Escape Rooms – Page 2

August 8, 2018February 1, 2019

Room Escape Conference: Strange Bird’s Takeaways

My co-founder Cameron and I debated for too long whether we should attend Transworld’s Room Escape Conference. Considering we talked like a non-stop fireworks show for the twelve-hour drive home, plus meals and camping time, followed promptly by a three-hour production meeting, presenting concrete, actionable items…I’d say it was worth it.

Below are some of Strange Bird Immersive’s takeaways from the conference, from the talks we attended (or were a part of) to the games we played. Note that this list is NOT a summary of the main idea nor does it include ideas that we’ve already adopted. There were a lot of ideas presented that, frankly, were part of Strange Bird’s game-plan Day 1.

There was such a stir in the crowd over “Make your timer immersive” that Gratuitious Sets had to back-track and say, “At least try to blend-in your TV screen.” (The clock in *The Man From Beyond*.)

Instead, this list features something a bit more interesting—what Strange Bird learned. It’s either something that was new to us, or the rationale behind a design instinct we had, or “Holy crap! Somebody else came to the same conclusion! Maybe we’re onto something…” We’re talking higher-order revelations, the kind of things that can elevate your work from great to successful. (Note that we did not attend every talk, but specifically went to those we thought we stood to gain from, so this is again not intended to be comprehensive.)

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that escape room companies are co-petors, not competitors. If we all craft better experiences, we’ll make more enthusiasts. This post (heck, the whole blog) is my commitment to that.

Achieving #1 google ranking (Brad Kendall, Escape Assist)

Make sure all of your name and address listings are identical
List your category of business as “Tourist Attraction”
Register on Google, Yahoo, and Bing Places
Blog: Google rewards new content, hence why a blog is a good idea. To make the most of it, move it to your URL. (Did you notice that Immersology just relocated?) Posts should be minimum 500 words (LOL—got that covered!)

bigger, brighter, louder: HOW TO CREATE WATER COOLER MOMENTS WITHOUT BREAKING THE BANK (Skip Dylen, Wicked Escapes)

If you can make the prop big, MAKE IT BIG! 4 wheels with symbols you have to match up is fine, but when those wheels are three feet in diameter, it feels epic, important, heroic!

Big thing, showing here. (The Man From Beyond)

Big things in the middle of the room make the room feel larger.
Lighting: don’t light for coverage like a photographer. Light for drama—without of course going to the point where you frustrate players. Different colors can create shadow looks without actual shadow.
Sound has three categories: score, ambient, incidental. You should have all three.
- Score: while traditional theatre rarely uses underscoring, all other media outlets do. At the right level and with the right taste, people won’t find it distracting, and it does lots of subconscious work.
- Ambient: things around us make noise constantly. Bugs chirping, machines humming, dogs huffling, road noise, wind.
- Incidental: sounds produced from discrete actions (aka PUZZLE FEEDBACK FX). Please to be having more of these!

Setting the scene: using story to enhance immersion (Summer Herrick, Locurio)

I loved this talk so much…
Story is what can make your room truly unique. There are a ton of similarly-themed escape rooms out there, and it’s almost impossible to make a truly original puzzle, but no two stories are ever alike. Story is memorable.
In addition to having story turns that the whole team experiences, be sure that each of these turns feature puzzles that engage the whole team. (I’d call this “bottlenecks are your besties,” but more on that later).
Make sets and props that reveal character. (The classic SHOW, DON’T TELL, which means stop with all the journals in escape rooms, please!)

Even with Madame Daphne out of the frame, you can easily imagine just what kind of person might step into it. (The Man From Beyond)

4 years of escape rooms: a data driven look (Lisa & David Spira, Room Escape Artist)

Read their data post
Locations opening peaked in Q3 2016
More companies are closing—but they consider that a sign of a maturing industry.
Inputs (how the lock works) are not and should never be puzzles. We’ve had this instinct since forever, but I’m glad to hear it reinforced. Whenever we see a team is stuck on how to work a lock, we are quick to hint them. Or, you know, we fix the lock permanently. Instance: we engraved an arrow on our briefcase lock, so everyone knows to slide the button instead of push it. Trouble with that lock instantly evaporated.

A good UI is a joy forever. (The Man From Beyond)

Ideally within the first 2 minutes, the team should experience a solve and its reward. 10 minutes in is way too damn long.
Design your lobby like you would your games.

It’s our time: How the escape room community will take the industry to the forefront OF entertainment (Mark Flint & rogers clayton, the escape game)

Learn from your mistakes. They didn’t drive this one home, but to me this meant: the best companies are not companies that don’t make mistakes; it’s that the best companies make certain they LEARN from them. A useful message for those of us working under the delusion that some day we won’t make mistakes anymore.
Their mission statement is “epic interactive experiences.” At one point, they shifted from “awesome” to “epic” as their guide-word.
They estimate that 5-10% of the US have played an escape room.
When they started requiring post-game reports of mistakes, the number of mistakes went down substantially. Strange Bird took detailed notes of the first 9 months of shows, but we retired the practice once the need for iteration declined. We’ll be reviving this practice in the new space, as I think it can 1) help our actors keep track of their performance and 2) help us identify things that are failing at an unusual rate—or could otherwise be re-designed to eliminate the potential for human error in the first place.

CASE STUDY: THE NEST (Jarrett Lantz & Jeff Leinenveder, Scout Expedition Co.)

The Nest offered a new structure for an immersive by bringing walking simulator games like Gone Home into the real world. Since it’s not a simulation, that term won’t work. I’m advocating for the term “explored space,” since it spells out the goal of the experience: to explore.

But…we need to have a name…in order to have higher order discourse… (Mean Girls)

Reality in your design changes everything.
The Nest hosted only two people at a time, in part because the bigger the group, the sillier people get. (That’s one of the weaknesses of The Man From Beyond and of the immersive-theatre-meets-escape-room genre overall).
Unlaminated paper can last MONTHS. (We’d say years.)
Audio tapes were 60-90 seconds long. I think it’s wise to keep audio short.
Only about 25% of the stuff needed to be reset in a precise place. The rest could go wherever. (Not a model I’d recommend for an escape room, given the danger of red herrings, but a good tip for immersive theatre)
People invest themselves more in non-present characters (think of the difference between a movie, where a character is handed to you, and a book, where you imagine all the details on your own). I’m not certain this principle is universal, as a live actor is extraordinarily compelling, but probably if Josie had been in a chair in The Nest delivering monologues, people would have been less invested.
Jarrett & Jeff said the metric for an immersive theatre ticket is $1 per minute. Probably a rule of thumb from the LA scene? We offer 45 minutes of immersive theatre, on top of a full escape room experience (Houston games typically run $30), putting The Man From Beyond at a $75 ticket. So yeah, at $38, we’re really under-priced (at least by LA standards), but the trick is not the person afterwards saying it’s worth every penny, but the person beforehand who’s persuaded it must be worth every penny.

