In the past couple of years, I’ve been honored to have a few creators invite me to join their creative process. Whether the relationship is ongoing or a single meeting, as a consultant, I always start with one request…
Show me your player journey.
WHAT’S THE PLAYER JOURNEY?
Think of it as a written outline of your experience. It walks through the show beat by beat, notably from the player’s perspective. Write down what happens, but strictly through the guest’s eyes.
This allows you to focus on what the players experience and when, and nothing more. It’ll show you what’s irrelevant, and what really matters. It will challenge you to consider onboarding and offboarding, when the crossover to the Magic Circle happens, what facts players learn, when they receive a goal, what twists happen when, how they achieve their goals, and how the whole comes to a fulfilling end.
The X factor of the immersive industry is the invitation for the audience to become players. To make the most of that X factor, we should consider first and foremost what the player is experiencing.
When Strange Bird Immersive is in the early stages of developing show ideas, each pitch takes the form of a two-page player journey. It sketches out the main story beats and sets, often defaulting to “insert plot-driven puzzling here”—the details do not matter as much as the whole. The competing outlines allow us to quickly identify what stories seem most exciting and what stories feel too boring or too complicated.
We’re looking for that sinker pitch, although sometimes a curveball shows up in the creative process.
When I’m invited into a project, the player journey quickly communicates to me your vision for the production. I get excited. I can see it happening! It will also reveal what decisions still need to be made and if there are any structural problems that need solutions. I have the context to see what’s working and what’s not.
WHAT’S NOT THE PLAYER JOURNEY?
When I’m consulting, creators sometimes want to share with me a lot of information. They’re excited about all they have developed. But details aren’t where you start. Details need context. And most details end up as “nice to know.” The first meetings should be dedicated to “need to know.”
Essentially, you can’t pitch a concept from the writer’s POV.
Skip the lore, at least for the first meeting. Instead, show me how you’ll get players to care enough to engage in the world in the first place. Only when they care, will the details mean anything at all.
HOW TO WRITE
Think of it like a short story. I prefer to use sentences instead of bullet points. It makes for a more exciting read.
Keep it short. Unless you’re outlining a multi-day experience, you shouldn’t need more than a few pages. Each sentence can be a beat.
If the project is in the early stages, don’t get bogged down by the details. A sketch will suffice. Feel free to write “…and then they work on some compelling plot-driven engagement/puzzles for a while.”
I write my own player journeys in a third person limited voice (I only describe what they see/hear/touch at that moment). Third person omniscient would not be useful here, so avoid that. If you’d like to give it more immediacy, you could write in second person “you.”
Remember that the player journey is for internal use only, so no need to make it a perfect piece of writing.
SAMPLE PLAYER JOURNEY
Once the players have booked the escape game Lucidity, they receive communication from Dr. Riley Newmark thanking them for volunteering for her experimental study in lucid dreaming.
Players arrive in an office lobby all in black and white that, when they look more closely, is by no means normal. Dr. Newmark enters in a lab coat to greet them, directing them to restrooms. She is spooked by a statue in the lobby, it’s apparently a new installation.
When everyone is ready, she leads the team to her lab: a small blue room outfitted with a desk, computers, cabinets, and a bank of seats with large halos hovering overhead. She invites them to sit. “Not to worry, the halos are not active yet…“
First look at Lucidity. We expect the halos to be active by the end of the year.
WHAT IF MY PROJECT IS ALREADY LAUNCHED?
As a writing tutor in college, I encouraged writers to do what I called “a reverse outline.” Look at the draft you just wrote and create from it an outline. If you find a paragraph that doesn’t say something new or doesn’t rhetorically follow from what came before, congratulations! You just identified a problem you can fix!
The same goes for a show that’s already running. Write down what players or guests experience beat by beat. Is the onboarding too long? Does the offboarding feel inadequate? Can you identify the moment players are given a reason to care?
