Category: Escape Rooms

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Given the most innovative thing about immersives, “Rule #2: The audience is active,” it’s tempting as an immersive writer to create stories about YOU, the audience. Film can’t do it. Fiction can’t do it very well (choose-your-own-adventures hardly made the big time). Theme parks maybe get the chance to explore second-person narratives, but the stories they tell tend to be simple. Immersives provide a more complex story-platform, with detailed worlds and an empowered audience doing things, making choices, even talking. The temptation is great to make the audience the Star in the cinematic world. Haven’t you always wanted to be the Star?

Most escape rooms do precisely that. Some immersive theatre projects have dabbled in it, too.

But does that pay off?

Case study: The Grand Paradise

I am a huge fan of the work of Third Rail Projects. Anytime they produce anything that I can’t see (I’m looking at you, Behind the City!) is a cause for mourning in my household. But I am about to be critical, something I don’t usually do in this blog, because one of their shows taught me a lesson in immersive writing.

Back in 2016, when The Grand Paradise announced that it was closing, Cameron and I made a special last-minute trip to NYC. I’ve recounted before that I had some bad luck that night—being grouped with a Talker, not getting either part of the coffin/bird sequence, which surely would have been a highlight for me (imagine missing the Tea Party in Then She Fell). But I left that show turned-off for a more fundamental reason than bad luck.

The show was about me.

The Grand Paradise transported you to a 1970s pleasure resort, brimming with cocktails, water tanks, and New Age-ism. People wearing very little greeted you with leis and knowing smiles. A straight-laced nuclear family appeared, but was quickly broken up by the resorts many temptations. There was also a creepy fountain of youth, too, but that’s about all the plot you need to know.

When not in set dance numbers, the Resort characters spent their energies seducing me. They looked straight at me and told me I needed to change, or realize who I am, or set myself loose on the world, etc. etc. The show had two sides, Family versus Resort, and they wanted me as a member of the Resort. Seducing me was the heart of the experience. I remember in particular a map-making, fortune-telling sequence about my past, present, future. Then there was a meditation on how I use my time. And ropes as metaphors.

I was there to be transported, and yet all the monologues kept prompting me strangely enough to think about Strange Bird (my future ambitions). That’s nice, but unexpected. That’s not why I came here. The characters again and again kept pushing me into my head. That higher plane we aim for in the theatre experience—where the head shuts up and the heart takes over—was unreachable.

I like introspection. I have a solidly introspective moment in the tarot readings in The Man From Beyond, but introspection does not make a good story-experience. Third Rail always likes to ask personal history questions, and those usually allow you to make a stronger connection with the character you’re with, but in Grand Paradise the questions were pervasive, and they never looped back to the character who was asking them. I do think Third Rail designed the show to be about the audience, for the show to seduce us as equally as the family (our stand-ins) are seduced and set free.

I bucked against the role they wanted me to play the whole time. When I left, it was the first time I had no desire to return to a multi-pathed immersive. I didn’t have the sense that there was more story for me to uncover—and damn, did it make me uncomfortable.

Case study: Sweet & Lucky

The night before I visited The Grand Paradise, I had been to Third Rail Project’s antiques shop in Denver, Sweet & Lucky. This was a hard act to follow.

It opened with characters ushering us from an antique shop to an outdoor funeral. They handed out umbrellas, and some folks had to share—because it was pouring rain inside this warehouse. I stepped onto the astroturf. Who was dead? We sang a hymn badly. Slowly, characters peeled the congregation off in groups, and the story that would answer my burning question began. When we returned at the close of the show to the funeral, there was no rain—because our tears had taken its place.

This show had nothing to do with me—so it had everything to do with me. I watched a romance in its many stages, its ripples through time, how a life touches another life. There was even a scene where the couple had a devastating fight, and despite clues to the contrary, I left thinking they had separated permanently but was later convinced by friends afterwards that they had indeed made it up. (So that says something profound about how sensitive I am to conflict…). I can’t look at a tree or a robot or a glass dish the same way again.

Through specificity, we get at universality. A story with characters with distinct points of view and rich details resonated with me—they felt truly human, and so felt more like me. The details would be radically different, sure, but I could easily be the person in that coffin.

