Backstory is not story

In my last post, I defined a scene. Read it now, if you haven’t done so. It gets at the heart of good writing in any genre.

Ready? Strap in, this one’s a rant.

I’ll be honest. While I encounter weak scenes all the time in novels, television, plays, and film, there’s something about immersive entertainment that more often loses sight of what makes a good story.

What’s up with that?

Perhaps creators rarely have backgrounds as writers. Perhaps the creators have to do so much else to mount these insane productions that they forget about the writing part (which by the way… writing should come first. Or you’ll have problems. Just sayin’). But look: I get it. Just making the thing exist requires puzzle/interaction designers, set designers, set builders, software gurus, hardware gurus, electricians, prop fabricators, stage managers/game masters, painters, etc. It’s easy to forget in this avalanche of skills to add a writer to the team at project conception. (But please don’t.)

This is a skill, too. If it’s not one of yours, hire it out before you build a single thing.

Perhaps the problem might be that we don’t often have actors (or if we do, not many actors) for whom we can write more traditional scenes. The genre demands non-traditional scene writing. We instead tell stories through environmental engagement, voice overs, video recordings, maybe an actor here and there engaging with the audience. It’s easy to let these scenes fall into the trap of being exposition or world-building, also known as: irredeemably boring. Avoid this trap.

Maybe there’s other reasons. But understanding doesn’t lead to forgiveness. We need to step up our writing game in this industry.

To sum up my thinking on bad writing in the quippiest quip…

Backstory is not story, gossip is not drama, and information is not interesting.

Let’s break it down…

Backstory is not story

What happened before I arrive to the story is not where it’s at, because that’s not where I’m at. Even in a mystery plot, you need stakes in the here and now, a reason that you need to solve the mystery and soon. “The killer is still on the loose—and inside this snowed-in house” sort of stakes.

The killer must always be about to strike again.

Backstory is usually the history of the character or the history of the location or any other events that happened before my arrival on the scene. None of these is exciting, because it’s not happening to me, or even in front of me. You want to give players things that they do and things that they see. If you give them things that they learn, they’ll feel more like students back in school.

Worse yet is when backstory isn’t even a discovery point, but told to me at the beginning by a game master. People’s eyes glaze over when you tell them facts, especially when they’re standing on the threshold of an adventure. Reduce the facts, up the surprise.

Never start your experience with backstory monologues. I recommend crafting an inciting incident in lieu of backstory. Move the past to the present as much as you can. If something bad happened to require the adventure, can players experience that bad thing, rather than being told about that bad thing?

With an inciting incident, you’ll probably discover you can get by with less backstory. Consider too if any remaining backstory may have a greater impact in the middle of the story, rather than at the crucial beginning, when we risk losing people forever.

Think about the story you want your audience to tell to their friends who weren’t there. The best stories will have them using the personal pronoun “I” or “we.”

“And then we caught her lying to us.” “And then we powered up the ship.” “And then we forged the will.”

VERSUS

“And then we read about the maid being unhappy.” “And then we learned why the pirate buried the treasure.” “And then we watched a video about the war between the Snarlofs and Boogatons.”

Let your audience be the subject and give them the very best verbs.

The temptation to write stories that only reveal “what happened here” is strong in immersive theatre and escape rooms, I think because they don’t require a character present, and it’s a very easy way to link puzzles and narrative together, with every engagement uncovering secrets of the past. But these stories only exist in the past. Avoid them. What’s happening now is the story. Write for the here and now.

Backstory is not story.

Gossip is not Drama

Discovering gossip about characters is not inherently exciting. I see a lot of gossip in environmental story-telling experiences, where I learn character details and scandals of their secret lives. But if that does no work in the story, it’s just gossip. It’s a dead fact. You can have “nice to know” bits, but if your entire experience is only “nice to know,” then you have no story.

Say I learn that Sandy is secretly dating Andy. Cool, cool. How does that change what I want? Does that change what they want?

Put that gossip to dramatic use in a scene where: people want things, but then the truth is revealed, and the revelation thwarts someone. That’s how you make a big reveal.

I hold Sleep No More as an example of using details in sets and scenes as plot support and not gossip. If you see what Malcolm types on the typewriter, or what he keeps in the drawer, or what’s depicted in that photograph he just found, you’ll learn about what’s happening in the story.