An outline can show holes in your Magic Circle or places to optimize the flow. Getting that sweet sense of flow is what immersion is all about.
WAIT. YOU CONSULT?
For a blog reader? Absolutely! While I remain primarily dedicated to the Strange Bird brand, I relish the opportunity to explore other approaches in this medium I love best, and the chance to collaborate with a fellow creative is a both a privilege and a profound joy.
Let’s chat at Recon LA this weekend, or reach out to me via email. I would love to hear about your player journey.
Flashback to Boston 2022, Cameron and I gave a talk on “The Magic Circle: Delivering Game Changing Immersion” at the Reality Escape Convention. It was part tell, part show, and everyone in that room left with a pledge to deepen their immersive experiences. One creator told me they implemented a key change that very day, and I’ve heard the term “Magic Circle” in discussions ever since.
It had a real impact.
With permission from the RECON team, ever eager to propel the industry as I am, I am presenting the core content of that talk here to share with a wider audience.
The immersion technique you’ll read about today you can implement without great expense, perhaps even before the day is done.
If you enjoy this article, RECON 2024 is coming up in Los Angeles, August 18-19. You’ll hear from thought leaders in the industry, on topics from game iteration and storytelling to marketing and managing contractors.
Let’s begin with a tale of two escape rooms…
Code Name: Eagle
Your game master greets you in the lobby. You sign waivers, use the restroom, lock up your stuff, the game master teaches you how to use a directional lock.
Once escorted inside the room, your team is immersed in a replica fine arts museum. It’s beautifully lit. You can see the brushstrokes on the paintings, and a statue looms over you. There’s a lightning flash through a window, and a thunderclap follows. The GM grabs a remote and turns on the TV above the door. You watch a 2-minute rules video. Then you watch a 2-minute scenario video, telling you are heist team, Code Name: Eagle, here to steal a painting.
“My name is Susan, call for Susan if you need a hint!” She starts the clock and leaves. When you ask for a hint, you get a memo on the TV. When your team successfully nabs the painting, Susan opens the exit door and asks…
“DID YOU HAVE FUN???”
Now imagine a different game.
Code Name: FALCON
Your game master greets you in the lobby. You sign waivers, use the restroom, lock up your stuff, the game master teaches you how to use a directional lock. You GM leads you down a hallway where you watch a two-minute rules video.
The GM hands you a backpack, opens the game room door, and quickly shuts it. Your team is immersed in a replica fine arts museum. It’s beautifully lit. You can see the brushstrokes on the paintings, and a statue looms over you. There’s a lightning flash through a window, and a thunderclap follows.
Suddenly you hear a sound from the backpack:
“Schrk. Team Falcon. Are you in the nest? I repeat. This is your hacker, Phoenix. Are you in the nest?”
You open the backpack, find the walkie-talkie, and say, “We’re in, Phoenix. What do we do next?”
“First, you need to find a way to disable the cameras. Communication is risky, but let me know if you need my assistance. Over.”
When you ask for a hint, Phoenix is there for you over the walkie talkie. When your team successfully nabs the painting, Phoenix yells, “GO! GO! GO! I’ve got the systems down for the next ten seconds! Make your escape NOW!”
You rush out into the hallway, painting in hand, and then your GM aka Phoenix congratulates you on a successful mission.
Which would you rather play?
Do I even need to ask? I didn’t think so.
But these games and their customer journeys are close cousins. They have the same hosting ritual, the same rules video, the same set, the same puzzles.
What’s different is the commitment to the Magic Circle. The creator of Code Name: Falcon respects the world of the heist, taking it as a truth. Players experience the immersive adventure of a heist, just as the owner promised they would get on the website.
Here are competing schematics of the two games.
In Eagle, the greeting and lock tutorial are outside the circle, with the game inside. But the Rules Video, Scenario Video, Hint System, and Congrats, keep breaking the Magic Circle, constantly reminding the team that this is just a game.
