Author: HER Cooper

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Iterating Interactions

A little over a year ago, Strange Bird Immersive opened The Strange Secret of Mr. Adrian Rook, a virtual immersive mystery where teams of eight visited six different strange tenants at Strange Bird and uncovered the secret of the missing secretary to the Raven Queen. (It’s closed now—thank you to every guest who joined us.)

We never planned to run a show like this, but the coronavirus had other plans. A one month run turned into eight. Given the intimacy of immersive theatre, we chose to keep The Man From Beyond closed until April 10, when our performers were fully vaccinated. We would otherwise have had zero income for thirteen months—and thirteen rent bills. Strange Secret changed that and changed the spirit of the time, too. Even in the bubbles of our separate spaces, we were connecting with people again.

Left-to-right, top-to-bottom: Amanda Marie Parker as Vivian Mae, Lexie Jackson as Dr. Newmark, J. Cameron Cooper as Brendan O’Neill, Bradley Winkler as Professor Hazard, Haley E. R. Cooper as Madame Daphne, Wesley Whitson as Adrian Rook.

Looking back on it, Strange Secret reinforced a very important lesson for me: iterate your interactions.

iterating puzzles

A company culture of iteration is one of Strange Bird’s super-powers. We keep tweaking things, until they hit that sweet spot of challenging but surmountable.

It’s a given in the escape room community that you need to test your puzzles. Your puzzles are always harder than you think. You can never fully anticipate how people will respond.

There are many stages of iteration. We go through alpha testing (internal to the team), then beta tests (invited), then previews (public), and then there’s the long tail of being “open” but still watching and tweaking. The first three months of a new experience are very active in iteration, then it settles down at about six months, we’ve found. But The Man From Beyond opened over 4 years ago, and I recently changed the size of a paper clue by 25%, and it’s currently performing better.

We never stop iterating our puzzles.

interactions are puzzles

But what about questions to the players, or calls to engagement—moments that aren’t explicitly puzzles? You should iterate those, too.

People staring blankly at you when you ask a question? Probably this isn’t the response you had in mind. Just like an under-clued puzzle that’s causing frustration, this interaction is broken. So fix it!

Vivian Mae’s Secrets

At the opening to Strange Secret of Mr. Adrian Rook, guests meet Vivian Mae, proprietress of Definitely Not a Speakeasy. She has a collection of secrets customers offer her that she keeps in bottles.

Definitely Not a Speakeasy is…definitely a speakeasy. Surprise!

We knew we wanted a “secret-themed” engagement with the audience, so in our initial draft, Vivian Mae opened by asking one guest to share a secret as tribute for entry. Here’s that script:

But I do ask one last task of people who come through my door
Before I pour them a drink,
And that is…share a secret with me. 
That’s what a Speakeasy is all about, of course,
Sharing secrets.

So I would ask a secret from someone here,
And in return, I’ll share a secret of my own.
An even trade. 
What better way to get to know one another?

Perhaps the sort of thing you wouldn’t post on social media.
But true, nonetheless…? 
Who has one?

We wrote, rehearsed, and built the show in about two weeks before getting it in front of a beta audience. (Speed being of the essence in the pandemic.) This engagement went okay in the beta, but I got feedback that opening the show with an engagement so intimate was challenging. When I looked at it, I saw this was the most challenging engagement of the whole show.

So we moved the question to the end of Vivian Mae’s scene, when she has built more trust and has shared examples of other little secrets. We also changed the text to suggest easy secrets, to help coax folks.

Your turn.
Does anyone here have a secret you’d like to share?
It can be a small one. 
No need to turn your hair into a feather or anything!
A simple secret will do. 
What better way to get to know one another?
Perhaps the sort of thing you wouldn’t post on social media.
But true, nonetheless…? 
Something surprising about yourself,
The website you visited earlier today,
Your secret ambition.
Who has a secret?

The engagement again went okay in our next set of previews. I know we had seasoned immersive theatre folks present (always a risk with early testing, that you attract experts), and they often enjoy taking the spotlight.

Then we opened to general audiences.

We didn’t have the option to film our other groups (permission and all that!), so we asked each performer to report back to us on how groups were engaging. Two public shows in, and ten groups later, Amanda Marie Parker, playing Vivian Mae, was reporting that 20% of groups offered a secret, and while it often made for a very memorable moment for that group, the other 80% of groups stared awkwardly at her.

That’s way too many groups. And not fun for our actress, either. Interactions shouldn’t be like pulling teeth. I’d have changed that interaction if it failed for 1 out of 5 groups. 4 out of 5 was insanely broken.

Why it didn’t work

I have some theories.

The format of the show wasn’t kind to this engagement. There’s a group of 7 other people—some of whom you may not know—watching. Due to the virtual format, every engagement in Strange Secret felt like stepping into a spotlight more than we’d like. (Speaking over Zoom feels like that in general, which is really problematic). It’s possible such a question would work better in a one-on-one interaction between character and player, so that the player doesn’t feel the pressure to entertain their friends and can stay fully anonymous, too. I also think in-person this may have worked better. Everyone hanging out on their feet has a more casual feel than the performative Zoom boxes.

Who wants to take the mic in this mess, seriously? Zoom is a relentlessly self-conscious format.

I’d also categorize this level of question as “hard”—it requires on-the-spot storytelling. You have to dig deep into your personal history. People probably have more dark secrets than fun secrets, and those are much harder to share. I really should have tested this question better—I don’t really have one to share myself. That alone should have told me something.

Vivian Mae also opens the show. By the time groups reach Madame Daphne (the fifth character), they are more comfortable engaging. Starting with a hard-mode engagement turns people off before things even get going. Given that we couldn’t move her place in the show order, we needed a softball interaction.

EASIER ENGAGEMENTS

So in the few days between performances, we rewrote a chunk of Vivian Mae. From our experience, softball engagements are more “yes/no” or easy personal recall. Third Rail Projects builds their engagements on yes/no and easy personal recall—the kinds of questions where you can answer without having to think about it. “How old were you when you first fell in love?” is approachable. And impactful.