While actors looked at me, drew me in, even gave me light roles to play, I never felt self-conscious. I was wholly in my heart. I was feasting on them. Who I was didn’t matter. I was not the star—they were.  And that was a good thing.

pitfalls of second-person narratives

When the audience is the true “star,” that means they have the starring arc. They need to start in one place, pivot, make choices, face consequences, and end in a different place, fundamentally changed. That’s…not easy to do. If you insist on making the audience the star of the story, you can only address the audience in the most generic way possible. The number of rich personalities who have come through The Man From Beyond have taught me it’s always best to let them be them—and invest in interesting things happening around them.

By calling the audience to be the star, you’ll be manipulating them constantly along a designed arc, so that you will most likely trigger self-consciousness—the enemy.  People may think they want to be in the spotlight, but they react viscerally against it most of the time when you put them there. You may force them into a role that doesn’t suit them, or on the flip-side, not build a detailed arc at all. (If you want to do this, explore Odyssey Works, which tailors experiences successfully, but for only one person at a time). I’d like to see an immersive succeed at making me the star, but I haven’t seen it yet. Perhaps there are lessons from larping that I need to learn, which are much more emergent and flexible than immersives, but what I do know for sure is…

You must always have a character.

Characters HAVE POV

Grand Paradise was missing characters. I paused at the playbill on the door at the exit, but I honestly didn’t recognize any difference among the paradise characters. They all had the same point of view. I wasn’t convinced that there was any additional insights to be gleaned from the story. Whereas I met impactful characters in Sweet & Lucky—I even believe that one character was another character but older, a theory met with much acclaim by my friends. Now that’s interesting.

Characters have points of view, an opinion about what is happening that differs from the rest of the company. The plot proper should tease out character, prompting the person to show their true colors. This goes beyond the nonsense that actors make up, like what their characters like to eat for breakfast. I’m talking about what the writer shows in the story.

You can have a story without a separate character than the audience, but it’s not going to be particularly compelling. It’s going to be a choose-your-own-adventure, and those burnt out in the night for good reason. At the very least, you need a sidekick. And I’d wager that arcs are more successful when they’re fully in the writer’s hands and not in the audience’s heads. It’s easier to find yourself when you’re lost in somebody else’s world, if you will, then when someone insists on staring at you and asking you probing questions and urging you to change. Or worse—not having any character look at you at all.

What this means for Escape Rooms

Escape rooms often advertise YOU as the STAR. Very rarely does a game deliver the storied experience you’re promised on the website. Sometimes you’re given a role and sometimes you’ve just stumbled upon a rogue submarine, but it’s not very common for the arc to go beyond “in trouble” to “we’re saved!” If you’re given a role, it’s lampshading—no role-play is needed in the actual game.  It is the rare Heist that calls upon you to be sneaky in the slightest.

So while escape rooms may think they’re delivering a cinematic experience where you (finally!) get to play Indiana Jones, throwing challenges at you doesn’t really amount to much. Cinema is, after all, about story arcs. We like to see people change, and thereby learn about ourselves.

I’d like to see more escape rooms featuring supporting or starring characters. Even if you’re not interested in involving live actors, you can still have a character presence. Escape rooms have always compelled me because they scratched an unscratched itch of mine: as a young girl at a slumber party, I always wanted to rifle through my friend’s drawers, discover her drawings, her secrets, her handwriting, the album in her CD player, all the things she loves and perhaps find the voodoo doll devoted to all the things she hates. I wanted to know how another life is lived.

I doubt I’m alone in that curiosity. Escape rooms should lean into that unfulfilled desire.

What is a space without a human presence? It’s meaningless, un-immersive, a game at best. But a space with a distinct human presence—logic, reason, passion, handwriting. That’s a space I want to explore, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll come out the other side a bit different.

Yes, I know: most escape rooms aren’t after the same sort of “audience transformation” that I seek. But if you want a truly memorable experience? The kind that makes super-fans? It’s time to start calling ourselves artists—and to start thinking about characters beyond the players.

Big news hit the escape room community this week: Time Run announced their collaboration with BBC’s Sherlock in an all-new experience, The Game Is Now.

The news got me thinking again about the decision all storytellers make to adapt something existing or to compose something original.

Whether you’re excited or not by the Sherlock fusion, you have to admit: damn, this move is SMART. Here’s a look at why.