In Falcon, everything that addresses the experience as a game takes places outside the game room. The Rules video is in a hallway. There is no scenario video, in its place is an in-world introduction. The hint system is in-world, even the exit from the game stayed in-world, with the out-of-world congratulations happening outside.
And the cost difference between a Magic Circle and no Magic Circle? A walkie-talkie, a backpack, and training GMs to talk like the Hacker Phoenix. Oh, wait, actually it may be net cheaper, as Falcon doesn’t require a scenario video. A little bit of script took its place.
This is a magic less about money and more about commitment.
the Magic Circle Defined
The Magic Circle is the boundary between the ordinary and imagined world. The border is a transition point, a threshold. Within awaits a new world with new rules and the need for new behaviors. Weddings, conferences, sports, board games, rituals, these are all Magic Circles we encounter in our every day.
Hallowed.
I believe the term first appears in Homo Ludens (1938) by Johan Huizinga, a Dutch cultural historian. The book examines the importance of play in developing culture.
“Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the playground. The arena, the card table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function playgrounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.” (Homo Ludens)
Take that in. Read it again.
If this sounds like I’m suggesting that the play of an escape room is in fact sacred, well, I am. We are talking about magic, after all. This is higher plane stuff, the stuff that makes life worth living.
Kids treat play seriously. Adults need play just as badly, but they need commitment from the designer to feel comfortable joining in. They need a leader.
We’ve all had that embarrassed game host, apologizing in body language or even in words for how silly all the make-believe they’re about to deliver is, only half committing to it. And then the experience itself keeps interrupting you with reminders it’s just a silly game. That higher plane couldn’t be further out of reach.
Be the lead kid. Dare to plant your feet and ask the question, “Will you play with me?” More than mechatronics or smoke machines, committing to the Magic Circle is the difference between a nicely decorated game and a cinematic adventure.
I still want to play pirates. I bet you do, too.
But that lead kid commitment must come from both the designer and the staff.
within the Circle
Once players are inside your world, you want to ensure consistency. Follow the simple rule of thumb, familiar to actors…
…except think of it on the scale of the whole world, rather than just the people in it.
You’ll want to start with a fully believable space. Finish your set, floor to ceiling. Leave no trace behind that you built this world from Home Depot.
Lighting fundamentally transforms your space into another world. Lighting is seriously powerful magic. If I could snap my fingers and improve one production value at every escape room facility, it would be the lighting.
Worklights. Only employees ever see this. No shadows = no soul.
Game play lights. Much better.
Séance lights. Shadows abound.
Consider appropriate sound for the world. Are there any practical sound effects, like a fireplace crackling? Would score help create a sense of a plane elevated from the normal world? Yes, yes it would. Think about diagetic and nondiagetic sound.
Puzzles also need to fit in the world (see my post on immersive puzzle design). Make sure every puzzle has an author, a reason to be in the world.
To preserve the circle, you’ll also want immersive hinting, which means a character in the world who wants to see the players succeed.
But Magic Circles are not just production design. They’re also people design. Consider if you want actors in your experience. Just one committed actor is a giant immersive bomb.
The greatest magic is in the eyes. (Chaney Moore as Madame Daphne)
Make sure you make a clear choice and communicate it to your staff: are you an actor, yes or no. I’m tired of being greeted by a GM who is half-acting-it. Half-acting is worse than no acting.
And actors aren’t for everybody. We get it. It’s a whole other art form to master. Should you opt not to have actors in the world, note that commitment to the Magic Circle makes a couple demands…
Your Magic Circle must begin at the game door (otherwise your hosts will need to act a bit, since the world spills past the door).
You cannot allow any out-of-character hosts in the game room.
Look at this. Take it in. It’s ridiculous. It’s blasphemy.
This person does not belong to this world.
If I called you out just now, you’re not alone. Everyone does it. It’s inconvenient to brief teams in the hallway, and yes, I know logistics matter. But do they matter more than your guest experience?