Those who lean over his shoulder get rewarded (Malcolm in *Sleep No More*)

Meow Wolf’s installations are most often not a good example of this. Sorry, no, I’m not going to visit a second time just because I didn’t read all the diary entries on that computer.

Gossip is not drama.

Information is not interesting

World-building gets wayyyyy too much love. Maybe because of the cultural impact of super-franchises like Marvel and Harry Potter, where the worlds run deep, people think it’s a marker of top-tier writing. But no one memorized the ship names in Star Wars until they fell in love with the movies.

Let’s just say you don’t read this one first.

You shouldn’t skip world-building, but it’s not the heart of the matter. I do not care about the metaphysical underpinnings for the pseudo-technology, nor about what happened on this planet 100 years ago. Unless you connect those facts to my objective (or another character’s objective), I do not care.

World-building fleshes things out, but scenes are what matter. And if you trot out your world-building, it’ll be about as exciting as backstory. It’s information without stakes.

And like backstory, not a breath should be wasted explaining your world to the audience. They must discover your clever little details on their own.

I speak from experience. In The Man From Beyond, the ghost has power through electrical currents, so everything it touches in the game has burn marks on it, and intense electrical sound effects accompany the ghost’s actions. We never point this out to the audience, though; we leave it to them to notice or not.

I also speak from future experience: we could spend two minutes in the upcoming Lucidity show explaining the neuroscience behind Dr. Newmark’s break-through technology that supports group-wide guaranteed lucid dreaming. But we won’t. We didn’t even write a first draft with that in. It’s boring. Nobody but the geekiest of Lore Boys care.

“WITNESS MEEEEEE knowing all the granular details of your WOOORLD!!!” (War Boys from *Mad Max: Fury Road*)

Don’t write for Lore Boys.

There will undoubtedly be information the players need to know. Divide up your world facts into need to know and nice to know. Embed nice to know as environmental discoveries for solo explorers. Embed your need to know information in bookend or bottlenecked scenes where everyone has something at stake.

Yep, even with need-to-know facts, we need to care, or we’ll tune out. Make opening scenes raise questions that are only answered later via dramatized exposition. Make the facts matter to character objectives. Exposition goes down easier when it comes with a good helping of drama: desire, conflict, surprise, change.

Oh my, I seem to have discovered this bureaucrat secretly worships a demon! Cool, cool. How does that impact what the character wants, or what I want? Does my team need to be super quiet now because Baphomet is always listening?

Make it matter. And please. Resist the temptation to tell me all about the demonology.

Baphomet was formalized by Victorian occultist Éliphas Lévi as a figure representing the absolute in symbolic form, an expression of occult natural forces that are explained by his magical theory of the Astral Light, the context of which…and I’ve already lost you, haven’t I?

Information is not interesting.

Writing is not facts

When writing your experiences (ideally at the start of project conception), remember the difference between writing that matters and writing that just… exists.

Backstory is not story, gossip is not drama, and information is not interesting.

Just because you have words doesn’t mean they do any work.

Scenes are the most powerful tool at your disposal and will be what people remember best. Create moments that thwart your players and characters, or that produce irrevocable change.

Start always with what happens to the audience in the here and now. Give them a narrative they want to tell afterwards… and you may not spend a penny on marketing ever again.

End rant.

August 28, 2017

Meisner for the Immersive Audience

Last week, I examined the Meisner technique for the immersive actor. I am particularly excited by the genre’s promise of a scene partner who has no script. Who is, by the way, you. You’re my scene partner.

In immersive theatre, the audience becomes actors. Think of them that way. When sold out, The Man From Beyond has a cast of 10. It’s precisely this radical reconception of the audience that energizes immersive theatre. Hell, I love it so much, I extended Meisner language to include the audience and enshrined it in the Strange Bird mission statement:

We’re in this together.

But if audiences are truly actors, then they are now facing the same pitfalls all actors do. The audience doesn’t need to worry about not listening—they are hearing the script for the first time—but they do need to overcome the bigger demon: feeling self-conscious.

Most folks associate interactive theatre with self-consciousness, and with good reason. Performances that pull an audience member on stage typically thrive off that person feeling awkward. The performer points up the audience member’s behavior, and the audience subsequently laughs at that person’s expense. This is the stuff of nightmares. This is the OPPOSITE of immersive theatre. Let’s run as far away from that kind of “interaction” as possible.

