Category: Escape Rooms

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Know What Motivates You

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

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

He said there are typically three root whys…

  1. In it for the money
  2. In it for you
  3. In it for them

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

Let’s dive in…

for the money

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

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

I hate you, RENT.

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

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

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

I really hate RENT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are they in love? I wonder.

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

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

Patented Dome Smiles™

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

Enjoy the gift.

My ranking

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

  1. Them.
  2. Money.
  3. Me.

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

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

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

How to measure a successful business?

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

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

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

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

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

Recon 2023

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

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Mapping your Experience

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

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

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

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

THE layout

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

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

The shapes represent…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

simple experience flow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Complex Experience Flow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which program?

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

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

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

Online subscription programs (Whimsical, Miro, etc.)

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

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

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

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

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:

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

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Bottlenecks: Designing for Focus Mid-Experience

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

Rocking my Recon Meme Shirt

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…

  1. 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).
  2. Reveal something magical when it’s solved.
  3. 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).
  4. 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.

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Bookends: Fulfilling Finales

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

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

Did you have fun?

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

Your Game Master opens the exit door and says…

“DID YOU HAVE FUN???”

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

Why?

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

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

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.

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Bookends: Inciting Incidents in Escape Rooms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mischievous Mr. Mistoffelees strikes again!

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

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

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

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

What about in media res?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where to begin the story?

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

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

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

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

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

How long to spend on the inciting incident?

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

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

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

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.

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Bookends & Bottlenecks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ACTOR VS THE PADLOCK: AND THE PADLOCK WINS

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

In the typical escape room, the adventure is…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s define our terms.

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

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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Hints are not Clues

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

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

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

Words, words, words.

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

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

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

DEFINITIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHY BE RIGOROUS?

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

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

Stop sending in the First Aid Kit for every team!

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

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

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

AIM FOR ZERO HINTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving past “THe CHALLENGE”

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

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

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

Fun was had at Cross Roads’s Fun House.

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

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

WE CAN DO IT!

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

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

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

RECON

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

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

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Do’s and Don’ts of Virtual Experiences

In the face of an ongoing pandemic, Strange Bird Immersive has elected to keep our doors closed. To help us make rent, we’ve pivoted to creating virtual experiences.

I am eager to report that Zoom can indeed deliver the thrill of immersive theatre.

Offscreen Madame Daphne swoons with joy after connecting with her first stranger in months.

We started with Zoom Tarot Readings with Madame Daphne, a new fifteen minute one-on-one experience with a character we know, with a skill we could spotlight.

This Saturday night, we’re opening The Strange Secret of Mr. Adrian Rook. It’s an all-new experience that explores the Strange Bird Immersive story: 90 minutes, 6 actors, and a strong dose of magic.

Shows are selling out fast, so reserve your seat stat.

Along the way, we’ve learned a thing or two about how to make the most of virtual experiences. So here’s a list of do’s and don’ts to jump start your own creation.

DON’T UNDERSELL IT

You’ve created something. You’ve invested time and money. Even if you’re not paying rent on 3,400 sqft, you still have expenses. Just because your experience is virtual does not mean it has no value. Charge for it. Trust me: no one will remember in a six months when they’re looking for an escape room that, “Wasn’t that free game we played one night from Trapopolis fun?”

Don’t forget about perceived value. If you sell your production for free or $5 or $10, that suggests I shouldn’t expect much. You’ve set my expectations low. Charge $20, $30, $40, and that sounds much more to me like a real experience, something to look forward to, something to book now.

DO DELIVER PRODUCTION VALUES

Everyone is tired of looking at people’s living rooms. Deliver the same aesthetic WOW! that you would if they were in-person. Give them something beautiful to look at in the first five seconds. Consider costume, makeup, set and light. Production values establishes your show as not-your-everyday-Zoom.

Visuals are arguably the most powerful tool we have in the immersive entertainment arsenal. People remember visuals. They don’t remember what they heard half so well. Movies get this. And guess what we’re making now? Give them visual memories.

Sets are easier than ever before over Zoom, so make a few. Position the camera just right, and you don’t even have to dress the whole wall!