Advantages of Adaptation

In developing our immersive theatre escape rooms, Strange Bird has talked a lot about whether to adapt a work or to make something original. It’s a particularly interesting question for the immersive industry—a lot of shows and games are inspired by source material. This topic came up again in development as we started work on Show #2, so here’s my dispatch from those front lines. We boiled adaptation’s advantages down to three…

1. Adaptations can potentially sell more tickets
2. Adaptations give the audience grounding
3. Adaptations give the writer creative parameters

1. financial benefits

We all ultimately want to sell our art, get rich quick, quit our day jobs. That’s not easy in this field. With such a wide-open frontier in the immersive industry, it’s hard to get any attention on your own. Your story is unknown, your company is unknown, hell, even your very genre confuses people when you try to explain it.

But if you create a show from an established brand, you immediately tap into an established fan base. Media and social media suddenly appear and drool. People who’ve never heard of immersive theatre or haven’t ventured into an escape room yet are now snatching up your tickets. Instance: in anticipation of demand, The Game Is Now will open with no fewer than FIVE COPIES of the game. That looks incredibly risky in any other context, but given the established fan base, it makes sense.

Even if you’re not a super-fan of the work, people tend to like things they’re familiar with over something totally new. New things carry risk. We are risk-averse. Risks sometimes pay off, but more often than not, they don’t. We all have favorite places to eat. While I could theoretically find a better or equal Thai restaurant in Houston, why risk the dollars, the calories, and the time on a new place, over the place I know is good? In the same way, we buy tickets for story-worlds we already know something about, rather than starting from ground zero.

It’s not entirely dissimilar to the sunk-cost fallacy.

Hollywood and Broadway have been onto this secret for a while now, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Sponge Bob: the Musical. Did anyone really want Ghost: the Musical? Perhaps not, but once it opened, it became a safe ticket for summer-time tourists. It was total crap, but lo, it even toured.

Taking up an established brand’s very tempting. But just how many works are there that can tap into a rabid fan base or inspire purchases on the “sunk cost fallacy” in entertainment? Unless you work some IP-magical-deal like Time Run did, not many.

INtellectual PropertY (IP) 101

This is a big, sticky area that I’m not an expert in and don’t want to be an expert in, but it’s worth addressing here. Essentially, in the United States, you cannot create within somebody else’s story-world, unless it is in the public domain, that is, published before 1923, or otherwise lapsed in copyright. (Good news: that horizon is about to, at long last, start moving again this year. We’re about to get works through…1924!)

There’s no easy path to acquire IP rights, and if you do connect with the right people, you’re likely in for some serious sticker shock. Only the very biggest of companies can really afford a deal. (See: Time Run, Escape Room Live, Punchdrunk (there’s a Dr. Who immersive in their past)).

You can maybe sneak in under “fair use,” which allows for parody of or commentary on a copyrighted work, but that’s ultimately an act of “crossing your fingers that you never get caught in the first place.” In which case, you better hope you never get big. You’ll almost certainly not have as good of a lawyer as the IP suing you.

There are many escape rooms based on IPs, licensed and unlicensed and hovering in that grey area, and they’re all trying to capitalize on the “established fan base” advantage, hoping a Harry-Potter-style game will be their market differentiator. IP invocations are happening less in the immersive theatre realm in comparison, where we see more shows based on Shakespeare and 19th-Century novelists. A baffling trend, until you realize it’s all about the rule above. Public domain? Fair game!

But I’d argue these adaptations are missing out on the big reason to adapt, which is the financial benefit. “The Dead” is easy to pick on—that’s super-obscure. Houdini is well-known, but I sincerely doubt rabid Houdini fans have made an impact on our bottom line. And let’s be honest: just how many more tickets is Sleep No More selling because of die-hard fans of Macbeth?

We have three avid Shakespearean practitioners on Strange Bird’s creative team, but even we’ve faced the truth that, while people would rather see Hamlet than Pericles, no one is going to an escape room because its billed as Hamlet-based.

2. Audience benefits

But Punchdrunk’s choice to adapt Macbeth has other advantages. It gives people an “in” on the world. Immersives use non-conventional story-telling techniques, and it’s truly bewildering the first time you encounter non-linear story-telling or second-person narratives or sandboxes where you have to choose your own path.

These stories…they don’t hold your hand like the stories we’re used to. They immerse you in the experience and dare you along the way (or at the end) to make sense of it all, if you can. It’s almost as if the story itself—what’s going on here—is the fundamental mystery, and it’s your goal through the experience to solve it. Immersives (even non-escape-room ones) are chock-full of AHA! moments.