The most exciting part for the guest is walking into the room for the first time. Throwing on the brakes to talk to them about the rules while they steal glances of your cool world like naughty children is an unmitigated disaster. It shatters their immersion immediately. Let the team ride that high and start their adventure the moment they cross that threshold.
Finally, consider script design. The best Magic Circles host beginnings and endings to the story within the world proper. It was the bookends that really brought the Code Name: Eagle game down, with the drawn out in-room hosting and the dreaded “Did you have fun?” ending. Craft an inciting incident to spur players to action, and deliver a fulfilling finale where players see the impact of their actions on the world.
What matters more than the magic circle?
When the experience goes well, you shouldn’t be breaking the Magic Circle. But sometimes things go a little sideways, and you need to break character. I’ll spotlight in a later post the Disney Parks 4 Key Hierarchy, but suffice it to say for now, we recommend training your staff to break character for the higher values of safety (#1) and courtesy (#2). Especially for safety or to correct an issue with the show, calling “Hold!” is most effective.
“Hold, please! There’s been a mistake. X did not work like it should. In order to preserve your experience, I am doing Y to correct the issue. Thank you, please resume playing.”
Where to put the threshold?
Every Magic Circle has a transition point, a threshold that you cross where you go from the real world into the ritualized play. Consider carefully where you want your transition to be.
Disclaimer: Some circles are larger than others. That does not make them better. More time in the magic circle is not a priori superior. The following lists in order from smallest to largest, but as you’ll see, the choice affects more than time spent immersed.
At the game door
This is the most common option for an escape room. This is where the Code Name: Falcon game has its threshold. This frees your hosts to be out-of-world and able to address guest needs best. If you run a business that needs to answer the question “What’s an escape room?” then at the game door is the best place for your transition.
The famous adventure of The Dome begins with this really cool door. On the left: lockers.
At the game door works best for…
Business model: street retail with walk-ins, an entry-level market
Customers: new players and families
Acting: none (unless hint mechanism is a live performer)
At the hallway
At the hallway is the best of both worlds: freeing you to have an out-of-world lobby, but allows you to create a deeper story that unites all your games. You can have rooms in a hotel or time travel portals or a gallery of magic paintings. Your briefing room can even be in-world.
I don’t know of any companies that draw the circle at the hallway, but it has a lot of potential.
At the hallway works best for…
Business model: stand out in a crowded market
Customers: works for new players but also appeals to a seasoned player base
Acting: required only for hallway hosts, if any
At the front door
At the Front Door is challenging but rewarding.
Escape My Room in New Orleans, famous for their immersive lobby experience.
The challenges: you can’t explain what an escape room is (and players will feel pressured not to ask out-of-character questions). It requires commitment from all staff—can you get that kind of staff? And the rules of the game have to be in-world.
The reward: you deliver the maximum sense of adventure, since there’s no onsite transition from being a player of a game to being the protagonist in an adventure.
At the Front Door works best for…
Business model: by appointment only, obscure retail location, premium pricing
Customers: experienced players
Acting: all staff
A “cold start” escape room, which plunges you immediately into the adventure, skipping the lobby experience and all pre-game hosting, is a variant of “at the front door.” Recommended for educated player markets who don’t expect a bathroom when they arrive onsite (see: Spain).
After booking
The first email after booking, while not a physical threshold, is a threshold nonetheless. After booking makes otherwise bland communications special, heightens anticipation, and preps players for imaginary play.
This is where our Magic Circle begins.
At the website…?
We don’t recommend a fully immersive website. It leads to customer confusion. There is such a thing as being too immersive.
It’s funny, sure. It’s also false advertising. (Brittney Jones as Madame Daphne)
The Cross-Fade
Punchdrunk takes a more gradient approach to the Magic Circle threshold. Rather than a hard line, as I have depicted above, they think in cinematic terms of a dissolve from the real world to the fade in of the imaginary world. If you’ve been to Sleep No More, it’s not clear if the staff checking you in are in the world of the hotel or outside it. But they do have a certain attitude and a certain dress that guides you to think things are already special. Elevated.