Nice brick wall, am I right? (Amanda Marie Parker in Strange Secret of Mr. Adrian Rook)
DO TEST EQUIPMENT

Gather your devices in one place, and test out cameras and computer processing side-by-side. See what camera looks awful, what computer runs a delay. The iPad has the best camera…? Okay, go for it!

Device party! Invite the whole neighborhood!

Test mics. Test the sound in the space. Test the internet, and test it again. What’s that weird buzzing? Find out. Figure out the camera angle—you can have a lot of fun with the camera angle! And test the lighting. Prioritize the face.

I am so, so sorry, but you’re a videographer now. Learn those skills. Those skills mostly involve mastery of equipment.

DO INVEST IN EQUIPMENT

You don’t need to spend a lot to boost your set-up to a more professional level. Most likely you’ll want to buy lighting. You want photography light for Zoom—architectural light won’t do. We bought a few photography light kits.

DO CREATE FOR THE MEDIUM

Strange Bird briefly considered offering The Man From Beyond as an avatar-led Zoom escape room. There were many problems with adapting it, but the number one problem was that our puzzles are all tactile. They’re about discovering the physical item. We have only one puzzle that requires a notepad. Wouldn’t tactile puzzles become frustrating in the avatar medium?

The joy of the maze box over Zoom becomes the tedium of the maze box. And that’s just the beginning of things. Yeah, no.

So we decided to save our award-winning experience for what it was designed for: in-person play.

When we wrote both Tarot Readings and The Strange Secret of Mr. Adrian Rook, we created with Zoom in mind. For all its faults, Zoom is the platform of the moment and requires the least on-boarding of guests. We leaned into the medium and built experiences that worked with that tool rather than against it. Our engagements flow easily, and our puzzle was built for the Zoom style of solving.

We also have a really cool moment in Tarot Readings where we engage with the platform’s features. It’s a WOW moment—from within Zoom. Weird and wonderful. I’ve also heard of other immersive experiences using Zoom’s breakout rooms to great effect. Explore what the medium can do.

The most satisfying virtual experiences are at home on the platform—they would not easily translate to an in-person experience.

DON’T PRETEND RECORDED VIDEO IS LIVE

It’s disappointing to try to engage with an actor only to discover they’re a video. In-person escape rooms do this all the time. It sucks over virtual, too, perhaps even more. We’re so hungry to connect.

DO JUSTIFY LIVE ENGAGEMENT

If you’ve got an actor or an avatar in the experience, use them to your most entertaining advantage. Actors are your best special effect. I’ve long considered them the fast-pass to immersion, as players have to engage with the imaginary world to engage with the actor at all. Actors make the experience dynamic. If you’ve got them, give them more than a puzzle to deliver or a two-minute scene.

Immersive theatre has the edge on traditional theatre right now. Presenting live theatre over Zoom makes no sense to me if there’s no engagement. Why not film the best version of the production, edit it, and put that out? It’d be better for the audience. Not so with immersive theatre: ours is a genre where you just have to be there. So engage, engage, engage. Keep alive the fire of live performance.

DON’T MUTE EVERYBODY, DO USE SPOTLIGHT

Tarot Readings feels like a real conversation—because it is. We make it as natural as possible.

The screen sits exactly where you would sit in-person at Madame Daphne’s.

For Strange Secret, we thought 8 unmuted guests plus one leading actor would overwhelm the scene. So we tried “mute all.” You should see the beta tapes. All six actors fumbling through the clunky process of unmuting and muting guests just to ask them a simple question or two. It slaughtered the fun.

Then we discovered a special Zoom feature: SPOTLIGHT. Once the host admits guests to a meeting, the host can spotlight their video, so that the video doesn’t randomly prioritize a laughing guest or someone’s barking dog. We could lock the video on the actor.

So we went with unmute. Just like with a real immersive, guests gain an instinct for when to speak and when not, and it makes the “being there” much more authentic and the engagements more natural. Plus, there were no technical problems. At least with 9 people. More than that…maybe you’d be pushing it.

DON’T UNDERSCORE YOUR VIDEO

We tried working with underscore, but the only way it doesn’t clip in and out over Zoom is if everyone else is on mute. So there goes our in-house style of scoring everything.