Lest we forget, there’s this thing called stage fright. We must take this phobia seriously.

Training audiences to be in-the-moment like actors are trained isn’t possible, but what we can do is design environments that engender real interaction. Armed with an understanding of the Meisner technique, designers can help slay self-consciousness for audience-actors, so they, too, can live truthfully in imaginary circumstances.

Here are my Meisner-inspired design principles for killing self-consciousness and eliciting truthful behaviors from your audience…

Make your world rich
Start your world as soon as possible
Limit audience watching audience
Stakes
Dialogue that matters
Really doing stuff
The element of surprise

Make your world rich

Children have no trouble with imaginative play. The entire world still feels novel to them, so behind a bush is as rich a secret hangout as the fanciest speakeasy with trick-wall entrance. But adults must preserve their dignity and need much more help to get them to a point of make-believe. And make no mistake, make-believe is our ultimate goal.

The less your audience has to imagine, the easier it is for them to believe. Immersive actors can help tremendously—they belong to the world, so interacting with them requires adopting their world—but production design also plays a major part. The more you can WOW your audience with a sense that they have been transported, the more they actually have been transported and can act in that world with ease. If you do your job right, they won’t even realize they’re making believe.

Do you have to have a big-budget build-out? No, of course not. While I don’t know of any immersive productions that have done so, you can ask your participants to use their imaginations like black box productions do, but you risk losing a few people in that leap. It’s just easier for me to behave like I’m in a hospital if it looks like a hospital.

Start your world as soon as possible

No matter what you do, there will always be an awkward transition from real world to imaginary world. The earlier your participants can pass through that transition, the easier it will be for them to believe.

I think escape rooms in particular suffer from starting their worlds way too late. You spend a good 15-20 minutes checking in, signing waivers, chatting up the gamemaster, hearing the rules of the game, getting the lock tutorial (oh lord), and then, THEN you cross the threshold to your exciting Egyptian Tomb adventure. No one really expects me to start acting like a cursed archaeologist now, do they? After treating it as a game for so long, I’d feel silly, and making that transition to play-acting would make me feel self-conscious. So I just don’t do it.

(Note that this is where actors inside the game can really help. Escape rooms with actors are the only times I’ve felt motivated to play along. Peer pressure can move mountains!)

I like aggressive worlds, worlds that bleed into the street if possible, with hosts who contribute to the make-believe instead of tearing it down. Think of the pre-show experience in Sleep No More, Then She Fell—even Accomplice. You may be waiting to enter the main attraction, but as for the world, you’re already there. You’re already playing.

”How would you like to die?” he asked me. ”In media res,” I said. (The Manderley Bar at the McKittrick Hotel, NYC)

Limit audience watching audience

There’s nothing worse than feeling the eyes of strangers—or worse, your friends—on you during imaginative play. You feel a little judged, and just like that, you’re hyper-aware of yourself, and all doors to transformation slam shut.

When I speak of The Man From Beyond to people who haven’t played yet, I often have to assuage fears of embarrassment. They don’t want to be actors in the traditional sense: they don’t want to be watched. So we should take great care that they are watched as little as possible. Disperse the audience. I’ll examine in more detail later how audience distribution affects the experience, but for now, I’ll just say that it matters a great deal.

There’s a reason 1-on-1’s feel special—with no one else watching, you’re more open to connect with the performer. You can even keep the content a secret to your grave. Case in point, I am still deliciously creeped out by the fact that a Then She Fell interaction I had (solo with two cast members) was in fact observed by another audience member via a secret hiding place (I found this out later from a friend—such a great psychological twist!). Knowing I was watched at the time would have changed everything.

The sandbox-style also does a good job of freeing folks from the gaze of others; if you don’t like the audience energy where you are, you can leave. Escape rooms and dark rides, however, involve audience groups with no hope of relief. Someone is almost always watching your interactions, and if that someone’s not playing along, your entire show is screwed. Third Rail Project shows always make me feel really uncomfortable with whatever it is I’m wearing—and that has nothing to do with my fashion choices.

Stakes

Not just your characters: the audience too needs stakes in the story they inhabit. Following the Meisner Independent Activity guidelines for drama, actors should be doing something “important, on a deadline, and difficult to do.” Importance is paramount here. If the audience thinks what’s happening around them matters, they’ll enter a true state of flow. Their awareness of themselves will slip away, as they laser-focus in pursuit of their goal. You’ll get some wonderful make-believe behaviors that way. But if the story lacks importance, you’ll wind up with a bunch of disengaged people reaching for their phones.