FUTURE OF THE INDUSTRY DEBATE (lots of people, including me)

Much to my delight, everyone agreed games should be designed to be won. Escape Games Canada studied this, running rooms with a 4% and a 70% escape rate—and surprise, surprise, guests who won their game came back at rates high enough to infer causality. People like winning. We should focus on delivering a fun experience, not an absurd challenge.
5 minutes is a hard puzzle
There are a lot of zombie escape rooms out there. No, not zombie-themed! I mean owners who signed a personal guarantee on their lease (DON’T DO THAT!), aren’t making the big bucks they expected, want out, and are riding out the end of their 3 or 5 year lease without opening new games or up-keeping old ones. That’s bad.
Pay attention to when an escape room opened. If they opened in 2014 through early 2016, they’re probably successful because they were early adopters and have a ton of SEO and review momentum. Now there’s enough market saturation in most cities that you need to differentiate yourself—just to get any momentum at all. (This one was me.)

Start by showing pictures inside your rooms. It’ll be okay, I promise. There’s an ocean of difference between seeing and being there—that’s what immersives are all about. (The Man From Beyond)

Think about beginnings and endings. If you have a McGuffin, have a moment at the end of the game that allows players to use it. Give games climax and closure that goes beyond the game master bursting through the door—which, no matter how much I like the game master, shatters the experience. (This one was me, too. At least, I hope that’s what I said…)

How to create themed facilities and unified aesthetics (Andrew PReble, Escape my room)

Begin the onsite experience with a grand gesture (in their case, it’s the lobby).
Escape My Room had to back off some of their in-world branding in their marketing. It is indeed possible to be too immersive.
They do a complete guest walk-through from website to on-site to follow-up emails every 1-2 months, to ensure that everything is still flowing smoothly.
LEVEL-ONE SPOILER ABOUT THE LOBBY (Oh, how I love that there’s a spoiler about their lobby!)…Only about 50-70% of guests were picking up the phone. Since they added explicit instructions on the door, it’s more like 90%. For an experience designer interested in pushing boundaries, I hated hearing that, even with instructions, it’s not 100%. But it’s very hard to get any behavior at 100%.

Alternative lines of business (ariel rubin & juliana patel, Escape room in a box)

You really should sell more than just escape rooms, and they had a great list of scalable stuff, from selling take-home games in your lobby to partnering with museums and/or ClueKeeper (a crazy-cool app) to deliver large-scale puzzle adventures.
If you’re going to add on a puzzle/quest/interaction to an event like a wedding or party, KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID. The “stupid” tag refers not to you, but to them. Because your “players” are people who did not explicitly opt-in to a puzzle experience. They’re also probably drunk.
Ariel and Juliana proposed partnering with immersive theatre companies to expand your offerings, which caused my jaw to drop. The LA scene must be even bigger than I imagined. Meanwhile, I’m in Jamestown, and it’s friggin’ winter. I’d say if you’re in LA, NYC, or London, you can expect to sell tickets just by adding the “immersive theatre” label, but anywhere else? Prepare to make your audience.

Deep Dive: immersion (mark mummie & matt charles, Gratuitous sets)

Check out their youtube channel
Organic spaces don’t have corners. I’m not a fan of the indoors-turned-outdoor, but if you must, that’s good advice.
Don’t just research the history of your story. Research related film and instead focus on fulfilling the cinematic expectations of your guests. People don’t want a real lab; they want the CSI lab they saw on TV.

Note the lack of realistic fluorescent lighting, for example. (CSI Miami)

The average escape room they build totals 600 sqft.
Someone else cares when the Phillips Head Screw was invented! My people!!

While patented in 1932, the Phillips Head Screw wasn’t widespread until WWII. (Handcrafted drawers circa 2016, The Man From Beyond)

Lessons from playing

The first escape room to open in a city sets the tone for every company that follows. The Escape Game is well-known as one of the best in the industry, with its polished lobby, epic sets, attention to detail, and consistent customer service. So guess what? Aspiring owners copied that example. The result is a high-quality escape room market. (Maybe with the audiences we’re making, Houston’s about to become an epicenter for immersive-theatre escape rooms? But I doubt it. We were far from first—#20, actually.)

Decipher for yourself if we had a totally miserable time or not in “The Blind Pig.” Note the polished lobby, the designed photo. We never hold up signs, but who could resist these?

As more rooms embrace tech-driven locks, I’m encountering more confusion in games, where I don’t know what I opened, if I opened anything at all, or worse, what I did that made that thing over there just open. Feedback on a padlock is clear. The feedback on a tech interaction needs to be clear, too, or it muddles the whole experience. We need positive feedback and negative feedback. Frankly, the industry needs to make player-responsive, fully-automated light and sound effects standard—which demands some wicked coding. (We’re toying with packaging up ours for sale. Email me if you’re interested).
As games get more ambitious, designers need to get more careful. There were stories of injuries circulating at the conference. No matter how fantastic your idea, prioritize safe interactions.
I caught a glimpse of the scenic-arms race in the Nashville area. Sets like WOW. But sets without soul fall flat. Puzzles and story and characters give a space soul.
Escape rooms cannot escape the host interaction. You need a theatre director to step in and finish your design, and that probably means you’ll do better if you hire actors, too (unless they’re Equity, I swear they’re not more expensive). I am tired of having hosts apologize to me for “all this make-believe stuff.” WHAT DO YOU THINK I BOUGHT A TICKET FOR??? A PUZZLE ROOM??

What I’d like more of…

METRICS. Want to convince me that XYZ is a must-do for my escape room? Talk to me about your sales, or at least run some metrics on how often XYZ gets mentioned in your reviews. Convince me you’re doing better business because of XYZ.
NUMBERS. Let’s talk sales. Let’s talk material costs. Let’s talk about paying for labor. Let’s talk about how many people are working other full-time jobs or have an independent source of income—and aren’t yet living on their escape room business. I’ll start: we run a totally different (but still strange) business that happily doesn’t need our full attention, and that is frankly how we make Strange Bird work.
BUSINESS PRACTICALS. It’s clear escape rooms are beginning to fail because, like theatre companies, creatives enter the scene to create, not to run a business. Those are distinct skills. Where was the talk on marketing escape rooms? Or managing growth? Wouldn’t you love a panel of people talking about Certificate of Occupancy battles and code requirements in their respective cities? That’d be entertaining AF.
PUZZLES. Puzzle design was strangely absent, given the fact that puzzles are the heart of the genre. Where’s the panel of enthusiasts talking about their favorite and most dreaded puzzle types? Panel of designers discussing open-path versus linear games? What makes a fun puzzle, anyway? The industry can’t possibly get better at puzzles if we’re so obsessed with spoilers that we can’t talk about them. It’s an art form—and a lot more consequential than what type of screws you use.