DO LOOK INTO THE CAMERA

This is the best trick on this list. No matter where the camera is positioned, if you look straight into it, you’ll make eye contact with your guests. Can’t see it easily? Outline it with tape. Look at the camera as much as possible. It combats Zoom fatigue for your guests like nothing else.

Wesley Whitson delivers that delicious eye contact in Strange Secret of Mr. Adrian Rook.
DO HIGHER ENERGY

Siobhan O’Laughlin, immersive theatre superstar and veteran Zoom performer, put it to us thus: “If your energy is 10, that translates to a 6 over Zoom.” Performances need way-higher-energy in this medium.

DOn’T USE PAUSES

Dramatic pauses in-person build tension; over Zoom, they kill the scene. Pause as little as you can. Keeping them in your world requires more effort than before.

DON’T FORGET TO BETA TEST

Just like an in-person interactive experience, you’ll want to beta test. How people engage will surprise you. Does it work? Tweak it until it does. Record the experience, and review it closely. Invite feedback afterwards, and listen. I can’t tell you how much beta feedback fundamentally changed Strange Secret for the better.

DO GET CREATIVE

I love constraints. They fuel my creativity. We’re under a ton of constraints right now, and no, I don’t expect virtual experiences to replace the income we’re losing from closing our primary business. And yet…this is a wonderful moment to branch out, to experiment, to test and fail and test again. I hear audiences are more forgiving then ever. They get it. They want to be somewhere else, do something else, see something NEW.

Let’s give them something new!

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On-theme vs. Immersive Design

EDIT: after publishing this article, I learned that some might call “immersive puzzles” diegetic, some might call them mimetic, and in general, “diegesis versus mimesis” is a hot mess, exacerbated when film decided to use diegetic to mean its opposite (read this great piece from Errol Elumir, published after this article). To sidestep this problem, I’m proposing that we call the concept “immersive puzzles,” as that clearly expresses both that extra level of sense and the ultimate goal to immerse the players in the world. In other words, I’m stubbornly refusing to edit this post.

In the escape room community, you often hear about puzzles being on-theme or not. (Important note: “theme” in escape room lingo means time-and-place, like a WWII submarine, not “theme” in the literary sense of ultimate message, like “war is hell”). Puzzles deemed “not on-theme” don’t blend with the game’s setting—”Shame on you, rando-puzzle!” As escape rooms have grown in sophistication, I’m hearing this complaint less and less. More and more rooms seem to be presenting challenges that are “on-theme.” And yet, I still find myself playing games where I feel like the puzzles lacked a shred of sense.But I’m judging not by a binary. I’d like to propose a third category that goes beyond “on-theme”: is the puzzle immersive? An immersive prop or puzzle dives me deeper into the plot, character, or world. In short, when you step back to look at it, it makes sense. When it’s immersive, it isn’t just decoration; it’s revelation. I can clearly see the human hand that set up this challenge or created this thing—and the events that have brought me to this place to solve it.

At the top is true enlightenment.

Basically I’m proposing we permanently enshrine Nicholson’s “Ask Why” paper with a new tier for judging puzzle quality. (If you haven’t already, read it.)

CASE STUDY

Let’s say you’re in that World War II submarine.

Random puzzle: there’s a steel-ball tilt-maze that I need to navigate to get the ball through a hole that completes a circuit, turns on a blacklight, and reveals a four-digit combination that I then plug into a lock. Cool. I confess I’m a maze-hogger, and I’ve done tilt-mazes in games before, they’re pretty fun! But this is clearly not a thing that has ever happened on a submarine—WWII or not. Why even bother building an immersive set? No matter how fun it is, this is not a cinematic engagement.

On-theme puzzle: the captain’s jacket has morse code symbols on it, that I then need to punch out on a morse telegraph key that then magically throws open the door to his cabin. NEAT! That’s nautical! But wait…why does the captain wear morse code on his jacket? If it’s a password he wants kept secret, why would he flaunt it? Also how does the right morse code lead to a door magically opening? Is this submarine haunted? Why would the captain leave his uniform behind in the first place? This feels…artificial.

