the surprising thing that incites them to act. It doesn’t require a special room nor hiring more staff. You can incite on the cheap. But it does require special thought and must include a moment of surprise.

Design your inciting incident to your strengths and resources. And trust me. It’s worth it. Without experiencing an inciting incident, your players get only the shadow of an adventure. With it, and they will remember what they did that day.

October 4, 2021October 5, 2021

Iterating Interactions

A little over a year ago, Strange Bird Immersive opened The Strange Secret of Mr. Adrian Rook, a virtual immersive mystery where teams of eight visited six different strange tenants at Strange Bird and uncovered the secret of the missing secretary to the Raven Queen. (It’s closed now—thank you to every guest who joined us.)

We never planned to run a show like this, but the coronavirus had other plans. A one month run turned into eight. Given the intimacy of immersive theatre, we chose to keep The Man From Beyond closed until April 10, when our performers were fully vaccinated. We would otherwise have had zero income for thirteen months—and thirteen rent bills. Strange Secret changed that and changed the spirit of the time, too. Even in the bubbles of our separate spaces, we were connecting with people again.

Left-to-right, top-to-bottom: Amanda Marie Parker as Vivian Mae, Lexie Jackson as Dr. Newmark, J. Cameron Cooper as Brendan O’Neill, Bradley Winkler as Professor Hazard, Haley E. R. Cooper as Madame Daphne, Wesley Whitson as Adrian Rook.

Looking back on it, Strange Secret reinforced a very important lesson for me: iterate your interactions.

iterating puzzles

A company culture of iteration is one of Strange Bird’s super-powers. We keep tweaking things, until they hit that sweet spot of challenging but surmountable.

It’s a given in the escape room community that you need to test your puzzles. Your puzzles are always harder than you think. You can never fully anticipate how people will respond.

There are many stages of iteration. We go through alpha testing (internal to the team), then beta tests (invited), then previews (public), and then there’s the long tail of being “open” but still watching and tweaking. The first three months of a new experience are very active in iteration, then it settles down at about six months, we’ve found. But The Man From Beyond opened over 4 years ago, and I recently changed the size of a paper clue by 25%, and it’s currently performing better.

We never stop iterating our puzzles.

interactions are puzzles

But what about questions to the players, or calls to engagement—moments that aren’t explicitly puzzles? You should iterate those, too.

People staring blankly at you when you ask a question? Probably this isn’t the response you had in mind. Just like an under-clued puzzle that’s causing frustration, this interaction is broken. So fix it!

Vivian Mae’s Secrets

At the opening to Strange Secret of Mr. Adrian Rook, guests meet Vivian Mae, proprietress of Definitely Not a Speakeasy. She has a collection of secrets customers offer her that she keeps in bottles.

Definitely Not a Speakeasy is…definitely a speakeasy. Surprise!

We knew we wanted a “secret-themed” engagement with the audience, so in our initial draft, Vivian Mae opened by asking one guest to share a secret as tribute for entry. Here’s that script:

But I do ask one last task of people who come through my door
Before I pour them a drink,
And that is…share a secret with me.
That’s what a Speakeasy is all about, of course,
Sharing secrets.

So I would ask a secret from someone here,
And in return, I’ll share a secret of my own.
An even trade.
What better way to get to know one another?

Perhaps the sort of thing you wouldn’t post on social media.
But true, nonetheless…?
Who has one?

We wrote, rehearsed, and built the show in about two weeks before getting it in front of a beta audience. (Speed being of the essence in the pandemic.) This engagement went okay in the beta, but I got feedback that opening the show with an engagement so intimate was challenging. When I looked at it, I saw this was the most challenging engagement of the whole show.

So we moved the question to the end of Vivian Mae’s scene, when she has built more trust and has shared examples of other little secrets. We also changed the text to suggest easy secrets, to help coax folks.

Your turn.
Does anyone here have a secret you’d like to share?
It can be a small one.
No need to turn your hair into a feather or anything!
A simple secret will do.
What better way to get to know one another?
Perhaps the sort of thing you wouldn’t post on social media.
But true, nonetheless…?
Something surprising about yourself,
The website you visited earlier today,
Your secret ambition.
Who has a secret?

The engagement again went okay in our next set of previews. I know we had seasoned immersive theatre folks present (always a risk with early testing, that you attract experts), and they often enjoy taking the spotlight.

Then we opened to general audiences.