I’ll never forget you, Alice. (Third Rail Projects’ late, great “Then She Fell”)

To get that softball engagement, we turned a simple script for our actor into a much more complicated one. The crux of it was two questions:

NAME, have you ever kept a secret from someone? [She engages with them.]

NAME, have you ever shared a secret with someone? [She engages with them.]

Note how now she cold-calls individuals with these questions, looking for someone she deems as present. While we eschew cold-calling in The Man From Beyond, we discovered that Zoom needs something different. Cold-calling allows for smoother interaction in the hyper-self-conscious format, so we changed up our house rules. We still wouldn’t cold-call on a more complex engagement, but for something approachable, we would do it.

Together with Amanda, we created a flowchart for how the conversation in this section would go.

She naturally deviated from this flowchart as conversation blossomed, but we wanted to have an idea of the conversational spine. The bold track is what we deemed the most likely responses.

We wrote and rehearsed this change in between performances. And then? We asked her to debut the change with a critic from The New York Times.

It worked. This version became canon. And for extra bonus points, it’s a better engagement from a thematic point-of-view, too, as our hero character must choose whether to keep his secret or not.

Note that we rewrote the interaction twice. Sometimes you have to keep tweaking until you hit the sweet spot. (Puzzle still too hard? Sorry, yes, you do need to add yet more clue trail. It’s not as obvious as it feels, I promise.)

Empower your performers

None of this would have been possible if Amanda hadn’t spoken up. At our end of year party, she earned the “Bravest Performance” award, because it takes courage to speak up to the writers and say, “Your script isn’t working.”

Too often I witness powerless game masters or performers who feel stuck. They can’t fix it themselves, they’re not allowed, and reporting it to their boss (the writer/designer) often won’t change anything either. Or worse, they worry about their job security if they do report it.

I am proud not just of Amanda, but that Strange Bird has created an atmosphere where egos are not at stake. To create experiences that work, you need to acknowledge what is failing—and fix it. And if you are here for the ego trip? In the long run, fixing things will set you up for greater praise anyway. Just saying.

Interactive scripts need more work-shopping than traditional scripts. Like with puzzles, you need lots of players engaging to get a body of knowledge on whether something works or not. Test, watch, iterate, repeat.

Note how you never leave the cycle.
The right questions

Here’s another example of an iterated interaction. When we first opened The Man From Beyond, in a moment of heightened tension, Madame Daphne asks the team,

“Can you keep a secret?”

Brittney Jones as Madame Daphne

About 80% of teams would concur—great. But 20% would crack some joke, “Well, Susy sure can’t, she’s such a gossip!” etc. Ha. Ha.

Again, we have a group format, which can inspire wanna-be comedians. Maybe if this question were asked in a one-on-one, it’d perform better.

Jokes were the last thing we wanted in this moment, so we changed the question to:

“I will need you to keep a secret. Will you please do this for me?“

The comedians disappeared.

This question makes it a personal ask from the character. Everyone likes Daphne, even if they don’t trust her, and she now receives only sincere assent with this question.

Simple change, big impact.

Iteration is life

At the Reality Escape Convention, I heard the question pop up, “So when do you stop testing? I said, “Never.”

People are creative. The more people engage, the more you learn, the more you can refine your interactions, so that every guest has the best experience. If you’re in the business of interaction, whether that’s immersive theatre or immersive gaming or maybe both, iteration is your ticket to a golden experience.

Every part of your experience can be played with. Guests looking bored at the beginning? Iterate your game master introduction. Have a rule that’s being ignored? Iterate the presentation of the rule, or the wording. From the kinds of emails we send to the arrival time for guests, from the map to our location to the losing sequence, we’ve played with all of these things. Play around until you find what works.

I’m dissuaded from making pop-up experiences myself, because I know that it takes time to get golden. But even with a limited run you can iterate, if a better experience is something you value (rather than say, sheer experimentation, which is a viable value). Ask your performers to report back to you, and be ready to make quick changes.

You need to have a company culture of iteration.

And it usually doesn’t require a major rewrite. Quite often a tiny tweak will do wonders. So let’s tweak it out!

Immersive artists at work.
Bonus photos

You made it to the end of the post—congratulations! I know, I do go on. As a reward, here are some fun behind-the-scenes, zoomed-in and zoomed-out photos from The Strange Secret of Mr. Adrian Rook.

Vivian Mae inside Definitely Not A Speakeasy. Gotta love peel and stick brick.
Dr. Newmark in her lab, which ironically looks less messy zoomed out.
The truth about Whiskey & Welding’s set? It was at the Coopers’ other (top secret) business, BottleMark. We don’t usually stock whiskey there, but those were weird times.
Professor Hazard’s studio at the School of Accidental Photography…is a kitchen.
Madame Daphne inside her Tarot Reading Room. Poor Walter got kicked out of the frame.
Adrian Rook in the Office of the Raven Queen, sporting two computers, wires and buttons, a glass of brandy, and a step stool that is crucial to the magic.

Zoom magic is a bit of a mess!

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Bookends & Bottlenecks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ACTOR VS THE PADLOCK: AND THE PADLOCK WINS

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

In the typical escape room, the adventure is…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s define our terms.

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

Bookends support the whole experience.

Bottlenecks. When there’s only one puzzle that can be solved at that time. Every game ends in a bottleneck, and often a room (before another room opens up) also ends in a bottleneck. Bottlenecks are moments of undivided player attention: use these moments for your best puzzles, your not-to-be-missed magic, and for story-telling beats. (Bottlenecks are a useful technique outside of storytelling. I advocate using bottlenecks for your coolest effects so everyone will see them, or again, people will play over them!)

Unlike in traffic, bottlenecks are a neutral tool in game design, to be used for good or evil.
What it looks like

I’ll cover in detail how Strange Bird likes to make experience flow maps in another post, but here’s a simplified visual of bookends and bottlenecks in a 2-room, 6-puzzle experience.