Immersive puzzle: your team of soldiers has stumbled upon a scuttled German U-boat that can still be salvaged. You first need to close all the valves that have been opened and disable the demolition charges set to go off. Once you’ve saved the submarine, you break into the captain’s quarters and find a coded message from the day it was abandoned. The codebook has different codes by day, so you use a calendar from a shipman’s locker to decipher the right day, then decipher the code, then translate it using the German-English dictionary left behind (hey, the Captain needed it, too!), and win the game by predicting their next coordinated attack. (Inspired by German U-505, for the curious).

Winning team photo (U-505 successfully captured)

Note how the immersive puzzle required me to make up a scenario, whereas the other two didn’t engage a scenario at all.

Any given challenge has three stages: puzzle, solution, and what it yields. An immersive challenge is not only a puzzle that makes sense in the world, but its solution and what it yields are also logical. Solutions shouldn’t just come from something random in the space (like an hour’s sign being the password). The solution instead should come from understanding the person who set the password. And if you’re using magical tech for reveals, be sure to have a supernatural or otherwise very clever character behind it all.

Note how essential the character becomes to the immersive challenge.

Immersion is a soufflé. Just one of these in a non-locker-room-scenario will deflate everything.

It’s a high bar.

Just what are escape rooms selling?

In the early years of escape rooms, designers didn’t make puzzles out to be anything other than a good puzzle. Rooms were rooms, puzzles were puzzles, and all you had to do as a designer is make a good flow of puzzles. This sort of game put a lot of emphasis on the locked door for player motivation—it was the only thing that could really qualify as “story.” But fairly quickly, owners shifted away from selling pure puzzle games (let’s be honest, it sounds a bit nerdy!), and instead started marketing their escape rooms as cinematic adventures. Nowadays designers have to pick a setting and then sell a story.

I should know better by now, but I can’t help it—I am so easily seduced by those three-sentence scenarios on escape room websites. They set my imagination on fire. I can’t wait to bring the story to completion. And I know I’m not the only one. We’re a story-telling species. It’s well-known that casual players are primarily motivated by a room’s theme: does it sound awesome or not?

Trouble is, while they may deliver on décor, escape rooms drop the story-telling past the marketing stage. Game masters may read that blurb to you before leaving you in the room, but then it and all the characters mentioned disappear from the game. Talk about bait-and-switch: you sold me an adventure, and then you hand me puzzles in a decorated room. Are on-theme puzzles really making that material a difference, when the heart of what you sold me is missing?

Strange Bird Immersive is gambling hard that the industry will eventually wake up and start delivering what we’re selling. And that’s a cohesive experience that dives players deeper into an imaginary world.

How to achieve immersive props and puzzle

Always begin with your big picture: what’s the story, and who are your characters? And by characters, no, I don’t mean the players (see: When You’re the Star on the importance of non-player characters). I mean the people who inhabit the space and/or the people who built the space for the players to engage with.

There is no such thing as a room without an author. So who’s behind yours?

My rule of thumb for writing (and acting) is, “Is that a thing a human would do?” A simple question, but one that most designers don’t think to ask. If the answer to this question is “No,” then I am left in an artificial game, constantly aware that a game master is monitoring my progress in this office-suite-turned-submarine, battling not the antagonist in a story but a bizarre game designer, who literally could have made the answer just about anything.

In the first games I played, I was quite the Gollum. I’ve since learned not to take it personally.

Giving each puzzle a human logic not only enhances my immersion, it also makes the puzzle easier. And yes, that’s a good thing! Players who win a game come back for more—seriously, Escape Games Canada measured it. Grounding everything in human logic means I am more likely to look for solutions that make sense over something random, which delivers pleasure over frustration. Players want to say “Aha!” not “WTF?” When you need to deliver a hint, you want players to exclaim, “Of course! Why didn’t we see that before?” not, “Wait—say that again?”

I admit that escape rooms have quite the acrobatic feat to pull off if they really want to answer WHY. Why would someone place a web of interconnected challenges in this particular location for someone to solve in exactly 60 minutes? This is typically not a thing a human would do to begin with. So we’re on the hunt for exceptional humans. It’s easiest to say “a serial killer is testing you,” or “there’s a secretive magician, inventor, or spy who left behind these weird things for you to decode,” or (my favorite) “there’s a supernatural power at work here that needs you to do its will”—there’s a reason why these themes are so popular. But there are other explanations out there. Get creative. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.