But that doesn’t mean the world should always be ending. Higher stakes do not translate to better results, as you can easily break the ceiling of believability. See: most escape rooms.

Threatening the explosion of the earth or even just my death if I fail is frankly beyond my imaginative pale (we all know the game master will just enter to console us), so you might as well have just skipped the stakes part entirely. Sometimes the best stakes aren’t the highest or even the most personal ones. We have stakes in other people all the time, so perhaps this is where your characters can step up.

Dialogue that matters

Meisner wants us to really listen. Your audience should be all ears in an immersive, and listening—or navigating to the right place to listen—should engross them. The script should reward those who listen, with every word providing insight into a part of the story. Avoid dialogue that is obtuse, or your audience will quickly learn that their efforts are for naught.

really Doing stuff

To reach a proper flow-state, where the knowledge of the self disappears, you need to be doing something. Like actors on stage, tasks and challenges—from holding up a mirror to deciphering the riddle inside a poem—offer a great path for audiences to forget themselves and engage in the story world.

Escape rooms are masterpieces of doing stuff, and fans get addicted to that sweet puzzle-flow-state. Third Rail Projects adores simple tasks as entry points to relationships, and even Sleep No More, often maligned for not giving the audience activity, packs a wallop of stuff happening in their one-on-ones to the point that you don’t have time to catch your breath.

So give your audience something to do other than “watch.” All the better if it’s important, on a deadline, and hard to do.

the element of surprise

Actors often perform from their heads instead of their guts; knowing what’s going to happen, they plot out their reactions ahead of time. The result is it feels fake—and we remain unmoved. Since rehearsal is unavoidable, Meisner offers tricks for actors to rely more on their gut, but immersive audiences don’t rehearse, and they have no lines to learn. If they go into the experience without any foreknowledge of the script, they are very likely to respond from their gut. And that’s a very good thing.

I don’t recommend reading too much about an immersive theatre production you plan to see. Read just enough for you to decide to buy a ticket, and then STOP. Don’t read the reviews, blogs, or facebook comments, or you could walk into a show like a cold, premeditated killer, acting cerebrally: “What’s a clever thing I could do or say in that situation to surprise them?” When the mind holds the reigns, we stay firmly on the ground. We can’t be transported.

Gut-response requires the element of surprise.

Creators get this. Immersive theatre productions typically say as little as possible about a show. The mystery entices you, and you go maybe not even knowing the themes of the piece until two-thirds of the way through, when it hits you like a hammer. That’s special indeed.

But creators can take surprise too far. Immersive theatre is uniquely visceral—you are there, participating in the world, and leave with a real memory—so we should appropriately warn audiences of potentially traumatic content within. We need to be responsible, to care for our audience, rather than to ambush them. After all…

Given what they’re doing, they’re actually very responsible about it.

But when are warnings needed? It’s hard for me to draw the line. I think The Man From Beyond capitalizes a great deal on thematic surprise, and taking away that surprise at the start would damage its power. Surprise has a huge payoff, but if it comes at too high a cost (trauma to a reasonable percentage of your guests—we’re not talking about that one guy who has a fear of taxidermied turkeys), the art is not worth the cost. We need to be responsible, first and foremost, and earn the trust of our audiences. The genre won’t get very far if our chief weapon is surprise.

Okay, so apparently hurricane stay-cations inspire a lot of meme generation in me. Apologies for that. (Luckily, Strange Bird is coming out just fine through Harvey.)

To wrap up…you know you’ve been self-conscious in an immersive before. It happens—and it’s awful. Think about why you got kicked out or perhaps why you never started the make-believe in the first place. Maybe I mentioned a reason above. If designers are in turn conscious of the scenarios that create it, they can reduce its likelihood and boost the chances of audiences acting truthfully and emerging transformed. Just as Meisner would have wanted it.

May 4, 2017February 1, 2019

Breaking the Rules: Sleep No More

99.9% of audiences don’t want to break the rules. But sometimes people go rogue, or more commonly, someone makes a mistake, and when a rule gets violated, the entire experience can break.

(See my post on the importance of rules in immersive theatre here.)