Bookends Can be longer

Every escape room has bookends. Usually the Game Master greets you, teaches you the rules, and plays a video or reads the set-up for your adventure. This is Act 1 and covers the inciting incident—what spurred you into the adventure in the first place. Then when you win, the Game Master opens the door and congratulates you, asks you about your adventure, takes a team photo (Act 5). These moments happen off the game clock, so everyone pays attention easily enough.

Note that a fair amount of your visit at the escape room is spent in these preambles and conclusions, probably 10 minutes or more on both ends.

Now imagine if you will, what happens when Act 1 and Act 5 are within your immersive world. When there are no puzzles to solve, you have full player attention. You’re already spending time on bookends. Use it in the adventure!

But once she turns over that hourglass, I’m really not interested in her backstory anymore.

The bookends will carry most of your dedicated story minutes. Deliver an inciting incident—something surprising that spurs the players to take action. Then deliver an in-world conclusion that rewards them for their efforts. Let them see how the world is better now. You can still have your GM host them in and out, but it’ll be a richer experience when you begin and end inside the world.

Because these moments are explicitly off-the-clock, you can take your time. In The Man From Beyond, greeting at the door to start of game clock runs about 25 minutes. The conclusion runs about 15 minutes. But hey, we’re theatre people—you don’t have to indulge in time like that! You can do bookends that set-up and end the story that only last two minutes each. Or even thirty seconds. Point is: the time allotted to your bookends can vary widely and be successful at any length. Just have them!

Bottlenecks must be shorter

Designing story beats at bottlenecks is trickier. You’ll need to first identify where your bottlenecks are in your puzzle flow. Also ask the question, do the players know they are at a bottleneck? You’ll be most successful at gaining attention if the players also have a clear sense that they can’t yet advance.

Look for the moments when there’s only one puzzle available to solve, and then insert your storytelling beat, only after which, give the team the ability to advance.

Don’t give them a key at the start of your speech.

The most likely bottleneck is right before the players enter a new room. Make the last puzzle unlock a story beat, then give them access to the new room.

Do not deliver a story beat at the entrance to a brand new room! I see this all the time, and even I play over it. There’s so much new stuff to explore!

You can also design bottlenecks within a room, although it’s trickier to signal to players there’s nothing more available at that moment. But it can be done (we do it).

Story beats at bottlenecks are on the game clock, so even without any puzzles available, they still make players anxious. Limit these beats to 2 minutes or less. Do not go over 2 minutes, or you will lose player attention.

Can you stop the clock at a bottleneck, so players relax? Yes, you could—our Act 4 is all scenes and gameplay outside of clock time—but remember, it’s hard to communicate anything in the middle of a game. I still wouldn’t go over 2 minutes.

Think of bottlenecks as “cut scenes.” No video gamer enjoys long cut scenes, but they also don’t want to get rid of them, either. They crave the surprise, the turn, the new stakes to the adventure.

We got it wrong, we learned

We learned the “Bookends & Bottleneck” principle the hard way. While designing The Man From Beyond, the theory was in its infancy, and we did not rigorously apply the theory to every story beat. We have one moment that is not at a proper bottleneck in the game play, and naturally, some players play over it.

When we saw that behavior, we dimmed the lighting dramatically to try to drive player attention, which I am happy to report, has helped! But it’s not 100% attention like at our more rigorous bottlenecks. But lighting is one way you can patch your structure. Just don’t be surprised if someone keeps solving in the dark.

Photo of the player who keeps playing.

Our next game Lucidity is even more rigorously structured with Bookends & Bottlenecks. In development, when we realized we had a huge WOW puzzle on our hands that wasn’t at a bottleneck? We restructured.

Beyond Escape Rooms

This technique serves more than escape rooms. It works for any experience design where groups take different tracks or otherwise divide their attention from the story to other matters. Think about how Sleep No More funnels everyone through the same beginning and ending and also cleverly bottlenecks people at the banquet and the rave (the most essential scenes).

More

You can watch our analysis of Bookends & Bottlenecks in more detail at our conference talk at the Immersive Design Summit in 2019, “When Game and Theatre Collide.” (Bookends & Bottlenecks start at 19:30).

I think this is the greatest physical distance between Cameron and me registered in 2019.

Note that the talk is full of structure spoilers. David Spira of Room Escape Artist told us to never spoil like that again, so…you’ve been warned.

I’ll revisit the B&B concept in future posts on mapping puzzle flows and in story-telling techniques (what do you do at those bookends and bottlenecks, anyway?), and probably a few other places. It’s foundational.

An immersive theatre sandwich…?

Critics have called our game “an immersive theatre sandwich,” where there’s a game in the middle, and the theatrical bookends are the bread that hold it all together. But when you consider bottlenecks, perhaps it is more like a layer cake…? Yeah, like crust is the inciting incident, the mousse layers are the beats and turns, the icing on top the conclusion, and the moist cake in-between are all the puzzles that escalate the action.

That’s a pretty sweet game you got there.

Any way you slice it, it’s a more filling experience when there’s a story. You just have to build the cake right.

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Hints are not Clues

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

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

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

Words, words, words.

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

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

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

DEFINITIONS

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHY BE RIGOROUS?

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

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

Stop sending in the First Aid Kit for every team!

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

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

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

AIM FOR ZERO HINTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moving past “THe CHALLENGE”

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

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

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

Fun was had at Cross Roads’s Fun House.

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

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

WE CAN DO IT!

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

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

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

RECON

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

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

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Tail Risks: Escape Rooms vs. ERCOT

Following the winter power crisis that swept through Texas and forced my family to flee my powerless, waterless home for four nights, I have been thinking a lot about tail risks.

I would say any good immersive designer needs to think about tail risks, but really any good business owner needs to consider them. You offer a thing to other people, you invite tail risks.