We didn’t have the option to film our other groups (permission and all that!), so we asked each performer to report back to us on how groups were engaging. Two public shows in, and ten groups later, Amanda Marie Parker, playing Vivian Mae, was reporting that 20% of groups offered a secret, and while it often made for a very memorable moment for that group, the other 80% of groups stared awkwardly at her.

That’s way too many groups. And not fun for our actress, either. Interactions shouldn’t be like pulling teeth. I’d have changed that interaction if it failed for 1 out of 5 groups. 4 out of 5 was insanely broken.

Why it didn’t work

I have some theories.

The format of the show wasn’t kind to this engagement. There’s a group of 7 other people—some of whom you may not know—watching. Due to the virtual format, every engagement in Strange Secret felt like stepping into a spotlight more than we’d like. (Speaking over Zoom feels like that in general, which is really problematic). It’s possible such a question would work better in a one-on-one interaction between character and player, so that the player doesn’t feel the pressure to entertain their friends and can stay fully anonymous, too. I also think in-person this may have worked better. Everyone hanging out on their feet has a more casual feel than the performative Zoom boxes.

Who wants to take the mic in this mess, seriously? Zoom is a relentlessly self-conscious format.

I’d also categorize this level of question as “hard”—it requires on-the-spot storytelling. You have to dig deep into your personal history. People probably have more dark secrets than fun secrets, and those are much harder to share. I really should have tested this question better—I don’t really have one to share myself. That alone should have told me something.

Vivian Mae also opens the show. By the time groups reach Madame Daphne (the fifth character), they are more comfortable engaging. Starting with a hard-mode engagement turns people off before things even get going. Given that we couldn’t move her place in the show order, we needed a softball interaction.

EASIER ENGAGEMENTS

So in the few days between performances, we rewrote a chunk of Vivian Mae. From our experience, softball engagements are more “yes/no” or easy personal recall. Third Rail Projects builds their engagements on yes/no and easy personal recall—the kinds of questions where you can answer without having to think about it. “How old were you when you first fell in love?” is approachable. And impactful.

I’ll never forget you, Alice. (Third Rail Projects’ late, great “Then She Fell”)

To get that softball engagement, we turned a simple script for our actor into a much more complicated one. The crux of it was two questions:

NAME, have you ever kept a secret from someone? [She engages with them.]

NAME, have you ever shared a secret with someone? [She engages with them.]

Note how now she cold-calls individuals with these questions, looking for someone she deems as present. While we eschew cold-calling in The Man From Beyond, we discovered that Zoom needs something different. Cold-calling allows for smoother interaction in the hyper-self-conscious format, so we changed up our house rules. We still wouldn’t cold-call on a more complex engagement, but for something approachable, we would do it.

Together with Amanda, we created a flowchart for how the conversation in this section would go.

She naturally deviated from this flowchart as conversation blossomed, but we wanted to have an idea of the conversational spine. The bold track is what we deemed the most likely responses.

We wrote and rehearsed this change in between performances. And then? We asked her to debut the change with a critic from The New York Times.

It worked. This version became canon. And for extra bonus points, it’s a better engagement from a thematic point-of-view, too, as our hero character must choose whether to keep his secret or not.

Note that we rewrote the interaction twice. Sometimes you have to keep tweaking until you hit the sweet spot. (Puzzle still too hard? Sorry, yes, you do need to add yet more clue trail. It’s not as obvious as it feels, I promise.)

Empower your performers

None of this would have been possible if Amanda hadn’t spoken up. At our end of year party, she earned the “Bravest Performance” award, because it takes courage to speak up to the writers and say, “Your script isn’t working.”

Too often I witness powerless game masters or performers who feel stuck. They can’t fix it themselves, they’re not allowed, and reporting it to their boss (the writer/designer) often won’t change anything either. Or worse, they worry about their job security if they do report it.

I am proud not just of Amanda, but that Strange Bird has created an atmosphere where egos are not at stake. To create experiences that work, you need to acknowledge what is failing—and fix it. And if you are here for the ego trip? In the long run, fixing things will set you up for greater praise anyway. Just saying.

Interactive scripts need more work-shopping than traditional scripts. Like with puzzles, you need lots of players engaging to get a body of knowledge on whether something works or not. Test, watch, iterate, repeat.

The right questions

Here’s another example of an iterated interaction. When we first opened The Man From Beyond, in a moment of heightened tension, Madame Daphne asks the team,

“Can you keep a secret?”

About 80% of teams would concur—great. But 20% would crack some joke, “Well, Susy sure can’t, she’s such a gossip!” etc. Ha. Ha.