Like a skilled magician, who uses multiple techniques to perform the same trick, you can have multiple answers to why. Some things in The Man From Beyond are Madame Daphne’s, some things are stolen from Daphne, some things are historical and Daphne knows about them, some things she’s never discovered before but have been there all along, and some things have been brought back into being—we have five different reasons why something is in the space. And that lends our séance parlor layers of richness for the players to discover.

Once you have your characters and your story, you can start getting into the details that enrich a puzzle. In design meetings, we start first with the story, then devise a puzzle, and then find a way to make its connection to the story clear. Sometimes it’s as simple as good set dressing. Instance: we needed an approachable on-ramp puzzle to begin the game, so we devised an unusual maze. Not exactly the most compelling story-telling device—admittedly mazes are hardly “Houdini-themed”—so we crafted a jewelry box and added a gift tag on it from Houdini to his mother. Boom. Immersive. Even better: that tag may be a clue to something else…

Immersive props in immersive theatre

Not designing an escape room? Guess what: the same principle applies to props and décor in immersive theatre. Sure, you can stuff a room with something shocking all day long, but that’s flat and forgettable. It won’t mean anything to the guest who discovers it. Build that connective tissue! Ask why! Reward your audiences for paying attention! If they’re snooping through drawers and find something, it should be exactly like a clue in an escape room: another piece of the story. You want them to say “Aha!” and share the story-connection they discovered with friends afterwards.

Case study: in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More the Macduffs’ apartment features multiple kid rooms, including one with creepy baby dolls hanging from the ceiling around an empty crib. But the creepy baby dolls aren’t just creepy. They’re a clue. Look around, what else do you see? Or don’t see? Where, oh, where are the children? And it seems the mother is pregnant again. Put these clues together, and you’ll see new nuances in their pas de deux.

What’s on those walls? Fortune favors the nosy. (The Macduff’s Sitting Room, Sleep No More)

That’s the bar, my friends. Let’s jump it!

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Emotion is the Goal

While at the Transworld’s Room Escape Conference, I overheard the tail-end of another creator editorializing on an immersive experience he saw, and I heard David Spira (of Room Escape Artist) respond, in perfect meme form, “Less story, more feels.”

Cue light bulb.

All that weekend, I had been harping on the importance of story, as I do whenever I’m around escape room creators—or, you know, it’s breakfast. Story creates stakes, makes memorable moments, guarantees your uniqueness in an industry flooded with look-a-likes—in short, fundamentally elevates the genre of escape room from a forgettable game to a true experience. The best designers and players agree. So it struck my ear like a discordant note to hear story talked of in terms of less after so many hours of everyone begging for more.

But when we say we want story, what is the goal, really? Why do we crave stories? Why do we fill so many of our leisure hours with storytelling experiences—books, theatre, movies, television? There are many reasons we turn to stories, but I think, more than any other reason, we crave emotion. Story is an ideal vehicle for emotion. At the end of the day, we want to feel something.

Grand, SWEEPING pseudo-sociological section

Modern society has erected something of a code: we’re not supposed to feel strong emotion. It’s disruptive, it’s not polite, it’s not “professional.” We’re supposed to smile, not guffaw, say, “Sure thing” when we want to say, “Go to hell.” Even-keel feelings keep the ship afloat, as it were.

Think about whenever you answered someone’s “How are you?” with anything other than “Good, and you?” They’re taken aback, even when you respond positively, because answering that question honestly is against the code. (And if you never have, try it sometime. It’s deliciously subversive.) Woe to the poor server when you tell him you’re not doing well—he literally has no idea what to do next. None of his training prepared him for someone declaring they are having a bad day—we’re supposed to hide that fact. We keep up appearances of a steady ship. Start paying attention to the amount of emotional regulation in the wider world, and you’ll understand a little bit better why we seek outlets for feeling.

This is the Wall we talk about in Meisner acting theory. In the real world, you need a Wall to protect you from responding to people who enrage you, attract you, etc. The Wall says, “Don’t take it personally.” And, outside of acting, Walls are good things. They keep us civilized. They mark the difference between adults and toddlers. Well-regulated emotions mean we’re not breaking out into violence, destroying society, and committing ourselves to “nasty, brutish, and short” lives, so famously described by Hobbes.