Once you’ve traversed the dark maze and emerged in the Manderley Bar, the cross-fade is complete and you are inside the circle.
Oh yes, you most certainly have arrived (Manderley Bar at the McKittrick Hotel, Sleep No More NYC)
show, Don’t Tell
It was around this time in our original talk that the Raven Queen made an unexpected appearance, introducing the room to Exhibit A, an everyday citizen lost in the haze of his phone. Could the people in the room give him a reason to look up?
I could describe it, but like all good immersives, it was very much a you had to be there thing.
You really should have been there.
There was no physical threshold we could cross on the talk stage, but through changes in costume, lighting, sound, and character, we created a new world and spurred the audience to new behaviors. It really was magic.
Draw Your Circle
To quote the Raven Queen, to create is the power of the gods. Do not take that responsibility lightly. Respect what you create. We are all Exhibit A, and we need to play.
Hold true to the magic in your circle.
Just because it is fake does not mean it is not true.
A promise at the threshold.
Recon is the real deal
Credit for this post goes to myself (Haley E. R. Cooper) and J. Cameron Cooper with special thanks to the Reality Escape Convention 2022 team for helping produce the talk, from getting the lighting right to those envelopes we hid under all those chairs.
RECON gathers people most passionate about the escape room industry for a intense weekend of ideas and camaraderie. I never miss it. It’s full of surprises. Last tickets still available for August 18-19 in Los Angeles.
In my last post, I defined a scene. Read it now, if you haven’t done so. It gets at the heart of good writing in any genre.
Ready? Strap in, this one’s a rant.
I’ll be honest. While I encounter weak scenes all the time in novels, television, plays, and film, there’s something about immersive entertainment that more often loses sight of what makes a good story.
What’s up with that?
Perhaps creators rarely have backgrounds as writers. Perhaps the creators have to do so much else to mount these insane productions that they forget about the writing part (which by the way… writing should come first. Or you’ll have problems. Just sayin’). But look: I get it. Just making the thing exist requires puzzle/interaction designers, set designers, set builders, software gurus, hardware gurus, electricians, prop fabricators, stage managers/game masters, painters, etc. It’s easy to forget in this avalanche of skills to add a writer to the team at project conception. (But please don’t.)
This is a skill, too. If it’s not one of yours, hire it out before you build a single thing.
Perhaps the problem might be that we don’t often have actors (or if we do, not many actors) for whom we can write more traditional scenes. The genre demands non-traditional scene writing. We instead tell stories through environmental engagement, voice overs, video recordings, maybe an actor here and there engaging with the audience. It’s easy to let these scenes fall into the trap of being exposition or world-building, also known as: irredeemably boring. Avoid this trap.
Maybe there’s other reasons. But understanding doesn’t lead to forgiveness. We need to step up our writing game in this industry.
To sum up my thinking on bad writing in the quippiest quip…
Backstory is not story, gossip is not drama, and information is not interesting.
Let’s break it down…
Backstory is not story
What happened before I arrive to the story is not where it’s at, because that’s not where I’m at. Even in a mystery plot, you need stakes in the here and now, a reason that you need to solve the mystery and soon. “The killer is still on the loose—and inside this snowed-in house” sort of stakes.
The killer must always be about to strike again.
Backstory is usually the history of the character or the history of the location or any other events that happened before my arrival on the scene. None of these is exciting, because it’s not happening to me, or even in front of me. You want to give players things that they do and things that they see. If you give them things that they learn, they’ll feel more like students back in school.
Worse yet is when backstory isn’t even a discovery point, but told to me at the beginning by a game master. People’s eyes glaze over when you tell them facts, especially when they’re standing on the threshold of an adventure. Reduce the facts, up the surprise.