Again, we have a group format, which can inspire wanna-be comedians. Maybe if this question were asked in a one-on-one, it’d perform better.

Jokes were the last thing we wanted in this moment, so we changed the question to:

“I will need you to keep a secret. Will you please do this for me?“

The comedians disappeared.

This question makes it a personal ask from the character. Everyone likes Daphne, even if they don’t trust her, and she now receives only sincere assent with this question.

Simple change, big impact.

Iteration is life

At the Reality Escape Convention, I heard the question pop up, “So when do you stop testing? I said, “Never.”

People are creative. The more people engage, the more you learn, the more you can refine your interactions, so that every guest has the best experience. If you’re in the business of interaction, whether that’s immersive theatre or immersive gaming or maybe both, iteration is your ticket to a golden experience.

Every part of your experience can be played with. Guests looking bored at the beginning? Iterate your game master introduction. Have a rule that’s being ignored? Iterate the presentation of the rule, or the wording. From the kinds of emails we send to the arrival time for guests, from the map to our location to the losing sequence, we’ve played with all of these things. Play around until you find what works.

I’m dissuaded from making pop-up experiences myself, because I know that it takes time to get golden. But even with a limited run you can iterate, if a better experience is something you value (rather than say, sheer experimentation, which is a viable value). Ask your performers to report back to you, and be ready to make quick changes.

You need to have a company culture of iteration.

And it usually doesn’t require a major rewrite. Quite often a tiny tweak will do wonders. So let’s tweak it out!

Bonus photos

You made it to the end of the post—congratulations! I know, I do go on. As a reward, here are some fun behind-the-scenes, zoomed-in and zoomed-out photos from The Strange Secret of Mr. Adrian Rook.

Vivian Mae inside Definitely Not A Speakeasy. Gotta love peel and stick brick.

Dr. Newmark in her lab, which ironically looks less messy zoomed out.

The truth about Whiskey & Welding’s set? It was at the Coopers’ other (top secret) business, BottleMark. We don’t usually stock whiskey there, but those were weird times.

Professor Hazard’s studio at the School of Accidental Photography…is a kitchen.

Madame Daphne inside her Tarot Reading Room. Poor Walter got kicked out of the frame.

Adrian Rook in the Office of the Raven Queen, sporting two computers, wires and buttons, a glass of brandy, and a step stool that is crucial to the magic.

Zoom magic is a bit of a mess!

August 20, 2021

Bookends & Bottlenecks

Time to publish Strange Bird Immersive‘s secret sauce. Because I don’t want it to be a secret.

The Man From Beyond: Houdini Séance Escape Room has a reputation as perhaps the most story-driven escape room out there—an escape room with a narrative so powerful that it can move you to tears. That was our goal as designers: to craft a game so grounded in a narrative reality, that it felt more like you were inside a movie than playing a game.

If you run into J. Cameron Cooper or myself—or more likely both of us—behind a conference podium, we’re probably advocating for integrating story into game play.

Our “Make It Immersive” talk from last year’s Reality Escape Convention was a stealth story talk. Although maybe it wasn’t that stealth.

Story is what elevates a fun evening into a life-long memory. It’s the game-changer, if you will.

Yet story is controversial in the escape room industry. Some escape room designers report frustration—”I’ve added story, but the players never pay attention to it!” Others are convinced their players just don’t want it.

But the problem isn’t a player hatred of story-telling—who hates stories? Seriously! The problem is in the stakes of escape rooms.

THE ACTOR VS THE PADLOCK: AND THE PADLOCK WINS

People go a little mad in escape rooms. We call it “escape room brain.”

In the typical escape room, the adventure is…

On a deadline (usually 60 minutes)
It’s hard to do (you need to complete 100% of the tasks)
It’s important (everyone wants to win)

These stakes are why we love escape rooms. They guarantee drama. I am addicted to the adrenaline shot of those 60 minutes, the dopamine hit when we unlock something new, and the feeling of mastery that comes with a win.

Players come to play. They’re simply not in a shut-up-and-listen frame of mind like at the movies, so story-tellers need to take a different approach.

If a designer makes something relevant and irrelevant available to the player, the player will rightly choose what they know is relevant. So when heeding story is in conflict with solving a puzzle, solving a puzzle will always win. If there’s suddenly something happening that interrupts their solving, they will not stop. This principle stands true just as much if you’re delivering backstory in a journal as if there’s an actor in the room delivering a monologue.

Believe it or not, if put in conflict, this lady would lose to a padlock 10/10 times. (Amanda Marie Parker as Madame Daphne).

