Immersology

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

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

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

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

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

DON’T UNDERSELL IT

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

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

DO DELIVER PRODUCTION VALUES

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

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

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

DO TEST EQUIPMENT

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

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

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

DO INVEST IN EQUIPMENT

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

DO CREATE FOR THE MEDIUM

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

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

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

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

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

DON’T PRETEND RECORDED VIDEO IS LIVE

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

DO JUSTIFY LIVE ENGAGEMENT

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

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

DON’T MUTE EVERYBODY, DO USE SPOTLIGHT

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

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

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

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

DON’T UNDERSCORE YOUR VIDEO

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

DO LOOK INTO THE CAMERA

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

DO HIGHER ENERGY

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

DOn’T USE PAUSES

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

DON’T FORGET TO BETA TEST

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

DO GET CREATIVE

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

Let’s give them something new!

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.