Ultimately, it’s not the size that counts, but how you use it.

July 24, 2018July 24, 2018

When You’re the Star…

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.

Poor straight-laced me, I mean, them. (The Grand Paradise)

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.

Those who saw this profound production were indeed lucky (Sweet & Lucky)

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.

A bedroom worth exploring at Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return (Sante Fe)

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.

June 11, 2018February 1, 2019

Adapted versus Original Immersives

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.

Meet your new game master. (Mark Gattis as Mycroft Holmes)

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…

Adaptations can potentially sell more tickets
Adaptations give the audience grounding
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.

Haunting, in all the wrong ways. (Ghost: The Musical)

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!

Nothing will satisfy public demand more than an immersive dinner production of James Joyce’s short story published in 1914. (Production of “The Dead: 1904” (2017) in New York City).

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).

The blue skirt is pushing it. (Then She Fell)

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.

After her husband’s death, Bess Houdini performed magic, supported young magicians, and kept his legacy alive.

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.

March 27, 2018March 27, 2018

Escape Rooms Will Save the World!

Strange Bird has been receiving a lot of love lately from the escape room community, having recently won Room Escape Artist’s 2017 Golden Lock-in and Partly Wicked’s 2017 Room of the Year. I think it’s high-time I reciprocate that love with a true escape-room-enthusiast post.

Escape rooms could save the world. I mean that. Each time I play or observe a team playing, I sense a powerful force for good at work. Escape rooms present a radically new learning environment that has the potential to train us to become smarter, faster, more open, more complete human beings. And they’re hella fun, too—which every teacher knows reinforces learning. Win-win.

Here are some ways that playing escape rooms has super-powered me.

come together

Most job environments require working collaboratively. As I’ve learned too well, the bigger the thing, the more people are needed to get it done. That means communicating clearly, supporting each other, saying “no” firmly but kindly when something isn’t working (and not taking that “no” personally), keeping track of each other’s progress, and ultimately committing to the final glory being ours, not mine. We’re talking high-level, interpersonal skills here.

School does a dreadful job of preparing us for teamwork, as students fall into the roles of slackers slacking and feverish Hermiones doing all the work for the essential “A.” Active entertainment doesn’t help much either—in board games and bowling, usually you’re competing against each other for solo glory. And no one but the oddest duck competes in team sports outside the school years.

But an escape room is an accessible team sport. One does not win an escape room alone. Every member contributes. Even if you don’t get a big “Hero Moment,” you probably made more than one connection that moved your team forward. Just working a lock correctly is a big step!

Super-Hero Moment if you know how to operate one of these. (Hint: though it may look like a padlock, it is NOT a padlock.)

As long as you’re engaged, talking, and listening, you’re contributing. The teams that fail The Man From Beyond fail to talk (or listen) to each other. They’re trying to play the game solo, and that doesn’t work. And just how often in life does drama ensue because we failed to talk to each other? Play enough escape rooms, and you’ll soon think communication and teamwork are the default modes for success. Which (pro-tip) they are.

I’ve ALWAYS RELIED On The smartness of strangers

“Public ticket” escape rooms, popular in the US, sometimes bring groups of strangers together in the same game. While most people prefer to play with friends, we see a lot of people come through our doors who have only 1 friend cool enough to join them for a séance-themed escape room, so they end up being locked in the room with some strangers. That sounds horrifying.

Turns out it’s not. When people have something to do, and they really want to see it done, the awkwardness melts away. You’re on the same team—and it shows. Friend groups divide up. High fives ensue. You may not know their names, but that’s not really what matters, is it? As a game master, I’ve noticed that stranger bookings tend to be stronger teams: they’re much more likely to come with different backgrounds and life experiences, and so a wider gamut of skills are at the team’s disposal. Granted, it’s not rainbows 100% of the time, but I’m happy to say it is rainbows about 95% of the time. (At least in our game—ours is not one of the frustrating types).

I know it sounds cheesy, but I always leave mixed-company escape rooms with a stronger sense that I can work with anyone, that what we have in common is far greater than what we don’t, and that, as Muppets Take Manhattan puts it, “peoples is peoples.”

Kind of a big deal in a day-and-age where people supposedly won’t share a meal with those of an opposite political bent.

looking is not seeing (spoiler level 1)

The hardest puzzle in our game requires noticing the thing that’s been there the whole time—it actually comes up a lot in escape rooms. I know for a fact that if we took “the thing” and hid it in a drawer, every team would pay attention to it stat. That’s because we filter out things in our given environment all the time. We have limited bandwidth. Thanks to evolution, we only pay attention to the things that matter—threats, rewards—and the rest can just disappear from view.

But this is not always an advantage. Sometimes my focus is too narrow. Like a horse with blinders, I don’t see the whole system. How often have I tried to work around an object in the way, rather than stopping and moving it out of the way? I have always been especially guilty of environmental blindness (“Has that building always been there???”), and that habit can hold me back from making key discoveries. Escape rooms have me seeing the wider world a lot more, and this skill not only benefits the practicals of my life, but the poetry as well.

Sometimes I catch a player without a puzzle pacing around the room. There are still puzzles all over the place, if only he would see them. But looking is not seeing, and one does not see with one’s feet. Seeing requires a deliberate act.

power over your environment (spoiler level 1)

Arguably my favorite moment in the Man From Beyond doesn’t involve a puzzle “aha!” nor an actor-player interaction. There’s an item in the room that players activate. It repeats. It’s up to the players to decide if they still need the information or if they can de-activate it. De-activation requires: 1) noticing it; 2) realizing it’s annoying; 3) confirming that your team doesn’t need the information any more; 4) taking the steps to de-activate it. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but ultimately these steps culminate in asserting your power over your environment. You CAN change the world.

This ain’t no “solve.” This is a super-power. If we can really see things, the next step is we can improve things. Instance: why not turn off that TV nobody’s watching at the restaurant? And that’s just the beginning of the revolution, my friends.

Since when did every restaurant become a sports bar?

And yet, about 40% of teams require the game master to deactivate it (we have a lot of redundancy in our control room). They just don’t notice it, or they fail to realize they have a say in their environment. It’s like subconsciously they have hunkered down and accepted their fate of this item repeating endlessly, and it takes a conscious, powerful leader—the game master—to put them out of their misery. Not cool.