A tail risk is a term I’m co-opting from finance. Event probability follows a bell curve, some events being extremely probable to happen for your guests, but along the “long tail” of the curve lie events that are unlikely to happen. But still possible. The tails pose a risk.

Alas, this is not a post about the rare awesome things, but boy are they our everything.

Since the first meetings of Strange Bird Immersive, our creative team has been obsessed with tail risks. We’ve protected against it in the design phase, and when issues arise in the execution of the design, as they inevitably do, we prep to mitigate the negative risks so they have minimal impact.

Our creative partner Nathan Walton, lesser known to the public than Cameron and I but no less essential, taught me a great deal about tail risks. He’s cautious. “Sure, it’s unlikely to go wrong, but when it does go wrong, just how bad is it? Visualize how bad it is,” he says. If it’s bad…we need a re-design or a fail-safe Plan B. Nathan’s a risk exposure expert. I love him for this (and many other reasons).

When you hit the fourth stage, you redesign. The third stage, well, you may try to risk it.

We learned this lesson the hard way back in August. Thanks to spotty internet, we took the risk to have Professor Hazard in The Strange Secret of Mr. Adrian Rook host via LTE hotspot rather than deploy the recorded video/understudy solution (our Plan B). We tested the connection ahead of time, and it seemed good enough. If we discovered it failed with the first group that night, we could then deploy Plan B. Trouble was, the first group he hosted was a bunch of critics from four different media outlets, and…his connection failed.

High impact, indeed! I didn’t properly visualize. We’re internet paranoid now, but we can never fix that group’s experience, and that’s not cool.

Professor Hazard (played by Bradley Winkler), founder of the School of Accidental Photography, is not-to-be-missed in The Strange Secret of Mr. Adrian Rook.

There are two types of tail risks to consider: experiential and existential. Let’s dive in.

experiential tail risk

An experiential tail risk is where something really unlikely happens, and it impacts the guest experience. Their level of fun goes down.

Every business has some tail risk—like, how bad is it when a customer doesn’t like the service? When an employee doesn’t show up? When we run out of sweet potato fries? These are common.

But the more you invite your guests to act, the more risk you take on. Immersive entertainment, especially escape rooms, are all about inviting you to act. Humans are wild, original creatures. There’s going to be a wider range of behavior on display, say, then you’ll see running a movie theatre, so the list of tail risks is simply much longer.

And if you run a thing over 500 hundred times, you’re likely to see that 1% chance occurrence show up 5 times. The best designers will plan for it.

What happens when the warded lock fails? We’ve got spares.

What happens when the actor forgets this prop? Here’s the best improv! (Oh, have I seen some lovely improvs. Our company is smart).

What happens when that object isn’t precisely where it needs to be to trigger the thing? Do we run a hint saying “Please nudge the MacGuffin two centimeters to your right?” NO! We have software that allows us to mark it as present without the players ever being bothered.

What happens when the image recognition software fails? The game master can hit the trigger. What if the server fails? Well, there’s a secret physical pull knob that never fails.

What happens when a psychic-guest randomly guesses the word lock? We let them play! Puzzle flow jumps—where players unlock something out of the intended order—can happen, whether from a bad reset or a guest’s supernatural ability. We have a strict list of only two instances where we interrupt a team because of a puzzle flow jump, and that’s when the impact of interrupting them is less than the impact of breaking the game too wide open. In every other case, we know our puzzle flow well enough to know it’s okay to let them jump and play it out.

Or how about when the magic fails? In Strange Secret of Mr. Adrian Rook, Madame Daphne has a Plan B and a Plan C for her magic. And yep, 150 teams in, I’ve deployed them both.

Not that you’d ever notice: Madame Daphne is cool AF, unlike me.

Point is: we do what we can to impact the experience as little as possible and move forward.

Really, I think the heart of escape room design is about designing for tail risks. You want to keep every team within the boundary of the experience while inviting them to explore for themselves. Physical parts + creatively engaged humans = a tricky thing.

Hints mitigate tail risks

Hints (not to be confused with clues) are the assistance we variably give teams when stuck on a puzzle and unable to advance. Some teams need zero hints. Some teams need eight. (We average about one—design for the fewest hints possible. Trust me. Hints feel like a defeat, no matter how immersive the delivery.)

Hints allow us to handle the unexpected “tail risk” behaviors. Hints keep every team, from the 70 year-old ladies to the enthusiasts who can’t search to save their lives, on the right track. We have a stock set of hints, but it’s essential to have a hint mechanism that allows you to tailor your message to a team. There’ll always be, “One time the team did this…” and you’ll be glad you were able to redirect them with a custom message.

THE TAIL RISK TOOLKIT

Here’s a look at the tail-risk toolkit.

  • Design. This is the first stage and the best way to mitigate tail risks. Imagine guests of all ages and sizes and behaviors. You don’t put a knife in your kitchen-themed game, do you? Physical puzzles especially demand good design: what do you do with that team of two where neither can physically crawl through your crawl tunnel? Or a team where everyone is too short for the input (there’s a hard reason we can’t host a team of 10 year olds, y’all).
  • Spares and repairs. Things break, especially after hundreds of over-eager hands have handled them. We have a policy of “don’t just replace, improve!” whenever something fails, and that approach has shortened our list of things that are vulnerable to fixing. Nonetheless, light bulbs still go out, paper gets torn. When X fails, how do you carry on for the next team arriving in an hour? Be ready. Often with glue or a ladder or a duplicate from the spares shelf.
  • Responsive repair technician. When the fix goes beyond the game master’s capabilities, you need a repair guru that understands the thing on stand-by. Otherwise, you risk delivering a broken game (and nothing gives Strange Bird panic attacks like nixing a puzzle for the next team).
  • Electronic Plan B. An automatic electronic trigger may not work. We build software that allows us to trigger events via game master if the automatic trigger fails.
  • Manual Plan C. Should all electronics lose their mind, we deploy a physical solution that can never fail.
  • Hint and warnings. Useful for redirecting mental attention (hints) or stopping unwanted behavior (warnings). Have the ability to customize these.
  • Game-master interruption. We deploy this only when something has gone so wrong that it needs to be brought to the entire team’s attention. Either an object has broken or team behavior has not responded to our text-based “warnings.”
  • Customer Service. So many ills can be smoothed over by confident and attentive service.