The secret sauce

The Strange Bird secret sauce is this: don’t put story and puzzles in conflict! Separate the two in the structure of your game, and then you can deliver both elements to the team’s complete satisfaction.

We call the concept “Bookends & Bottlenecks.” These are the moments in your experience when you can deliver your essential story beats: set-ups, turns, dark nights of the soul, finales. You should tell your story throughout the experience with nice-to-know beats, but Bookends & Bottlenecks are where you place every need-to-know narrative beat. The concept calls for very deliberate design. You will need to know not just the structure of your experience, but potentially make changes to the flow, so you have the appropriate space.

Let’s define our terms.

Bookends. Moments that sandwich the gameplay and happen off the clock. Bookends are your beginnings and endings. Make sure your bookends are fully inside the immersive world you’ve built (and please show, don’t tell)—or they don’t count!

Bottlenecks. When there’s only one puzzle that can be solved at that time. Every game ends in a bottleneck, and often a room (before another room opens up) also ends in a bottleneck. Bottlenecks are moments of undivided player attention: use these moments for your best puzzles, your not-to-be-missed magic, and for story-telling beats. (Bottlenecks are a useful technique outside of storytelling. I advocate using bottlenecks for your coolest effects so everyone will see them, or again, people will play over them!)

Unlike in traffic, bottlenecks are a neutral tool in game design, to be used for good or evil.

What it looks like

I’ll cover in detail how Strange Bird likes to make experience flow maps in another post, but here’s a simplified visual of bookends and bottlenecks in a 2-room, 6-puzzle experience.

Bookends Can be longer

Every escape room has bookends. Usually the Game Master greets you, teaches you the rules, and plays a video or reads the set-up for your adventure. This is Act 1 and covers the inciting incident—what spurred you into the adventure in the first place. Then when you win, the Game Master opens the door and congratulates you, asks you about your adventure, takes a team photo (Act 5). These moments happen off the game clock, so everyone pays attention easily enough.

Note that a fair amount of your visit at the escape room is spent in these preambles and conclusions, probably 10 minutes or more on both ends.

Now imagine if you will, what happens when Act 1 and Act 5 are within your immersive world. When there are no puzzles to solve, you have full player attention. You’re already spending time on bookends. Use it in the adventure!

But once she turns over that hourglass, I’m really not interested in her backstory anymore.

The bookends will carry most of your dedicated story minutes. Deliver an inciting incident—something surprising that spurs the players to take action. Then deliver an in-world conclusion that rewards them for their efforts. Let them see how the world is better now. You can still have your GM host them in and out, but it’ll be a richer experience when you begin and end inside the world.

Because these moments are explicitly off-the-clock, you can take your time. In The Man From Beyond, greeting at the door to start of game clock runs about 25 minutes. The conclusion runs about 15 minutes. But hey, we’re theatre people—you don’t have to indulge in time like that! You can do bookends that set-up and end the story that only last two minutes each. Or even thirty seconds. Point is: the time allotted to your bookends can vary widely and be successful at any length. Just have them!

Bottlenecks must be shorter

Designing story beats at bottlenecks is trickier. You’ll need to first identify where your bottlenecks are in your puzzle flow. Also ask the question, do the players know they are at a bottleneck? You’ll be most successful at gaining attention if the players also have a clear sense that they can’t yet advance.

Look for the moments when there’s only one puzzle available to solve, and then insert your storytelling beat, only after which, give the team the ability to advance.

Don’t give them a key at the start of your speech.

The most likely bottleneck is right before the players enter a new room. Make the last puzzle unlock a story beat, then give them access to the new room.

Do not deliver a story beat at the entrance to a brand new room! I see this all the time, and even I play over it. There’s so much new stuff to explore!

You can also design bottlenecks within a room, although it’s trickier to signal to players there’s nothing more available at that moment. But it can be done (we do it).

Story beats at bottlenecks are on the game clock, so even without any puzzles available, they still make players anxious. Limit these beats to 2 minutes or less. Do not go over 2 minutes, or you will lose player attention.

Can you stop the clock at a bottleneck, so players relax? Yes, you could—our Act 4 is all scenes and gameplay outside of clock time—but remember, it’s hard to communicate anything in the middle of a game. I still wouldn’t go over 2 minutes.

Think of bottlenecks as “cut scenes.” No video gamer enjoys long cut scenes, but they also don’t want to get rid of them, either. They crave the surprise, the turn, the new stakes to the adventure.