Power to the peoples.

you can’t give up

Escape rooms are tough. The vast majority of them require 100% completion of the puzzles to earn the “win” condition. When you get stuck in an escape room, you can’t rage quit. You can’t procrastinate. Someone in that room will eventually need to solve it, so you might as well roll up your sleeves and go at it again—don’t just walk away! In fact, now is the perfect time to call in a teammate who might see things differently. If you don’t get it, share it. Tell them what you know and what you don’t. After all, the most satisfying problems aren’t the easy ones to solve.

Double-check your work

We all have these stupid shackles called EGOS. Egos stop us short of becoming our better selves. We don’t want to improve, we don’t want to change, and we do NOT want to be wrong. Yet we are wrong all the freakin’ time.

That’s okay. Escape rooms taught me that. I can’t tell you how many dumb things I’ve done in an escape room—overseen something obvious, dropped the ball, messed up the math, worked the lock all wrong—and I’m not necessarily getting any better. Thankfully, someone usually corrects me in time. In fact, that’s what it means to be a team: we’ve got each other’s backs. Nowadays, if I suspect something should work when it doesn’t in an escape room, I double-check my work. Ego be damned: maybe I got it wrong. If that still fails, I introduce a new person to the problem to make sure it really and truly doesn’t work. Double-checking your work consistently will not only win you more escape rooms, it’ll get you in the habit of correcting mistakes and collaborating with others to make the Thing the best it can be.

Yeah…this used to be me. Despite appearances, it wasn’t a time-saving approach.

EMBODIMENT

Escape rooms, like other forms of immersive entertainment, give us our bodies back. Too often we chain ourselves to chairs to stare at screens—we might as well be those brains in vats. But escape rooms don’t come with seats. You’ll need your hands, feet, and knees to find the clues. If you’re lucky, the kind of puzzles will even engage your body, and you’ll find yourself running around, lifting, kneeling, twisting on tip-toe to solve a challenge. I think embodiment is why I love escape rooms but don’t dig puzzle hunts (whether at home or at a bar). The tactile experience adds immeasurable value.

I recently spent the perfect 24 hours in the NYC area: 5 Wits West Nyack, an immersive audio tour in Central Park (Her Long Black Hair), Komnata Quest’s Maze of Hakaina, Paradiso’s Memory Room, and my eighth visit to the McKittrick Hotel.

I did not want to yield my scroll quiver (Komnata Quest)

In that short period, I had never felt so deliciously alive, so present in my physical form. I felt…whole. Like a lion. Like I had just annihilated Cartesian dualism. I think this is the way I was meant to feel. But it was foreign. Maybe the last time was on the playground…? Hey! How come adults don’t have playgrounds??? Maybe that’s what immersive design should be about….

save the world? Really?

Okay, yeah, I’m being a bit optimistic. An average escape room doesn’t train people to do more than indiscriminately yell every number combination they can derive from the room. What’s worse: you’re often rewarded for guessing. That’s…not a habit that’s going to save the world.

But if more escape room designers take the guessing out of the game and focus on logical, rewarding design, then every player will walk away feeling stronger, smarter, more eager to work together, more ready to take on the world.

And the world needs taking on. (Good thing I’ve packed my scroll quiver.)

September 21, 2017February 1, 2019

The Safety Rant (with bonus waiver rant)

Two weeks ago, the Everything Immersive community was up in arms over a very serious safety infraction that resulted in injury to audience members and could have resulted in death. We were all understandably shaken by it.

No Proscenium reports about the incident here.
A harrowing first-hand account of what happened is here.
No Proscenium also talks about safety with leaders in the immersive haunt genre in their recent podcast (starting about 22:20) here.
Too long, didn’t listen: if you’re not an expert in the field of carpentry or aerial hi-jinks or waterboarding or what-have-you, consult with someone who is an expert to make sure your intended use in the show is as safe as possible. Also, TAKE THE TIME TO BUILD YOUR IMMERSIVE RIGHT. These things do not go up in a couple of months. Only sloppy and unsafe shows go up that quickly.

Since Immersology serves as a platform for the practice of immersive theatre—the big picture, if you will—I feel a need to weigh-in officially on the issue of safety, something we cannot take for granted in this genre.

Immersive designers: your audience is active. They may behave unpredictably. Your behavior to them is also unpredictable. You’re probably planning to do unusual and surprising things to them—that’s why this is fun. For fuck’s sake, make it safe. Really, really safe. That includes, but is not limited to…

No lifting, overturning, or throwing of furniture or other heavy objects
Creating clear safe spaces for the audience during vigorous action sequences
No audience-navigation in complete darkness
Poorly-lit stairs or other uneven surfaces feature glow-tape

First aid kits and fire extinguishers on-site (and every company member knows where they are)
No one locked in or locked up (handcuffs) without a user-operated safety release
All lighting instruments safety-cabled
Emergency lighting in case of power outage
Limited use of glass, and if there’s glass in the space, that space is monitored
No unfinished wood

I really don’t need to be immersed in splinters. Sand it, stain it, seal it FFS.

Clear rules of engagement for the audience
Proper advance warning for potentially awful stuff inside the show—whether that’s a strawberry cocktail (I’m allergic), forced enclosure in tight spaces, crawling, spanking, simulated drowning, etc.

These are the basics—and they apply to escape rooms, too, who in my experience are the more egregious violators of the above.

But there’s still a lot left off that list that we can do. Design “X” with an eye on that 0.01% chance that “X” fails catastrophically. If you plan to run a lot, you just might see that 0.01% come due. See what you can do to prevent that from ever happening.

But even with the smartest designers in the world, stuff can still go wrong. That’s where your well-trained actors can step in.

Calling Hold

Your actors are the enforcers of the rules and the guardians of the show. But they’re also committed to not breaking character, and they may want to carry on when something goes wrong. Break them of that instinct. Train them to call HOLD whenever they want to.

As creators, we think of HOLD as the worst thing possible, the nuclear option, the apocalyptic experience that breaks the magic. But I’ve been on the audience side of a very long hold once, and we didn’t care. We loved the show enough to wait in silence. I’ve also been on the actor side of a few holds, as escape rooms are rather notorious for something small but essential bringing the entire game to a halt. Really: your audience does not care. They’ll jump back in the moment you release them. In fact, they’ll recognize that you’re giving them the best service possible by addressing the problem, instead of letting the problem fester.

Get the whole cast comfortable with HOLD. Have a procedure for HOLD. Especially if a safety concern occurs, call HOLD.

Establishing safe space

Violent or dance-based immersives need to consider how they will train their audience to get out of the way—and stay out of the way. Third Rail Projects sits you in chairs, or they crawl up on set pieces you’re clearly not meant to access. The space of the McKittrick also has quality safe spaces: think of the step along the wall in the speakeasy during Banquo’s murder or the platform for spectators during the door dance. When it matters most, the actors and black masks make it quite clear that you are not to leave this space. Only an idiot would leave these spaces—although I’m sure someone has.