RULES FOR PUNCHDRUNK’S SLEEP NO MORE (NYC)

No talking
No cellphone use
Follow the guidance of the black masks
Wear your mask the entire time

Simple. Right? And yet I will hear people talking to their friends, flipping their masks up, or fiddling on their phones in the stairwell (which despite appearances is the highest trafficked area in the entire McKittrick). I WILL SHUSH YOU. If more than 1% of the audience committed these behaviors, I’d stop going. It’s no longer the experience it was designed to be.

I know it’s uncomfortable and sweaty. DEAL WITH IT.

No mask? No Mask!

The most unusual rule on this list is “to wear your mask the entire time.” While Punchdrunk’s custom-made bautas do wonderful artistic work (empowering the audience with anonymity, making the otherwise dopey-looking audience look spooky), their primary purpose is practical. Given the show’s large real estate and free-roam structure, audiences need to tell at a glance who’s a performer worth pursuing and who’s an audience member just screwing around.

At one memorable performance, my close friend earned the Malcolm one-on-one. He removed her mask, as in all SNM one-on-ones, to facilitate a more intimate connection. But he had gotten behind in the scene, and when the bell tolled Duncan’s death (Malcolm’s cue to run), he bolted out of there even faster than usual.

He forgot to return her mask.

She bolted out of there, too, tailing Malcolm down to the mezzanine. She arrived but didn’t realize she had no mask, and there was no way for her to get it back behind the locked door set on the fourth floor. Luckily a black mask pulled her aside, pointed out the problem, and asked her to wait. She sat on the couch and waited for her new mask.

Now I advise all of my friends to dress distinctively for immersives. Bold, dressy clothing tends to get the actor’s attention. Plus the performers can quickly confirm that it’s you that’s still following them.

Sporting my SNM uniform (center): no one can resist the red dress paired with running boots.

As my interestingly-attired friend sat on that couch without her mask, the audience started noticing her, and a small crowd formed. Unsurprisingly, she felt very self-conscious and did her best to look uninteresting. Which only made her more interesting. For some guests that night, she was a performer. What story of loss or acceptance did they see in her profound stillness?

The mistake wasn’t her fault, and it didn’t take long to correct. But within five minutes, the show broke because of a missing mask. Keep your mask on, please.

At New Year’s Eve 2014, the McKittrick spray-painted their typically white masks gold. A nice aesthetic touch, but practically it was a disaster. The gold didn’t contrast well enough in the dark for me to tell who matters at a distance. And when you’re on the actor-hunt, every second counts. Good designers know these details matter.

I am uncertain that a free-roam immersive can function smoothly without a means to distinguish audience from performers. I could be wrong. Maybe it’s not that hard to tell: audiences tend to be pretty boring. I hear that Speakeasy in San Francisco doesn’t make any distinction, and they even encourage the audience to dress in the time period. I look forward to a trip out there where I’ll wear my white beaded flapper dress, style my hair in bobbish curls, and fool the hell out of everyone.

No talking?

After (only) seven visits, I am still uncertain if Sleep No More wants me to hew religiously to the no-talking rule. It’s definitely a clear requirement out in the open world of the hotel. But what about in the locked door one-on-ones?

Most of the one-on-ones scripts don’t invite any response from you, but a few of them do present the possibility for you to talk.

Light spoilers ahead. I am often near Malcolm at the right time (or perhaps I’m subconsciously addicted to his wall slams), so I’ve won his one-on-one four times. Malcolm asks “Who are you?” Seems like he’s asking a question, right? I’ve offered four different actors different responses: Donalbain (my favorite), the Raven Queen, “never more.” In all of these Malcolm fails to acknowledge my response, and he never plays back in turn. In fact, I think he just slams me harder. Once I even filled out his line “Me thought I heard a voice cry” with “Sleep no more! Macbeth doth murder sleep!” (Okay, that was just pure cheek). From none of the actors, did I get a clear behavioral signal that he wanted me to answer his question.

But then why ask the question? This rule has me very confused! I’ve recently stopped answering Malcolm and focused on enjoying the ride instead. I think he prefers it that way. I think, even with the door locked and your mask off, Punchdrunk wants you to stay silent. The performer is the one showing you incredible things, after all, and (as witnessed above) he’s got a schedule to keep.

While we may like exceptions to rules in life, designing for a little exception in an immersive experience will only sow audience confusion and lead to behaviors you didn’t intend.

(See: Breaking the Rules: Third Rail Projects for more).