Knowing Macbeth intimately helped me make fast sense of what I was seeing in Sleep No More. My very first scene of consequence was the interrogation scene. I quickly recognized Act 4, Scene 3—a brilliant back-and-forth between Malcolm and Macduff which, as a wanna-be-rhetorician, I’ve always loved. Here was that scene, cloaked in a violent dance in a closet, with all of its push and pull. And then…the tree! I laughed out loud, I could not have been more delighted. I was won. I wanted to join their forces. But without the background knowledge, everyone else must be like, “What’s with the Christmas trees?” It becomes a radically different experience if you don’t know the source material.

Then She Fell also uses a well-known work as the string inside their labyrinthine mirror-maze of refracted selves. I read Lewis Carroll’s books for the first time in preparation for this show, and I’m glad I did. It gave me the foundation to see the new thing they were doing with the characters. It’s not a straight adaptation at all, but Alice in Wonderland is unquestionably its spine. (And unlike Macbeth, I think Alice is a public-domain story-world that may actually sell some tickets. See also: Les Enfant Terribles’ Alice’s Adventures Underground. Just…don’t get too close to Disney’s aesthetic choices).

Adaptations can fast-track the audience into engaging with the immersive world. But using an established work as audience hooks does carry risk: you risk leaving behind anyone who hasn’t read it or seen it. We all want the barrier-of-entry for our shows to be as low as possible, and that includes not requiring research ahead of time to get the most out of it.

Basically, you risk becoming fan service. And yeah, Sleep No More really kinda is fan service to Shakespeare nerds. Ugh. I don’t like that. Does it go too far?

More to the point: can we really safely assume an audience is familiar with the details of Hamlet? Yeah, no. Maybe if I were producing in England…maybe.

3. creative benefits

Perhaps the most seductive benefit of adaptation is the on-ramp it gives creators, and I think that’s really what’s behind immersives of The Idiot and “The Dead.” I love limitations. It sparks my creativity. To quote Robert McKee, as he pleads for screenwriters to do research in his phenomenal book Story:

“The principle of Creative Limitation calls for freedom within a circle of obstacles. Talent is like a muscle: without something to push against, it atrophies. So we deliberately put rocks in our path, barriers that inspire.”

Couldn’t agree more. Saying “I want to do something totally original!” more or less means infinite options. Saying “I want to create an escape room based on Hamlet!” gives me a cast of characters, major and minor conflicts, and even suggests sets, if not a particular aesthetic (Hamlet is usually medieval gloom in the public imagination, so why not lean into that).

We’re already working in a wacky, wide-open genre, where the very structure of engagement is up for grabs. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some boundaries? Source materials give us that.

The Man From Beyond, while by no measure an adaptation, has deep roots in the true story of Harry Houdini. He suggested a conflict to us, gave us an aesthetic, inspired puzzles (one’s even a historic puzzle, directly lifted from his magic), and even gave us historical films we could play in our show. I read a ton. Watched the movies. Spent days devouring the blog Wild About Harry.

The details…so many rich details, all at our disposal. We knocked out the writing-designing of that game in some 2-3 months. That’s not a coincidence.

Our second show, however, is not going to be “inspired by” anything extant—neither fictional nor historical characters. Which is not to say that there isn’t lots of research to do! I’ve been doing my research, Mr. McKee! But I can say with certainty that the writing process is more challenging. It was not completed in two months. All those rich details we got from Houdini? They’re now up to us to make up.

ADVANTAGES of original work

Which brings us to the other side of things: original stories. Note that original work is not in any way inherently superior to adaptations. They may be harder, but that doesn’t make them better. I think we should have both, and both are capable of magnificent and totally crappy things.

The main benefit of creating something original is that it can speak more directly to the moment. It can go anywhere, do anything, be about anyone. Creators can say directly what it is they want to say—rather than twisting Hamlet into some cautionary tale of fascism, or making Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf suddenly about racism.

If all we’re doing is re-mounting old stories, we’re stuck as a culture. We won’t have any stories of historically marginalized groups as protagonists, heroes, anti-heroes. There may be only seven plots, but the details matter. A LOT. Times change, and we require new stories to understand ourselves as we are and to unlock the frontiers of what we can yet become.

But they are harder. In immersives in particular, original stories will need to work harder to tell the tale—there’s no “string” in the chaos for your audience to follow. You’ll need to set-up and then deliver “AHA!” moments on your own. The audience has no preconceived investment in any of the characters, so you’re building their emotions from the ground up. Extra care must be taken.

And dammit, there are NO FINANCIAL BENEFITS to original work. NONE. Except, I suppose, not having to give the BBC a percentage.