Black Masks

The cast of Sleep No More do an excellent job of crowd control and establishing spaces for their work, but it’s the Black Masks who really get the safety job done. They’re always there when it gets dicey: Lady Macduff’s murder, the prophecy rave, the banquet table you can’t join, the box you can’t crawl into.

If you’re building a sandbox show, consider if you need a few black masks to ensure safety both for audience and for actors. (They’re also essential to show-function: I definitely saw a black mask deliver Macbeth his missing pants once. Someone really wanted his pants that night).

Disney Keys

Ricky Brigante of Inside the Magic taught me on FB about the Disney Parks tiered-value system, known as the four keys. I think it expresses succinctly how actors should behave in immersives, and Strange Bird Immersive has since adopted the policy.

Not exactly the poster I’m hanging backstage, but you get the idea.

Here’s what I put in our actor code of conduct…

#1 – Safety. Safety must be the priority in every decision we make and must never be sacrificed for another key. Address directly any audience member’s safety concern, and if a safety issues arises, call HOLD until the issue is resolved.

#2 – Courtesy. Never forget that the audience is a paying customer, and you are performing a guest-service role. Stay respectful. When in conflict, courtesy should trump your character’s response (i.e. Do NOT get in a yelling match with an audience member, even if that’s “what your character would do”).

#3 – Show. Serve the story and play your character as much as you can—this is what they paid to be a part of. Do your absolute best not to break the world.

#4 – Efficiency. Try to keep on schedule. Use your time and resources wisely to maximize every guest’s experience.

Audience responsibility

But audience safety is not only up to the designers and actors. It is ultimately up to YOU, the audience member.

Yes, YOU are responsible for your safety, too.

I know you want to tail that actor, I know you want a hero moment, I know you’ll do anything to maximize your experience, but please, BE AWARE OF YOUR BODY.

That includes, but is not limited to…

Not launching your body in the path of an actor
Not launching your body in the path of an audience member
Not getting in the actor’s face (we’re human, after all, and don’t know you)
Generally being respectful of the actors. If you’re unsure how they want you to interact with them, default to passive-mode until they signal otherwise
Watching from a safe position or space
No lifting, overturning, or throwing of furniture or any other objects (FYI no escape room tapes a key to the back of a very heavy desk)
Taking care on stairs
Accepting your physical limits and not pushing yourself to a breaking point
Being ready to say NO anytime you don’t want to do something

You are the person who is in ultimate control of your safety. Please don’t “give yourself up” to these experiences so much that you never ask, “Am I safe doing this?”

Especially in the wild west of this new genre, you may enter an immersive space where the designers have NOT done any of the above. Be aware. Take care. And remember that you can always NOPE the fuck out of there.

Waiver 101

DISCLAIMER: the following is non-professional legal advice. This is the result of my personal research. Nothing can replace consulting a real contract lawyer. And FFS, stop copying the waivers of your peers.

Waivers: you’re probably doing it wrong. If you really want it to hold up in court, you need to give the plaintiff absolutely ZERO excuses for why they retained the right to sue you despite having signed your waiver.

Here’s how to do a proper waiver…

Keep it as short as possible, so people will read it. If I have to scroll on the iPad, it’s too long. Bullet point the assumed risks in the experience and state that I waive your liability. That’s all you need.
Keep it as clear as possible, so people understand it. That means no legalese.
Provide one waiver per person. If there’s any sort of “line” at the waiver stations, then there’s social pressure to sign it without reading it. (That pretty much means if you’re doing iPad waivers, you need an iPad for every single person who arrives at a given time. Not very feasible). No “one waiver per team” on a clipboard that gets passed around, either.
In the state of Texas, no waiver for anyone under the age of 18, whether signed by a guardian or not, will hold up in court. Just FYI. That’s a good reason to have that age limit.

But ultimately, waivers are not about that day in court. They are about preventing that day in court. I think they are an important step in the immersive process: they create a transitional moment for the audience to pause, realize that they’re about to start behaving very differently, and acknowledge that they will face certain risks. It’s that reminder that YOU are ultimately responsible for YOUR safety.

I’m sure we could all use that reminder before Sleep No More. WHERE THE HELL IS THEIR WAIVER???

What about actor safety?

I’ve only talked about audience safety so far, but actor safety is an even harder issue.

Read this WSJ report, if you haven’t already:

“Audience Behavior Makes Immersive Theatre Highly Unpredictable” (Dec 2016) (follow this FB link to get around their paywall)

It’s important to keep some perspective here. After some 140+ shows, I have not one story fit for this article of an audience member who crossed the line. But we are talking about that 0.01% chance, and it never hurts to be prepared.

Good news is the experience does filter out the craziest of the public via paid tickets. People don’t usually drop $40-200 just to molest actors. But sometimes it was the friend’s idea to go, and you end up with an audience member who wants to break the world and so poses a risk to your actors.

Plan for that risk. That includes, but is not limited to…

Designing experiences that don’t prompt seriously inappropriate behaviors (care in particular should be taken with 1-on-1s)
Hiring actors who know how to handle themselves and have the instinct to stand their ground or fly, rather than fight back
Training actors in HOLD and other audience-control tactics
Having doors for 1-on-1s that can lock out audiences outside but never lock in those inside
Establishing escape routes when an interaction goes south
Establishing a safe-word to use if an actor needs assistance of a company member

Again, Black Masks can provide crucial assistance, as they can protect actors and audience alike. (The trouble is, of course, paying for your glorified security team.)

None of these are perfect remedies, however. We won’t have a perfectly safe immersive until all the world agrees that we be respectful of each other when we interact, whether inside an imaginary world or not.

THe Stakes

Please, please don’t forget about safety. All we need is one negligent audience member inside one negligent show to bring the entire genre crashing down.

August 5, 2017January 31, 2019

100 Séances Later…

Tonight at 8 PM, Strange Bird Immersive celebrates its 100th performance of The Man From Beyond: Houdini Séance Escape Room.

Okay, so on the escape room side of things, established companies call this milestone “July.” We’re kind of just getting started. But for a regional theatre production to hit 100 shows is kind of a big deal. Like, there’s Broadway. And then there’s Silos Studio #213.

I am indebted to immersive theatre for this gift. With small audiences and a memorable, active experience driving word of mouth from 0 to 60, I am living in Houston what most actors can only dream of: performing in a long-running show. How cool is that? And I’m even being paid from ticket sales.

Here are some things I’ve learned along the way, both from the immersive theatre and the escape room sides of my brain.