No, not that Hobbes.

This Hobbes.

We have put emotion under such sharp control that we actively fool ourselves that reason motivates our actions—never emotion. Under no circumstances should anyone act from a place of emotion! To be motivated by emotion is to be a pre-Enlightenment creature, more animal than human, not to be given a place at the table. Or so the lie goes. I’m getting sick of this lie. Can we admit yet that arguments from emotion tend to be more successful? But to assert something closer to the truth—that emotion comes first and the reasoning brain follows in its wake with its many beautiful justifications—is to invite anarchy. Won’t that lead to the End of Democracy and the Fall of Civilization?

We needn’t unpack Hume’s ought today, but the rest is unmistakably true.

To put it simply, we fear emotion. You cannot debate it or fix it. It is too powerful a force. So we do our best to discount emotion, to contain it when in society, and relegate it to the sidelines of our lives.

Story as emotional outlet

But emotion will out. We are feeling beings. We don’t want to be behind our Walls all the time. We can’t. So we seek outlets for feeling in art and stories.

We crave experiences that aren’t even-keel, at the same time that we don’t want to risk anything. Stories fit that need perfectly. We want to feel more love, laughter, joy. We also want emotions on the less-than-sunny spectrum, too: adrenaline, fear, anger, grief, helplessness, power. Really, every emotion is fun to experience when it’s in a safe environment. And entertainment is all about delivering feels. In fact, we choose what kind of story we want by its emotional result. Are you feeling like laughter or tears tonight?

Categorization-by-emotion goes deeper than the classical binary showing here: action delivers thrill, horror delivers fear, romantic comedy delivers love with laughs, romance delivers love with tears, etc.

If feelings are indeed so dangerous, imagination is a safe place to experience them. You can “opt in” when you need an emotional hit, and you can also “opt out”—it’s not actually your life. Books can be closed, television turned off, the theatre lights extinguished.  Your brain can say “it’s only fiction!” thus making storytelling a safe place to feel. This way we can have our emotions—and our society, too.

Eat your heart out, Marie Antoinette.

Story as emotional practice

It’s noble enough to be an outlet for emotions, but stories serve yet a higher purpose still: practice. Inevitably, emotion will break through in our lives. Society has left us ill-equipped for these moments, and certainly in public, you’ll feel pressured to get back to even-keel as soon as possible, and that’s not healthy. Thanks to stories, we have some idea how to handle extreme emotions. When romance walks through our door, we have already formed ideas about how to love because we’ve practiced it before. When our employer acts unjustly and we rage (directly or just to our friends), we feel confidence in our anger because we’ve experienced this sort of story before.

And grief, the other side of love, will come for all of us some day. We rehearse for that day with stories. Society says, “Don’t cry!” But a good drama says, “Do!” We need to know how to cry—and not to fear it. Opt-in to a good tragedy, and you get carte blanche to let the tears flow. God, that’s really important. Stories give us first-hand experience, bodily memory of emotions sans consequences, better preparing us for the inevitable day when the play-acting time is over, and fiction turns reality.

Perhaps best of all, the emotions stories prompt ultimately teach us empathy, expanding our understanding of who’s allowed in our inner circle of compassion. Emotion is the glue that binds us to characters and compels us to see the story through to the end. We care. When we emerge, we have a stronger sense that everyone has a point of view and so deserves our very best empathy. In fact, experiments in cognitive science have concluded that fiction really does improve our empathy.

World-building for what?

Emotion is the goal. That’s what we want from stories, much, much more than “ideas,” and we should write them with this end-goal in mind.

But sometimes creators get bogged down in the story details too much and can lose sight of why they’re telling a story in the first place. Every story detail needs to have a relationship with the audience. Ask always: why is it there? What work does it do? If you’re only adding detail to make the story seem more realistic, the audience can and will forget the detail. Flood them with irrelevant details, and you train them to tune you out. Make the detail do emotional work, and we’ll start caring.