Prep your toolkit because—trust me—one day you will need it.

Train Employees for Tail Risks

None of these preparations are any good if you don’t train your employees to use them. A good game master should not only be trained explicitly in hint style, but also know what can break, when to interrupt the game, and how to fix it. Perhaps above all else, you should let them know that you can’t prepare them for every issue that will arise. Tell them you trust their judgment. They are authorized to do whatever they deem necessary to preserve the team’s experience.

I wonder if I spend more time training our company in tail risks than in rehearsing scene work. Scene work is easy in comparison! You really should see our training manual…

My favorite interview question for Strange Bird is, “Tell me about a time something went wrong on stage, and how you responded.” If their face doesn’t light up, they’re not going to enjoy working here.

INVESTING IN TAIL RISKS

It’s worth noting that what I’m recommending is expensive. Preparing for tail risks is an investment of time and treasure. It rarely comes up, so from a business perspective, it isn’t always profitable. You have to care about each and every customer’s experience to go on this mad rampage like we do.

Maybe we’re obsessed with tail risks because we’re artists. Maybe we’re a little consistency-cuckoo. But I do know that Strange Bird’s commitment to mitigating tail risks contributes to our high reputation. Games differ team to team, but everyone who’s played The Man From Beyond talks about the same magical experience. Because we don’t let anything derail it.

That’s got to help our bottom line.

THE EXISTENTIAL TAIL RISK

This second category of tail risk is the most important. It’s risk that is about safety. It goes beyond a threat to the guest experience, to a threat to the guest’s life.

There are lots of existential tail risks in escape rooms: what if the power goes out? What if that pneumatic special effect activates with someone standing there? (an example of the kind to design against). What if someone trips over a threshold? Or injuries themselves with their own exuberance?

Here’s a classic existential tail risk for escape rooms: do you lock guests in? Escape rooms have pivoted away from locking guests inside the game, even eschewing the safest option of push-to-exit maglocks. Room Escape Artist freaking grades escape rooms on emergency exits now, and I’m glad they do. It helps incentivize safety.

I’ll confess: in our first installation in 2016, we had a maglock on the parlor door.

And one of the fanciest push-to-exit buttons in the industry.

Why did we do that? Honestly…? Because everyone else was doing it. It was one of the tropes of the genre.

When it came time to rebuild the parlor in our new location in 2018, we nixed it. We gained absolutely nothing while taking on a serious tail risk. We knew by then that people stay where the action is, and we don’t care if someone leaves to go to the bathroom! If that’s what they need, that’s a good thing!! But most importantly: should something go wrong in the room, would the team think to push the pretty little button beside the door?

I shudder knowing we once risked this.

And then there was the fire in Poland. Remember it. Learn from it. STOP LOCKING EXIT DOORS IN ESCAPE ROOMS. (And thankfully, the industry is doing just that.)

It is extremely unlikely that there will ever be a fire at Strange Bird Immersive. And yet, we have spent tens of thousands of dollars should such an event take place. We have EXIT signs and emergency lights and bonus doors we didn’t want in our architecture so the path to exit the building never exceeded 75 ft. We spent at least $10,000 on a fire spray for our ceilings.

While I’d like to think we would have opted for these safeguards, we were saved from any moral wrestling. We are legally required to have these safeguards in order to receive our official Certificate of Occupancy from the city. While 10% of the hoops we jumped through were bureaucratic bullshit, 90% of those hoops were about not taking on the tail risk of killing people. To be frank, not everyone is willing to invest in that on their own, so they force you to.

That’s what regulations are all about.

THE ASSHATERY OF ERCOT

A failure to invest in a tail risk is why so many of my fellow Texans experienced a tragic week. For those of you out of this particular news loop, for five days last week, power was out for days in millions of homes across Texas, where indoor temperatures plunged to the 30s. The blackouts impacted the whole state, thanks to power plants freezing and 30,000 megawatts going offline. People died.

Texas has an independent power grid, run by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). It’s notoriously deregulated. Following previous winter blackouts in 2011, recommendations were made to winterize the power plants. The recommendations were not followed.

Yes, it is unlikely that the entire humongous State of Texas would undergo a deep freeze at the same time. But if that did happen, how bad would it be? Visualize!

But wait, I forget, you’re not properly incentivized here, are you, ERCOT?

Preparing for a tail risk requires investment, and if the goal is profitability, it may not be worth it—especially when you have a monopoly over your customers. You can freeze them, displace them, even kill them, but it’s not like you’re going to lose their business. So…why should you…?

Regulations are written in blood.

Ask me how I feel running an escape room company more responsibly than Texas runs its energy grid.

Go on. Ask me.

Don’t be ERCOT. Invest in your tail risks. Care about each and every person, even if it’s not profitable.

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Do’s and Don’ts of Virtual Experiences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DON’T UNDERSELL IT

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

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

DO DELIVER PRODUCTION VALUES

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

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

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

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

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

Device party! Invite the whole neighborhood!

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

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

DO INVEST IN EQUIPMENT

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

DO CREATE FOR THE MEDIUM

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

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

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

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

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

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

DON’T PRETEND RECORDED VIDEO IS LIVE

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

DO JUSTIFY LIVE ENGAGEMENT

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

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

DON’T MUTE EVERYBODY, DO USE SPOTLIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

DON’T UNDERSCORE YOUR VIDEO

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

DO LOOK INTO THE CAMERA

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

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

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

DOn’T USE PAUSES

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

DON’T FORGET TO BETA TEST

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

DO GET CREATIVE

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

Let’s give them something new!

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Tarot Wisdom for the Coronavirus Crisis

This is a Tower moment if ever there were one.