100 IMMERSivE THEATRE SHOWS LATER…

There’s nothing like total confidence inside a show. Most plays I’ve done spend about 3 weeks in rehearsals for 16 performances—it’s fast. There’s all sorts of riches I can pay attention to when the routine of the performance comes naturally.
You’d think I’d have some set line readings by now. But every audience inspires new impulses, and every night I have new insight. And this ain’t even Shakespeare.
Performing doesn’t get old when your scene partner is brand-new, wide-eyed, and excited every time. I can’t speak to what it would be like to be stuck inside 100 shows of Sunday in the Park with George (my favorite musical), but I’m always eager for my next immersive show. It really is different every time.

So many possibilities… (A blank canvas in Sunday in the Park with George)

The reality of the moment is holier than the script. When in conflict, let reality win.
Every audience is perfect—whatever they give you is their truth. Respond to it.
Even if they avoid eye contact, even if they run away from you, don’t take it personally. That’s just them. Work with what happens.
It is so, so easy to fall in love in immersive theatre. I knew that was true from one side, but it’s true for the performer, too. There’s something in this work that accelerates intimacy and reveals souls. It’s magic.
If Meisner theory excites you, get thee to an immersive theatre. That’s where things will really take off.

100 Escape rooms Later…

People respond to things consistently. The behaviors we’ve seen are all very similar, which means you can successfully design for a particular response. This is great news for every experiential designer. It means you can iterate—even the slightest adjustment can change behavior. Instance: we have a very interesting box in the room, but lots of folks were missing seeing the key hole, to the point that I had to run a hint. We added a tiny handle on top of the box to suggest that it opens, and now that hint has disappeared. So if people are responding in a way you hate, you can, in fact, fix it.
Paper will last without lamination for at least 90 games. Only laminate it if it would be laminated in the world, please.
People don’t want to break your things. Desperate players at the ends of their ropes combined with a negligent game master are who break things.
Providing a hint deprives someone of a hero moment. Use only when necessary.
Providing a hint is your best tool for curbing player frustration, keeping the experience fun, and protecting the investment of your room. Use liberally.
Your immersive theatre verisimilitude is your escape room red herring. There are soooo many details I would add if doing so wouldn’t hurt the game. That sucks. It’s hard to do both.
In the current escape room climate, there is nothing you can do as a designer to earn the trust of your players. Players who are new to escape rooms are our best players: they quickly learn that they can trust the design to make sense. But I can easily identify my experienced player: he checks under every chair, he wants to disassemble framed photographs (instead of looking at them), he has an unhealthy fixation with the one 4-digit combo lock and will plug in any random number he can make up in the room until it opens.

If you’ve played a few escape rooms before, you know he’s actually behaving logically. I do the same thing when I play. Sometimes the clue trail is deficient or missing, wild guessing works or is even required, and a weird, twisted “escape room logic” prevails, where numbers under chairs unlock a treasure chest full of Cardan Grilles in the serial-killer basement. What is this, Monkey Island?

Adventure games didn’t make sense, either. And then the industry grew up.

Winning most escape rooms is not about being smart but about being methodically crazy. It’s NOT these players’ fault they don’t approach our room logically: they have no precedent for trusting a game designer. With any luck, they’ll leave realizing what a revelation it is to play a game that makes complete sense, and then demand it everywhere else they play. Right? Alternatively, it’s possible that escape rooms will ruin immersive theatre, creating hordes of people whose learned instinct in immersive environments is to turn over all the furniture instead of engaging with a story. A disconcerting but very real possibility. We’ll see what happens next.

but most of all…

Craft a detailed experience. People will notice. Asking why in every step of the design process, whether immersive theatre or escape room, isn’t just good art. It’s good business. Sure, your audience may not notice that all the antique items feature period-appropriate slotted screws, but they will certainly not be surprised to hear that that’s what you did. They sense the spirit of the details in every nook and cranny.

And that’s a spirit worth summoning 100 times.

July 21, 2017July 5, 2023

Hard Mode: Making an Immersive Theatre Escape Room

This is gonna be a long one, but an important one, so strap in.

It’s time to tackle escape rooms. I love them. Even when they have no story to tell, even when the set is an office, even when the clue-structure has gone AWOL, I love them. They get me off my butt doing something I’ve never done before.

Super-stoked and a bit sweaty after *Escape Games NYC*

I’ve made vows to immersive theatre, but a piece of my heart is with escape rooms. Everything Strange Bird Immersive will produce will be immersive theatre, but not everything we create will be an escape room. But our first outing, The Man From Beyond, belongs to both worlds, so today I want to look at the relationship between escape rooms and immersive theatre, and see what it takes for a production to be both.

Think of immersive theatre and escape rooms as siblings. They have more in common where it counts than they have differences. Both industries invite customers to take action inside a designed world. Both invite grown adults to play like kids again. Both use the buzzword “immersive” to sell the experience—and want to deliver on that, too. Together, we make up the new landscape of experiential entertainment.

But escape rooms own a LOT MORE LAND, guys.

Holy crap.

Immersive theatre creators, take note. Escape rooms have already achieved what we can only hope to do in the next ten years. They are the ones mapping the frontiers of what immersive entertainment can be. Like immersive theatre, escape games vary widely in budget and quality, but unlike immersive theatre, people outside of NYC and LA have actually heard of them, and some have even played them. Oh, and did I mention that they easily operate 15-30 times a week, make decent money as for-profit companies when well-managed, and run for years?

Granted, we have different end goals: one wants to give people a fun night of puzzling and the other, well, let’s just say that they never get asked by critics if they consider their work “art” or not. And yes, this may be a novelty bubble, and escape rooms may go the way of laser tag.

But holy crap.

what’s an escape room?

Escape rooms are much easier to define than immersive theatre—although they may not involve escaping, nor do they necessarily happen in a room.

An “escape-the-room” game puts a small team in a room (or series of rooms) and requires them to solve a series of puzzles/challenges/tasks in order to achieve their goal. They have the following features:

It’s on a deadline: an in-room clock counts down from 60 minutes. When time’s up, you lose.
It’s hard to do: to win, teams must complete 100% of the puzzles in the game. Puzzles range from complex ciphers involving a Welsh dictionary to rotating bicycle pedals attached to the wall to see what happens.
It’s important: most often the player objective is to escape the locked room, but sometimes teams need to steal a painting, find evidence of a murder, banish a ghost, etc.

Those of you trained in the Meisner acting technique may recognize these three characteristics as essential to the Independent Activity exercise. When you’re doing something on a deadline and it’s hard and it’s important, you have the key ingredients of drama. And that’s what escape rooms deliver: a dramatic, adrenaline-pumping experience where everything is heightened. Honestly, I go a little crazy under these conditions and inevitably end up in a shouting match with a directional lock. GREAT DRAMA.