World-building? So hot right now. Star Wars, Harry Potter, the Marvel Universe, the Hunger Games. We want to enter worlds different from ours and ferret out all the details, learn obscure character names, memorize the lingo. But all of these details aren’t going to interest us if our emotions aren’t captured in the first place. Emotion comes first. World-building is a distant second. We need to love the characters before we become rabid fans and want to learn more about them.

Let’s look at Harry Potter. Anyone who takes that world seriously for five minutes will see all sorts of holes in it. How do wizards handle a world with guns? Do they ever learn math?

World so broken, someone actually tried to fix it.

Yes, it’s true: Harry Potter’s world doesn’t hold up to reason. But it does hold up to emotion. When I think of the series, I don’t think about the many details, I think of how it provoked my laughter, my tears, my sense of injustice, my sense of wonder. The delivery of so many profound emotions is what makes it popular, not its richly-detailed (and unfeasible) world.

A 400-page, multi-branching immersive script is not a good unto itself. All that says is, “This show is complex.” What I want to know is, does its complexity do emotional work?

Less story, more feels.

Emotions in Escape Rooms

The primacy of emotion also explains why escape rooms, without a whiff of story, are so popular. Anticipation, adrenaline, frustration, joy, a rush of elation if won, the bitter taste of disappointment if lost—they’re perfectly designed for maximum emotional drama.

And they’d be so much better if creators actively designed for it! Do you really want your guests spending the first 15 minutes in frustration, or would you rather give them the elation of progress every 2-3 minutes? And are you sure you want to deliver bitter disappointment for even 25% of your paying customers? And if, yes, you still do want players to lose because you think that’s what escape rooms are about, be sure the game’s NEVER BROKEN and FAIR AS HECK—otherwise they will redirect their negative emotions onto you, the designer. They’ll probably still do that, actually, but at least you can sleep easy at night…?

I’d also argue that escape room emotions would be much stronger, more memorable when tied to a story, but I have to admit, even the worst escape room is more successful in the gamut of emotions than some theatre I know.

But the “story” often at the beginning of escape rooms—that wall of text delivered by the game master—does zero emotional work. It’s a prime example of world-building without the goal of emotion in mind. They’re trying to make the game feel more realistic, but realism is not why we tell—or remember—stories. The stories driving The Vanishing Act, The Maze of Haikana, and The Jazz Parlor (some of my favorites) I remember as well as if I played yesterday, because the stories engaged my emotions. These were not stories for story’s sake, but story deployed for emotional effect. Let’s just say it’s not a coincidence that these are top experiences.

emotion in immersives

As I’ve covered in other posts, I consider immersives more powerful than other forms of story-telling. Immersives locate you, body and soul, inside a story. There is less imaginative work needed on your part; you cannot easily “check out.” In response to this immediacy, the emotions the audience experiences can be overwhelming, unpredictable, dangerous. That’s why immersives so often have strict rules, content advisories, and black masks dedicated to everyone’s safety.

Immersives are fucking SCARY. I’m just saying. They’re not safe in the way books and movies and plays are. You leave with a bodily memory you can’t erase. And you definitely want to know if you’re walking into a show that’s dedicated to tearing you down instead of building you up, or you might just leave with some new psychological scars. Think of it this way: I can watch Schindler’s List, but I would not be able to attend a Holocaust immersive.

This is one reason why I love immersives, that element of un-safety, but that makes it all the more important to wield the power consciously.

I want all creators to write for emotion, but I implore it of immersive authors: please, write with the audience’s emotions foremost in mind. They’re not at a distance in the dark, but in your cast’s lap. You do not want to leave their reactions to chance. Ask always, how will this or that design decision elicit an emotion? You’ve chosen to tell your story in a form that is more visceral for the audience than others. Make sure that’s a good thing.

We try our best to design emotion-first at Strange Bird Immersive. We like to use a five-act structure and map out the emotions within each of those stages. Characters have emotional arcs, and audiences should journey with an arc, too. When making design decisions, we prototype as close to the real thing as much as possible, and see how our gut responds to the experience. Just recently we were wrestling with a design choice and opted for the prototype that didn’t provoke fear, as fear was an undesirable emotion for that moment in the experience. We nix choices and details that are only “funny to the GM”—the players have to be in on the joke.