In The Man From Beyond, guests have the opportunity for a tarot reading from Madame Daphne. These readings are often my favorite part of a performance—the personal connection in a tarot reading is off-the-charts, it’s really a bunch of one-on-ones—and guests leave not just with a grand adventure from the Séance Parlor but with new personal insight from the Tarot Room as well.

I learned the tarot for the show, and now I am an advocate. In my eyes, it’s not magic, but it is a ridiculously useful tool, and anything that carries meaning carries a kind of holiness for me. It’s helped me personally, and it’s honed my philosophy. There are 78 different cards in the deck, each designed to tease out of us a notion of something specific that is happening in our lives. When we see things, we begin to understand them. That may not be magic, but it is the path to empowerment.

In this extraordinary moment, I’d like to share with you a specific tarot insight.

Welcome to The Tower.

The Tower is the moment when we are subject to higher forces. Something that we did not want, that we did not will has just occurred. Make no mistake: it’s bad. Lightning—an act of God or an act of Nature, as you choose to classify it—strikes our Tower, and we fall. We are powerless against it. The crown of our great plans plummets to the ground.

But there is an opportunity in every tarot card, even the darkest ones (and this is the darkest one, in my opinion). The lesson of the Tower is: how do you respond? How you respond is always within your control. Do you take a moment on the ground and mourn the loss? Do you rebuild the Tower? Do you look into the feasibility of making it lightning-proof? Maybe the rebuilt Tower shouldn’t be so tall, or maybe you should get out of the Tower-building business altogether. Point is: know your sphere of action. What’s outside your control? What’s inside it? There’s a sharp line dividing the two. Focus on what’s inside.

So here’s some Tower-specific wisdom for all of us in the cornavirus crisis…

  • This totally fucking sucks. It’s bad. It’s important to make space for that fundamental fact. Do not deny that you have fallen.
  • It is not your fault. You are not responsible. Yes, the government could have done more to plan, but not you, dear reader. It was not within your power to have prevented this pandemic.
  • Do not blame yourself if you feel you could have planned more personally for this very strange apocalypse. Lightning is random. No one could have reasonably predicted this level of society shutdown. I’m sure some of us are secretly kicking ourselves for being in the arts, or hospitality, or restaurant, or service industries, and not choosing an “essential” business or a viable work-from-home career, but that kind of blame is unfair to yourself. So don’t do it!

Focus as much as you can on what you can control. That means…

  • Stay home.
  • Reconsider going out in public or meeting up—skip it, if you can. There’s a lot that’s unknown and a lot of asymptomatic carriers, so it makes sense to take the most conservative course of action as often as you can.
  • Limit your news reading. Get the information you need to inform your personal actions, and no more. Ask, “Do my actions need to change based on today’s update?” Once that question has been answered, cut yourself off. Staring at things that are out of your control will make you go blind.
  • Think about what you can do for yourself, for your family and friends. Work. Play. Videochat. Find something that puts you in a flow. Do whatever you need in this very strange time. Take care of these people.
  • Forgive your quarantine buddies. They’ve been thrown from the Tower, too.

In the tarot, the Tower doesn’t stand alone: it is part of a bigger story. Twenty-two Major Arcana cards represent the most important moments of life’s journey that we cycle through. The Tower, number sixteen, comes late in the cycle, we’ve gained a lot of wisdom, making this a particularly hard lesson. The Tower dethrones us, thwarts our narrative of progress. But the very next Major Arcana card, number seventeen, is this…

The Star represents hope and healing.

I’ve never felt a personal connection to the Star. All my books say it’s hope and healing, and I’ve never understood how those two different things are connected. Now I do.

Hope is healing. You don’t need to be cured of your illness to experience the healing power of the Star. The Star reminds us that dreams come true. Now, not all dreams come true, but some do, and it is the very act of dreaming that is just what we need.

This crisis has taken our dreams from us. We don’t know how long this near-lockdown will last. Two months? Eighteen? When will we meet at a restaurant again? When will school restart? When will it be safe to visit my parents? We just can’t know right now. (But answering these questions is not within your sphere of control, remember? So let go.)

What we need right now is hope. I am a very future-oriented person. I am driven by my plans for the future, whether that’s seeing the birth of Strange Bird’s next show Lucidity, working on our conference talk for the Reality Escape Convention, or just looking forward to the pleasure of reading a stranger’s tarot cards again. Given the current situation, it’s possible all three of these dreams will never come true. But I’m not about to stop dreaming them. Dreams are not part of what you let go of after the Tower.

The Star says, after the Tower, you must have hope. Hope is the way you will heal from this fall.

The future will come, so please, hold onto your dreams. Dream actively, if you can—perhaps there’s an opportunity for you to lay the groundwork to make them happen. But perhaps just looking outside your quarantine window and daydreaming about a day when hugs are back on is enough.

If you found this post meaningful, consider supporting Strange Bird by purchasing Madame Daphne’s Tarot Deck. Her guidebook features surprisingly similar insights as mine—it’s quite the coincidence! It’s also not a bad time to pick up a new hobby, and it’s one that will make your spirit stronger.

You can also support us with a donation. We are legally required by the City of Houston to have zero income, yet rent and taxes are unabated. What strange times.

All my best, from my quarantined home to yours, for the health of your whole being.

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Eyes before Engagement

One of the great joys of the long-running immersive is it becomes something of a laboratory. You get to experiment in tiny little ways…on humans…who are paying you for the privilege. Over and over again!

(Between you and me, if I had to point at just one element that earned The Man From Beyond the title of #1 escape room in the US—that link’s legit, click it—it’d be our commitment to experimenting with little changes until we get at something that works).

After countless experiments, I’m here to report on a particularly useful tool that I call “Eyes before Engagement.”

Let’s not be coy. Immersive theatre is all about the eyes.