Escape rooms may have started for puzzle people, by puzzle people, but they’ve rapidly grown into much more than that. They are an art form.

But can ESCAPE ROOMS be immersive theatre?

Absolutely. I include the escape room in my list of structures that immersive theatre creators work with. But even they are opting more often for sandboxes or dark rides than the more popular escape rooms, and escape room creators in their turn are just beginning to realize that, like it or not, they need the theatrical arts (at the very least, they need to consider sound, light, props and set design).

Despite the commonalities, it’s rare to find an immersive theatre escape room. Remember that tiny purple sliver in the Venn diagram? That’s tiny for a reason other than “we’re not interested in what the other one is doing.” An immersive theatre escape room is super-hard to do. Why? The generic requirements of immersive theatre (specifically: immersion and storytelling) conflict with the mechanics of the game. Boom. My thesis.

For those of you new to the genre, a typical escape room has an employee greet you at the door. He explains what an escape room is, assuages your fears, collects your waivers, and sometimes reads a story or plays a video that kicks off your game. He is not an actor. He then leaves the team alone in the game. With help from cameras and mics, a remote observer provides the team with hints and supervision.

But a few of these games go for something with more flair and involve actors, either outside or inside the room. This is where things start looking like immersive theatre.

To the best of my knowledge, there are only two games in the United States that advertise themselves as both an escape room and immersive theatre: Paradiso (New York City) and my work, The Man From Beyond: Houdini Séance Escape Room (Houston). You can safely assume the creators had the genre in mind when designing the experience and that those who know immersive theatre won’t leave disappointed.

I’m not certain why other games with actors aren’t marketing themselves similarly. Perhaps they’ve never heard of “immersive theatre,” or perhaps they know they’re light on story and don’t want to set up false expectations for anything more than a game. In Scott Nicholson’s survey of escape rooms in 2015 (ancient history for escape rooms, but this trend hasn’t changed much), he reported that 10% of games involved an actor. So actor-games are hard to find, but there are many more escape rooms with actors out there than the 2 who claim the immersive-theatre mantle.

So what does it take for an escape room with an actor to be immersive theatre?

Let’s look at the criteria that need to be met for immersive theatre…

Rule #2: the audience is active

I’ll start with Rule #2 because this is where escape room SHINE. Everyone is active in an escape room, on their feet exploring, observing, twisting, using their eyes, ears, hands, knees. This is what they came here to do.

A good wholesome dose of doing stuff (Escape the Room’s “The Home,” credit Benjamin Norman for The New York Times)

Escape rooms do a phenomenal job of making you feel special. You encounter something puzzling, you pursue it (don’t give up!), you have a flash of insight, execute it, and then trumpet: “I HAVE A KEY!!!” Whether you solved it solo or with teamwork, you’ve accomplished something real.

Well-designed escape rooms feature a variety of puzzle types, so the game rewards all sorts of behaviors and personality types. Immersive theatre tends to reward one kind of personality, whether that’s the empath (Third Rail), or the hyper-aggressive weasel (Punchdrunk). The things I do and become range more in escape rooms.

Escape rooms also deliver an individualized experience. Unless the puzzle flow is ferociously linear, people work on multiple puzzles at the same time. Like the best of immersive theatre, you’ll want to froth afterwards—to share a drink with your friends and swap stories of your individual experiences.

Rule #2 is actually the criterion that is hardest for theatre productions to meet, and escape rooms freakin’ nail this. Immersive theatre creators, pay attention. Think about game mechanics. Dare to make your audience more active. Rule #2 is what makes you both popular.

Rule #1: The world surrounds the audience, or “Immersion”

Escape rooms are certainly 360-degree spaces that you can touch, but I need a bit more world building than just “being in a room” to feel truly transported.

Most escape rooms feel like spaces designed for a game more than inhabited places. They often look a little empty. And there are good reasons for that…

1. Less stuff minimizes red herrings and streamlines puzzling.
2. Owners tend to be puzzle people, rather than set designers, artists, or theatre artists. Immersion, whether DIY or contracted out, costs money. Some owners also consider it non-essential, “nice to have,” but secondary to the puzzles. (For deep immersion, you need to design sets, puzzles, and story all at the same time).
3. People break things in escape rooms (especially in the ones that boast about their level of difficulty. Hard => frustration => destruction). The more stuff there is, the more stuff there is to break, which again, costs money.

There’s a thing in the business called “red herrings”—something that looks like a clue but isn’t. They can vary in degrees of evil from a book with pages circled in it in a room with number locks (most evil) to a chair with a lot number on the bottom (negligent) to a piece of art on the wall (fairly innocent). None of these are the clues you’re looking for. But how should you know better?

I’m pretty sure this film introduced me at a tender age to both “communism” and “red herring.” (Tim Curry in Clue)

Most escape room designers recognize that red herrings frustrate players and are not cool. And no matter what you do, players will always make up their own red herrings inside your room. So to streamline the puzzle experience, designers leave in only what’s relevant and kick out anything that’s extra. This leads to a sparse room that feels designed for a game, because it is.

Real spaces have stuff. LOADS OF IT. Imagine the escape room that would happen in your average American bathroom. It’d take 30 minutes just to correctly identify the puzzle. Compare it also to the deep décor in the McKittrick. How long would it take to find and solve just one puzzle in the fifth-floor hair-lock filing room? Because it’s not a game, but an experience, immersive theatre can go all out on décor in a way an escape room never can.

I recently played a game that went for immersive décor. In his introduction, the game master requested that we handle “the museum room” very gently. I’m sure this rule was instated retroactively, when they realized that the room as-designed couldn’t withstand the beating that escape rooms take. And even with the rule, the game master had to tell my team twice to get out of that room and stop searching in there. There was a lot to look at. How were we supposed to know there was nothing more to find in that space? But it was a beautiful room, totally befitting the absent-character who inhabited the space.

In that escape room, the immersive environment came in conflict with the mechanics of the game. Which should win?

I stand guilty of a similar sin. I took an immersive-theatre-design approach for our tarot reading room at Madame Daphne’s—it hosts a density of details.

Madame Daphne eyes the details in her tarot reading room

But I can only get away with it by explicitly telling players that you don’t have to remember anything in that room. And even with that rule, I still hear the occasional team talk at the start of the game about potential “clues” they found in the lobby. It’s a hard tightrope to walk.

But immersion goes beyond what you hang off the walls. There should be a deliberately-crafted logic to the space, evidence of human, or alien, or cat behavior that informs everything there. Nothing should be random—every item contributes to building the world.