We got it wrong, we learned

We learned the “Bookends & Bottleneck” principle the hard way. While designing The Man From Beyond, the theory was in its infancy, and we did not rigorously apply the theory to every story beat. We have one moment that is not at a proper bottleneck in the game play, and naturally, some players play over it.

When we saw that behavior, we dimmed the lighting dramatically to try to drive player attention, which I am happy to report, has helped! But it’s not 100% attention like at our more rigorous bottlenecks. But lighting is one way you can patch your structure. Just don’t be surprised if someone keeps solving in the dark.

Our next game Lucidity is even more rigorously structured with Bookends & Bottlenecks. In development, when we realized we had a huge WOW puzzle on our hands that wasn’t at a bottleneck? We restructured.

Beyond Escape Rooms

This technique serves more than escape rooms. It works for any experience design where groups take different tracks or otherwise divide their attention from the story to other matters. Think about how Sleep No More funnels everyone through the same beginning and ending and also cleverly bottlenecks people at the banquet and the rave (the most essential scenes).

You can watch our analysis of Bookends & Bottlenecks in more detail at our conference talk at the Immersive Design Summit in 2019, “When Game and Theatre Collide.” (Bookends & Bottlenecks start at 19:30).

I think this is the greatest physical distance between Cameron and me registered in 2019.

Note that the talk is full of structure spoilers. David Spira of Room Escape Artist told us to never spoil like that again, so…you’ve been warned.

I’ll revisit the B&B concept in future posts on mapping puzzle flows and in story-telling techniques (what do you do at those bookends and bottlenecks, anyway?), and probably a few other places. It’s foundational.

An immersive theatre sandwich…?

Critics have called our game “an immersive theatre sandwich,” where there’s a game in the middle, and the theatrical bookends are the bread that hold it all together. But when you consider bottlenecks, perhaps it is more like a layer cake…? Yeah, like crust is the inciting incident, the mousse layers are the beats and turns, the icing on top the conclusion, and the moist cake in-between are all the puzzles that escalate the action.

That’s a pretty sweet game you got there.

Any way you slice it, it’s a more filling experience when there’s a story. You just have to build the cake right.

July 28, 2021January 12, 2023

Hints are not Clues

Words matter. Not to dive too deep into linguistic relativity, but words shape our ideas. They give ideas boundaries. They act as short-hand for things they would require more words to express. Add new words, and you add new ideas.

In the escape room industry, and immersive entertainment in general, we need new words. And we need to be precise about them. The genre’s complexity demands that we agree on new terms, like “sandbox,” “pipeline,” even “immersive.”

The community at Room Escape Artist agrees. Check out their fun and useful ERban Dictionary. Having the word “runbook,” for example, or one that I coined, “ghost puzzle,” makes it easier to grasp that these are poor design choices.

I’ve been playing escape rooms again—YAS!!!—and something has been driving me nuts. I’m hearing sloppy language, and I sense it’s leading to sloppy design.

I’m making an ask of the escape room community: please stop using the words “hints” and “clues” interchangeably. “Hints” are not “clues.”

If we get rigorous about using these two very different terms, I believe we can get closer to better game design.

DEFINITIONS

Clue. A guide to a puzzle or interaction that appears in the room organically: a scrap of paper, an object, a key, writing on a wall. A clue is something 100% of winning teams find. A series of clues that lead to a solution is called a clue trail—they act like a map. Clues feel amazing when you find them! Players love finding clues.

Players hunt for lobby clues in Madame Daphne’s Tarot Reading Room.

Hints. Manual intervention from the game master when a team is stuck on a puzzle or overlooking something and has been unable to advance for some time. Different teams get stuck on different things in different places, so hints are custom delivered by the game master who oversees the game. Hints feel like a defeat for the players.

Notice how in these definitions, I’ve included the emotional response of the team. That’s part of what makes these two words so different.

Navi from Zelda: Ocarina of Time is a hint mechanism and inspires a lot of feelings. None of them positive.

No matter how immersive your hint system is, players can tell when you’re giving them a hint. Clues tend to be objects, but hints tend to be audio or text on a screen, gifted, not discovered. They know it’s the all-knowing game master intervening, and while a team does appreciate the help, there’s an air of disappointment in the room that’s not easily dispelled, this feeling of “Well, we’re supposed to be the heroes, but we screwed this one up!”

WHY BE RIGOROUS?

What happens if a game designer doesn’t think of hints and clues as starkly different things? Well, they start using hints as clues.