Never start your experience with backstory monologues. I recommend crafting an inciting incident in lieu of backstory. Move the past to the present as much as you can. If something bad happened to require the adventure, can players experience that bad thing, rather than being told about that bad thing?
With an inciting incident, you’ll probably discover you can get by with less backstory. Consider too if any remaining backstory may have a greater impact in the middle of the story, rather than at the crucial beginning, when we risk losing people forever.
Think about the story you want your audience to tell to their friends who weren’t there. The best stories will have them using the personal pronoun “I” or “we.”
“And then we caught her lying to us.” “And then we powered up the ship.” “And then we forged the will.”
VERSUS
“And then we read about the maid being unhappy.” “And then we learned why the pirate buried the treasure.” “And then we watched a video about the war between the Snarlofs and Boogatons.”
Let your audience be the subject and give them the very best verbs.
See how much fun they’re having?
The temptation to write stories that only reveal “what happened here” is strong in immersive theatre and escape rooms, I think because they don’t require a character present, and it’s a very easy way to link puzzles and narrative together, with every engagement uncovering secrets of the past. But these stories only exist in the past. Avoid them. What’s happening now is the story. Write for the here and now.
Backstory is not story.
Gossip is not Drama
Discovering gossip about characters is not inherently exciting. I see a lot of gossip in environmental story-telling experiences, where I learn character details and scandals of their secret lives. But if that does no work in the story, it’s just gossip. It’s a dead fact. You can have “nice to know” bits, but if your entire experience is only “nice to know,” then you have no story.
Say I learn that Sandy is secretly dating Andy. Cool, cool. How does that change what I want? Does that change what they want?
Put that gossip to dramatic use in a scene where: people want things, but then the truth is revealed, and the revelation thwarts someone. That’s how you make a big reveal.
I hold Sleep No More as an example of using details in sets and scenes as plot support and not gossip. If you see what Malcolm types on the typewriter, or what he keeps in the drawer, or what’s depicted in that photograph he just found, you’ll learn about what’s happening in the story.
Those who lean over his shoulder get rewarded (Malcolm in Sleep No More)
Meow Wolf’s installations are most often not a good example of this. Sorry, no, I’m not going to visit a second time just because I didn’t read all the diary entries on that computer.
Gossip is not drama.
Information is not interesting
World-building gets wayyyyy too much love. Maybe because of the cultural impact of super-franchises like Marvel and Harry Potter, where the worlds run deep, people think it’s a marker of top-tier writing. But no one memorized the ship names in Star Wars until they fell in love with the movies.
Let’s just say you don’t read this one first.
You shouldn’t skip world-building, but it’s not the heart of the matter. I do not care about the metaphysical underpinnings for the pseudo-technology, nor about what happened on this planet 100 years ago. Unless you connect those facts to my objective (or another character’s objective), I do not care.
World-building fleshes things out, but scenes are what matter. And if you trot out your world-building, it’ll be about as exciting as backstory. It’s information without stakes.
And like backstory, not a breath should be wasted explaining your world to the audience. They must discover your clever little details on their own.
I speak from experience. In The Man From Beyond, the ghost has power through electrical currents, so everything it touches in the game has burn marks on it, and intense electrical sound effects accompany the ghost’s actions. We never point this out to the audience, though; we leave it to them to notice or not.
I also speak from future experience: we could spend two minutes in the upcoming Lucidity show explaining the neuroscience behind Dr. Newmark’s break-through technology that supports group-wide guaranteed lucid dreaming. But we won’t. We didn’t even write a first draft with that in. It’s boring. Nobody but the geekiest of Lore Boys care.
“WITNESS MEEEEEE knowing all the granular details of your WOOORLD!!!” (War Boys from Mad Max: Fury Road)
Don’t write for Lore Boys.
There will undoubtedly be information the players need to know. Divide up your world facts into need to know and nice to know. Embed nice to know as environmental discoveries for solo explorers. Embed your need to know information in bookend or bottlenecked scenes where everyone has something at stake.