The generic conventions of escape rooms make this exceptionally hard to do. We call it “escape room logic”—there are numbers on the back of these pillows, so let’s go put some iterations of these numbers into this lock that happens to be on this cupboard—wait, what? Who the hell lives in this apartment?!?

In a recent game I played at a high-quality company in the US, the immersion actually fooled me. I expected a device to work, like in Myst, and kept waiting for my team to do the thing that would inevitably give it power. Instead, I should have paid attention to what was sharpie-d on it and plugged it into a nearby lock. In a way, the absurd, not-a-thing-a-human-would-do escape rooms tropes stood out more in this game because the sets were so believable.

You have to jettison escape room logic for total immersion, and that isn’t easy to do. I predict that once the industry gets the décor thing figured out, this will be the next step. (For a good challenge to designers, read Scott Nicholson’s “Ask Why: Creating a Better Player Experience through Environmental Storytelling and Consistency in Escape Room Design“)

But even with all these hurdles, escape room creators are beginning to consider immersion an essential part of the experience, and I couldn’t agree more. Strange Bird Immersive has placed a bet that people want a unique experience much more than they want hard puzzles. We love puzzles, but we got into this business to deliver a potentially-transformative experience, with puzzles conceived as a means to that end. Every escape room advertises itself as a cinematic adventure in which you’re the star of a story. Shouldn’t the game itself make good on that promise? Good news is more and more companies are delivering on that promise every day, walking that tight-rope of deep immersion and clean gameplay.

rule #3: live performers telling a story

To be “theatre,” we need an actor. Some games use an in-room game-master to monitor and hint the players, but putting on a lab coat doesn’t make you an actor. There’s a difference between an in-character game master and an actor. Is the actor a pillar of the experience? Is there a character arc, and is this person advancing a story? Or could you replace the actor with cameras and a video screen and not have taken the soul out of the game?

Which brings us to story. Characters in theatre are there to progress a story. Story has a beginning, middle, and end—what’s happening changes. A scenario is not a story. I’m not certain where to draw the line, but “escape the zombie” doesn’t quite count. Granted, every team leaves an escape room with their story: “first we did X, which unlocked Y, which we paired with Z to get the key to Q, etc.” But immersive theatre delivers narratives more interesting than a list of actions taken. There needs to be more, a there there, whether that’s players uncovering a story from the past or a narrative journey that players experience for themselves. Real story in escape rooms is rare.

Because it’s hard! If the story is presented tangentially, the players will ignore it—the things must be solved! Integrating story into an escape room means making the solution to the puzzle require engagement with the story. You can’t solve it unless you pay attention to the story. That’s a damn high bar for your average escape room puzzle. I’m not sure even we achieve it.

I think an escape room is by its nature hostile to immersive theatre work. Everyone’s too frantic and focused on the puzzle in front of them to heed the actor, who is rarely the center of puzzle-attention. In the same way that people scan a letter to find “the tricky detail” instead of reading it, they tune out the actor until the actor’s “tricky detail” is needed. The actor is just another obstacle on the path to winning.

”Trapped in a Room With a Zombie” gets it: the actor is a literal obstacle to gameplay. The Zombie does NOT waste time giving us her character arc.

Despite these difficulties, I believe story is worth fighting for. Story is what can lift an entertaining night of puzzles into a transformative experience that unseats your soul. That is the aim of art, isn’t it?

Strange Bird decided back in 2015 that if we wanted to tell a story with actors, we had to do so outside of gameplay. Our actor moments function as cut-scenes and bookends: we offer a longer experience than the traditional 60 minutes of gaming, which frees us to deliver a complex narrative that doesn’t compete with the game for player attention (get a taste of the story in our new trailer). It’s not the wisest financial move—we can run far fewer games a day than our competitors—but it’s what the narrative needed, and I hope other companies try out a similar structure some day. It makes for a more complete experience.

But it is financially stupid.

room escape artist’s list

Lisa and David Spira over at Room Escape Artist are the juggernaut reviewers of escape rooms. They’ve played over 360 of them, and they’re also fans of immersive theatre.

David and Lisa Spira: Room Escape Artists, reviewers, and genuinely nice people. (Photo credit: Michael Zawadzki)

I asked them for rooms they consider to be immersive theatre experiences as well, and here is their list of games that meet their criteria:

“1) Have actors; 2) Are escape rooms; 3) For whatever reason I think they capture the immersive theatery je ne sais quoi”

Note that this list is only for rooms they have played, so it’s not comprehensive, but it’s a great place to start! (Updated February 11, 2018)

ATLANTA
Al Capone’s Speakeasy (Review)

HOUSTON
The Man From Beyond (Review)

NEW YORK
Accomplice (Reviews)—multiple games
Paradiso: The Escape Test (Review)
Paradiso: The Memory Room (Review)
The Sanatorium (Review)
SPECIAL SHOUT-OUT: RED (Review)—”not an escape room by any real definition. It’s an immersive game.” While it shouldn’t be confused for an escape room, RED doesn’t have any peers in the realm of immersive-theatre-games, so I couldn’t leave it off this list.

LOS ANGELES AREA
The Basement (Review)
The Basement’s The Study (Review)
The Nest (Review) Not considered by its creators as an escape room, but features light escape room-style elements
Zoe (Review)

PORTLAND AREA (BEAVERTON, OREGON)
Madame Neptune’s Voodoo Curse (Review)

TORONTO, CANADA
Escape Casa Loma (Review)

THE NETHERLANDS
The Girl’s Room (Review), “no actors in this one, but the tech made it feel like there was one.”
The Vault (Review)

CLOSED
Club Drosselmeyer in Boston (Review), “which is one of the best examples of escape room / immersive theater intermingling.” A sequel is rumored for this winter…
A Pirate’s Tale in Orlando (Review)

Go PLAY!

Unless you’re in LA or NYC (the current hubs), you probably don’t have any immersive theatre within a full-day’s drive of where you live. But chances are you do live in a town with an escape room—or twenty! And even if it’s missing a narrative, even if it’s not striving for immersion, an escape room always delivers an active experience.

Strange Bird Immersive decided to launch with an escape room, because Houstonians had actually heard of them. It’s our foot in the door. Escape rooms offer a major opportunity for introducing immersive work to wider audiences, getting folks addicted nationwide to experiential entertainment. Yes, it’s seriously hard to meld the two genres together in a way that doesn’t frustrate players nor shortchanges the story, but it’s not impossible.

We have a lot to learn from each other. I hope immersive theatre starts experimenting more with gaming elements—a wider range of engagement. And I hope the escape room industry in its turn will pivot towards what immersive theatre does so well—a transportive experience that delivers immersion and story—actor or no actor.