At Strange Bird Immersive, we pride ourselves on an opt-in model for interactions. It guarantees that everyone who comes through our door will get the show they want. If you want engagement—and trust me, we can tell—you’ll get it. If you want us to leave you be (most often signaled in not looking at the performer), we’ll do exactly as you wish. We train our actors to watch for these behaviors and bestow attention on the players who want it. The eager-to-engage also make for more interesting scene partners for us, which also makes for a better show, so it’s a win for literally everybody. I highly recommend opt-in over opt-out.

But there are a couple of moments in our script where engagements depend not on your vibe, but on where you choose to sit or stand in the room. Which means the person who is sometimes not-that-keen to engage must nonetheless be engaged.

Unto the breach, dear friends… (Henry V)

How do you make that engagement smooth?

Right before I ask a particular person a question or request an action, I make eye contact with them. The kind of eye contact that you feel. Sometimes I even lean in with my body a little to make it clear I want their eyes in particular. It’s usually about two lines before the ask in the script. My eyes briefly go elsewhere, and then they come back to my target on the line of request. The initial eye contact makes sure that they’re paying attention right at that moment and subconsciously preps them to be put on the spot. Then they are suddenly put on the spot, and their response is seamless and lovely, as if they knew the moment was coming. Everyone can feel the magic.

Think of it as essentially foreshadowing engagement.

What really confirms for me that Eyes before Engagement works is when they fail to return eye contact with me, or when I plumb-forget to target them ahead of the ask. It’s harder to get someone’s eyes the first time than the second time. It suddenly becomes ambiguous just who it is I’m asking—often that eager-to-interact friend butts in to take the spotlight, UGH!—or my target stumbles through their moment. It doesn’t get a laugh. It doesn’t draw people in. It’s a botched moment.

Mountain lions do a great job of preparing you for what comes next with a little eye contact.

Be a mountain lion. Eyes before Engagement. Give it a try, and see how much readier they are to respond!

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Bandersnatch and the challenges of choice

(This post got buried in my drafts due to months of construction fun, so apologies for its not-quite-timeliness. I stand by its relevance, nonetheless).

Cameron and I just wrapped up 85% of the decision tree of Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch (time to call it “good enough”), and it brought up a number of problems I’ve been thinking about regarding choice in immersives. Consider this to be a Bandersnatch meta-review.

If you haven’t played it yet, go do so. I’ll wait. Or not—I’ll limit spoilers, as what I want to examine here is the structural aspects of the experience, but note that reading this article beforehand may frame your experience of it.

Ready? Let’s go.

What do i want?

In a linear narrative experience, the kind we’re used to, no choice confronts the reader/viewer. If the writer even bothers to ask the recipients what they want, what it is they’re doing here, they’d probably answer “to experience the story.” Easy enough.

In a choose-your-own adventure (CYOA) scenario, the players need to decide what they want. Many stories are now available, so it’s not enough just to get to the end. You can go about blindly making choices, but I think a lot of players will want to construct some sort of strategy, and it will most likely involve maximization. Are we looking for the best ending? The worst ending? The wackiest ending? The ending most like what we would choose ourselves? (And, if it’s an option, some will play for all the endings, just on principle. I think Bandersnatch expects repeat plays, especially since you can get to endings pretty darn quick).

Be ready for your players to think in these terms. You should probably script endings to satisfy all of these types (spoiler: Bandersnatch didn’t, although I’ll concede that maybe that was their point…? More on that later).

Reality or fiction?

I find when I’m faced with choice in a narrative environment, I have two instincts: 1) do I take this as reality (when I know it isn’t), or 2) do I take this as fiction? These two perspectives have radically different outcomes.

If it’s reality, I’m likely to play more like myself. I’ll be honest, thoughtful, really reflecting on what I want at every decision point. I’ll want to draw out the good in other people, and do what I can to see my character to happiness. I’m also more likely to make conservative choices, because I don’t like frigging drama. Real people don’t want drama.

Actors love drama.

But if I take the world as a fiction, I’m going to want to flip some tables. I’ll be more inclined to make extreme choices, because extremity creates drama, and drama makes things way more interesting. But drama cracks a few eggs (or skulls), and you almost always pay a price for it. But hey! If it’s fiction after all, there are no actual consequences.

But immersives are a bit more social than reading a book or watching Netflix, so no, there are indeed consequences. People who approach the world as fiction tend to be the worst audiences in immersives. Actors, who have to believe, and players, who may choose to believe, will clash with the “it’s fiction” people. In my experience as a performer, I’ve found the “fiction” folks are the hardest to contain, because my character can’t even respond to them: we’re on different planes.

Adding on a choice-driven experience then gives a vehicle to maximize the blow-things-up impulse. Don’t be surprised when players take it.

BLACK HAT OR WHITE HAT?

Essentially, if you’re in a CYOA, you’re in Westworld. Do you take the white hat or the black hat path?

HBO’s Westworld taking the hats metaphor literally

Given what HBO has shown us of the Westworld park design, it seems to me that the design itself encourages you to go black hat. The most exciting adventures happen when you buck the morality you practice in the real world. You’re rewarded for a lack of make-believe. (And of course only when the park is no longer consequence-free does the black hat path even look bad.) But are we really sure that inviting people to don the black hats doesn’t, in itself, have consequences?

I would think a designed experience that encourages black hatting does have consequences. The implication of so many rich people vacationing in a world without morality is an episode I’m still waiting to see. Are we really so certain of our ability to recognize the difference between reality and fiction?

I’m pretty sure I fell in love with immersives because my body couldn’t distinguish the difference, and my mind got a bit messed up because of it. They are fictions that truly happen to me. The black-hatting a CYOA inspires becomes a rougher, more visceral experience inside an immersive.

I found this piece on the original Club Drosselmeyer (Boston 2016) a very educational read: “On Drosselmeyer, devastating endings and giving your story to your audience!” On closing night, the winning group chose the “black hat” bad ending because they thought it’d be more fun. And everyone, from actors to participants who weren’t even aware such a choice was going on—had to experience the bad ending of Nazi victory. If you put a choice on the table, be ready to commit to every possible outcome.