If you’ve played a few escape rooms, you’ve seen it, what I call “band-aid” design: there’s a puzzle in the room that’s missing a proper clue trail. Rather than add in clues, the designer asks the game master to fix the problem by sending in hints for that puzzle for every single team. It’s a lazy fix, a “band-aid” on a wound in the game.

Stop sending in the First Aid Kit for every team!

What’s the harm in using a hint 100% of the time as part of a clue trail? Well…the harm is the players get pissed. They feel like they missed something, when in truth, they were never given the tools to succeed in the first place. It’s especially bad if the team has to ask formally for a hint that functions as a clue. They’ve wasted time hunting for a clue that’s not even there. Next, you make them beg for a hint. You’re shaming every single team that wants to win.

I’ve played games before that say, “Hey—you get three hints! You have to use them to win!” OMG NO. Hints are not clues. They are outside the game, not a part of it.

Or how about this one: “Nobody ever gets through that puzzle without a hint!” That’s band-aid design. And it’s bad design.

AIM FOR ZERO HINTS

Escape room designers should aim for zero-hint games. Players love clues! Players hate hints! Why wouldn’t you want to aim for all teams to skip the feeling of defeat?

For the first six months, Strange Bird kept close statistics on our hints. For any hint that ran for 25% of teams or more, we increased the clue trail in the room. Years later, we still watch for a too-frequent hint. I improved the cluing on something just the other day. Now our game masters are watching the change closely to see if it helps.

We also train our game masters to aim for zero hints. We want to give the team time to have their “Aha!” moment. When a team falls behind our schedule (we have time markers for where a team should be), or when there is an air of frustration in the room, or when they ask for help, we offer a hint. Hints keep the fun going.

We built an antique projector to deliver silent-movie-style hints. When a team needs help, we light up the projector button, so they can opt into the hint, but we can also force a hint or even run a static card. It makes sense in the world, but it’s still clearly a hint mechanism.

And when the hint comes, it’s the lightest possible nudge, not a walk-through, so that the team still gets an “Aha!” with that puzzle, and the feeling of mastery is restored.

And don’t get me wrong—hints are essential to a functioning game. I’ve learned that every step in the game, even “open this drawer” or “where that key goes” will be a hint for some team at some point. People are different. Hints make sure that every team, no matter their dynamic or escape-room-experience, can have fun.

At the bare minimum, you need to have had a real-life team win your game with zero hints, or your game is broken. I’d say that should happen weekly, monthly at the very least.

And keep in mind that zero hints on the regular doesn’t mean a game is “easy” or that teams regularly escape in 20 minutes. What it does mean is teams don’t waste 10 minutes (1/6th of their time!) stuck on something under-clued. Wasting my time is not a good money value.

Moving past “THe CHALLENGE”

Wait, if I want zero-hint games, that kind of sounds like I’m designing for teams to win. Whatever happened to “the challenge”?

Creating hard puzzles is easy—you skimp on the clue trail! Creating hard-but-fair puzzles is extraordinarily difficult. And I don’t think an escape room is a good vehicle for that type of puzzle anyway. Go enjoy a puzzle hunt instead!

The industry is shifting away from thinking of escape rooms as a challenge towards thinking of them as an experience. It’s a shift from the intellectual to the emotional. It’s better business when teams win. They feel good, they play more.

Escape rooms are fun because they take you to a brand new place where you can do brand new things—not because they can prove to your date that you could have gone to MIT.

The shift from “challenge” to “experience” will inspire designers to create stronger clue trails and fewer “gotcha” puzzles that require a hint to bypass. And we’ll get there faster if we start using “hints” and “clues” distinctly.

WE CAN DO IT!

If you’re a player, start asking game masters for “hints,” even if the house-style calls them “clues.” Keep it up when you talk with other players about how many “hints” you took in a game and if you think the “clue trail” in the game was any good.

If you’re an owner, make sure your game masters use the word “hint” when instructing teams on how to ask for help in the game—don’t say “three free clues.” All of your clues should be free! (So should your hints, but that’s an argument for another day).

If you’re a designer, watch your game. Get stats on your game. When you see teams struggling consistently, increase the clues in the room, rather than fall back on hints. Design with player emotion in mind.

RECON

Interested in what makes good hints? Be sure to catch Summer Herrick (Locurio) and Rita Orlov (PostCurious) talk about “Fun Insurance: What Makes a Good Hint System” at the all-virtual Reality Escape Convention this August. They know their stuff. It’ll be stellar. Hope to see you in the Discord!

Updated: link to watch “Fun Insurance: What Makes a Good Hint System.”