Yep, even with need-to-know facts, we need to care, or we’ll tune out. Make opening scenes raise questions that are only answered later via dramatized exposition. Make the facts matter to character objectives. Exposition goes down easier when it comes with a good helping of drama: desire, conflict, surprise, change.
Oh my, I seem to have discovered this bureaucrat secretly worships a demon! Cool, cool. How does that impact what the character wants, or what I want? Does my team need to be super quiet now because Baphomet is always listening?
Make it matter. And please. Resist the temptation to tell me all about the demonology.
Baphomet was formalized by Victorian occultist Éliphas Lévi as a figure representing the absolute in symbolic form, an expression of occult natural forces that are explained by his magical theory of the Astral Light, the context of which…and I’ve already lost you, haven’t I?
Information is not interesting.
Writing is not facts
When writing your experiences (ideally at the start of project conception), remember the difference between writing that matters and writing that just… exists.
Backstory is not story, gossip is not drama, and information is not interesting.
Just because you have words doesn’t mean they do any work.
Writing is 90% structure, 10% words
Scenes are the most powerful tool at your disposal and will be what people remember best. Create moments that thwart your players and characters, or that produce irrevocable change.
Start always with what happens to the audience in the here and now. Give them a narrative they want to tell afterwards… and you may not spend a penny on marketing ever again.
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.
Writer’s workshop in progress.
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.
Drama in a bowl.
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.
Best served with stakes.
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.
Recommended Reading
If you’re inspired by this post, treat yourself right now to Pulitzer Prize winner David Mamet’s absolute power-screed on writing drama. It’s a rant to the writing staff of The Unit. It’ll take you all of five minutes to read. He says it all better than I do—and with more expletives.
Do not disappoint David Mamet.
An excerpt (yes, it is in all caps): “IF THE SCENE BORES YOU WHEN YOU READ IT, REST ASSURED IT WILL BORE THE ACTORS, AND WILL, THEN, BORE THE AUDIENCE, AND WE’RE ALL GOING TO BE BACK IN THE BREADLINE.”
Cameron and I enjoy reading this out loud every few months.
If you’re up for deeper dives…
In my self-guided tour, I found myself where many writers end up: at the feet of Robert McKee.
Robert McKee’s book Storyhas informed a great deal of my thinking, as has his equally excellent Dialogue. Heck, while you’re there, dive into Character, too.
To whet your appetite…
From Story: “Scene is unified around desire, action, conflict, and change.”
“Big helpings of static exposition choke interest.” (Dialogue)
“When scenes fail, the fault is rarely in the words; the solution will be found deep within event and character design. Dialogue problems are story problems.” (Dialogue)
“All stories dramatize the human struggle to move life from chaos to order, from imbalance to equilibrium.” (Dialogue)
“Plot is character; character is plot.” (Character)
There’s also the screenwriter’s book Save the Cat by Blake Snyder, which (in)famously offers a beat sheet, outlining the minute by minute moments of a successful film.
From Save the Cat: “Danger must be present danger. Stakes must be stakes for people we care about.”
If you’re an immersive creator, you will want to adapt this advice for our medium, which adds the twist of turning our audience into characters we need to write for. To quote David Spira of Room Escape Artist, “Immersive experiences are about living the moment: not showing and certainly not telling,” which challenges us to develop a new story-telling approach. That being said, I feel strongly we are closer to screen (images) than stage (words), so keep that in mind.
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 textlabels 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…
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 WhimsicalFlow 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.
Flow from Draw.io
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:
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.)
A foundation is not easy to fix.
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.
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.”
Whiplash guaranteed.
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.
Make it memorable.
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.
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.
Surprise them early and often.
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.
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.
Note how you never leave the cycle.
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?”
Brittney Jones as Madame Daphne
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!
Immersive artists at work.
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.
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!
Bookends support the whole experience.
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.
Photo of the player who keeps playing.
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).
More
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.
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