Why you need to play/attend

Emotion is a powerful learning tool, and that’s why I advocate for every designer to be an enthusiast in their genre. Playing transforms dry theory into personal memory.

Players all say free-roaming blacklights are lame, but escape room designers don’t universally listen. But when you play yourself, you’ll never forget the rage you felt being relegated to “blacklight search duty” for 15 minutes while your teammates discovered cool things without you. Miss a game’s most amazing reveal? You’ll be more likely to bottleneck your own reveals. You may want to design a room with low-light—you want atmosphere! It makes no sense for this space to have good lighting! And that sounds like a convincing argument in a design meeting. But when you play such a game, how did it make you feel? Did it add to your wonder or increase your frustration? Only if you play, and play a lot, can you increase your ability to design player-first.

Same rule goes for immersive theatre. Ever attended an immersive where you missed the story? Or were uncertain about the rules? Or came back a second time and got stuck on two-thirds of the same track you saw your first time? That happened to Cameron at Then She Fell, and now we’re passionate advocates for dark rides to sell tickets for specific tracks (just don’t tell us where the tracks go).

Attend. Feel. Learn. Repeat.

SUBTLETY, or “don’t be like a haunted house”

Now that you’re focused on emotion in your design, be sure not to go too far! People hate it when they sense their emotions are being manipulated. That’s why we speak of tear-jerkers and Hallmark movies so disparagingly: they’re blatant. Keep things subtle. You might have an ideal emotional response at every moment mapped out, but you can’t be obvious about it.

Rule of thumb: don’t be like a haunted house.

This guy wants only one thing from me…

By which I mean a standard, run-of-the-mill haunt, not the cool immersive haunts currently trending in cool cities. A standard haunted house wants to SCARE you. That’s it. And they’re blatantly manipulative about it. An actor jumps out at you, he has no backstory, we don’t know what he wants—other than to scare you! The experience is binary: you’re either scared, or you’re not. And they so desperately want you to be scared. They’re leaning into it strongly. The result: a bunch of people who rebel against the design. We want to keep the audience with us, not against us, and that requires subtlety.

Start by focusing on characters instead of the audience (be sure to read my thought-piece When You’re the Star…). You’ll want concrete characters with distinct points of view, who will then draw the audience into emotional relationships. We really like it best when the spotlight isn’t on us. Make sure your characters are experiencing emotions, ideally an arc, but be especially sure they aren’t unconcerned or unfeeling. Automatons make for really boring immersives.

Spaces, too, can be designed for emotions, but be sure to create believable rooms, rooms with nuances to discover or many layers of meaning, and not a room that immediately reads as Scary Room. That will prompt more laughter than fear. When you show your cards, you lose your power.

And you definitely will need details. I’m far from being against details—I’m just against details deployed in a vacuum. They need to be part of the larger goal. Details help make a world realistic, so that the emotions provoked don’t feel forced but rather blossom organically. If spaces don’t have a logic or characters don’t feel properly motivated, the audience won’t get involved.

Make sure, too, that your actors train for a range of reactions. No matter how consciously you design, you cannot predict everyone’s response—and perhaps that’s a good thing. Let the story do its work, and make sure the actors don’t get expectant. If at a key moment, you look too eagerly at the audience for their emotional response, many of them will defy you.

Nothing kills laughter faster than an expectant comedian.

Be sure to let the audience initiate relation at these moments, especially if you’re working with tears. Sharing tears is a sacred act. Remember always that your guests are coming from a world where they’re not supposed to cry. Don’t take it lightly.

Keep the designer’s hand invisible, and you may just create something that really moves someone. For me, I can think of no greater goal.

But what about IDEAS?

Stories are also excellent vehicles for ideas (aka “theme”), and at least according to English class, this is the nobler goal of stories (stopping at emotion means you’re relegated to the “just entertainment” category). And while I count it a very high honor to have stirred audience emotion, Strange Bird does have Something To Say (TM) with The Man From Beyond, and the core idea in our next production is so radical, it frightens me. We’re chasing after individual transformation, too. All lovely, important goals. But a purely-intellectual vehicle, however, really won’t get your ideas very far. Arguments from emotion? It’s time to admit, they work better. Move me first, and maybe my ideas will budge.