I think a designer would be hard pressed to steer an audience entirely away from the “it’s just fiction, let’s see how extreme we can go” option. There’s always going to be someone wanting burn your world.

How do you design a choice-narrative that makes the “I’m taking this as real” path superior? Or even just appealing? I honestly think it’s easier to design an all-pro-black-hat experience, frankly, which is precisely what Bandersnatch does. Perhaps all CYOA experiences should embrace black-hatting.

I found myself in our first play-through of Bandersnatch going for the most dramatic path. It wasn’t explicitly “the most evil,” but I was all about not treating the characters as real people. If this had been an immersive, I would have been an incredibly obnoxious guest.

Story-litE

If you’re creating a multi-branching narrative, paths don’t share much overlapping information. There’s just not a lot of space for detailed narrative. I think that’s one of the reasons choose-your-own-adventure books didn’t take off: they were all too much the same.

I found Bandersnatch to be story-lite, a pseudo-intellectual piece who thinks it’s enough to say “choice” and “thief of destiny,” nod to the meta, and call it a philosophical day. Mentioning the issues is not the same as engaging with them, thanks. What’s worse: I didn’t care for the characters.

Can a fully-realized narrative exist in this format? Possibly. Every branch would need to share details with other branches or have their own unique arc. But the creators would have to show an interest in their narrative greater than in their decision tree. (And let’s face it, those choosing this format are super-into their decision tree).

Clear choices

In the first choice of major consequence, I hit a fast dead-end when I chose what the narrative wants me to choose. But it ended up being a choice that was incorrectly presented: “refuse” meant something different than I thought it meant. Choosing “accept” then proceeded to shame me for misunderstanding. While it trained me early in dead-ends and end-goals, I felt shamed by the creators for what ultimately was a sin of clarity on their end.

General customer service thing: don’t make fun of your players for their choices, and don’t bait-and-switch your choices on them. Unless of course you’re into that sort of thing. (Everyone’s got a fetish! Mine just happens to be making my guests feel like heroes.)

If you want me to feel ownership of a choice, be sure that I understand the options available to me. And make sure you signal to me that I’m making a choice. Bandersnatch didn’t have that problem because of the TV mechanism, but not knowing you’re making a choice is a common complaint I’ve heard when choice and immersives meet.

Choices that matter

The very first choice in Bandersnatch has no apparent consequence. It was a tutorial choice, but I still would have liked to see some reward, any reward for my action.

Every call-to-action in an immersive should give a reward for the activity. Period.

To our dismay, Bandersnatch continued to traffic in choices we had no opinion about. The screen presented what looked like similar actions. This left us in a constant state of shrugging. Sometimes they had no impact. More often, these indistinguishable actions ended up leading to very different paths, but again, I felt no ownership over them. It was just random. So why give me the choice at all?

Scaling choice

Cameron and I played together—and while we think a lot a like, two was too many cooks. I can’t imagine what it’d be like with a crowd. After the first choice, we paused and had a detailed discussion about how to play together with the mechanism. We decided to shout out choices so that the strength of our choice was communicated as clearly and as quickly as possible. Essentially, we wanted to limit debate but still experience it together.

I think the ideal player size for Bandersnatch is one. It’s on-demand video, it has no real estate limitations, no cost of goods sold, so that’s not really a problem.

I’m deeply skeptical of CYOA in immersive theatre because it leads to two options: 1) one person is capable of making the choice for the larger group (like flipping this switch), thus fundamentally dictating everyone else’s show, or 2) you have a jury deliberation moment. Is debating with other participants (whether friends or strangers) really that fun? And doesn’t someone usually get burned on a jury? People will either have no strong opinion (which means the choice is boring) or strong opinions where someone doesn’t get their way.

It’s called Twelve ANGRY Men, after all.

And you can’t have the jury moment take unlimited time, that’s just not practical, but putting a time limit on your jury deliberation moment will make players feel a lack of agency—the exact opposite of what you want to do by presenting a choice in the first place.

Or you can go with 3) a one-on-one-pipeline structure, much like Bandersnatch, and have one person making a choice only for herself. But that leads to some serious economic limitations since the through-put will never be high.

Play IT again?

Repeat customers is the Holy Grail for immersive designers, and choice seems to be the #1 tool for motivating the return. But how do you get audiences to pay to start at the beginning again?

We played Bandersnatch over two nights, but that second night bored me. We had to sit through a lot of content—unexciting content—that we’d seen before (and weren’t particularly excited by the first time) only to make choices we felt ambiguous about again.

To motivate a return, you need a ton of new content. And you have to make the depth of the content clear and present on the player’s first visit. They can spy that they could be on a radically different adventure. In short, if you’re banking on a return, you pretty much need to write a second show. Sleep No More justifies returns well. Escape rooms that promise more puzzles do not.

If you’re gating different shows by choice, you could also run into problems when repeat players face jury moments again. They’ll be desperate to make the opposite choice from their first visit but may lose the vote—and feel like they wasted their money.

The Man From Beyond takes a different strategy to repetition: we create an experience so detailed that returning is like watching your favorite movie again. We’ve had a surprising number of people return just for the emotional ride. No one cares that they’re repeating content because the content is exciting. Of course, we’re not building a business model on veterans, but I do think creating one amazing experience is more viable than housing a ton of content that most of your guests will never come back to see.

okay, but what did you really think of bandersnatch? (Spoiler section)

As far as decision trees go, it’s pretty clever. There’s a lot of clever going on. But witnessing somebody else’s cleverness is not why I seek the arts.

There’s a loop towards the end that a lot of people get stuck in, thinking there’s more, but there isn’t. They forced the black hat on me, and I couldn’t get out of the cycle. I looked on the internet, and saw there was no true white hat ending. Cute and all—apparently I don’t have the power to choose the best ending, just the illusion that it could be possible. This is in keeping with Black Mirror‘s general emotional goal, which is to shit on its audience.

Not a fan.

My efforts were rewarded when I hit the amusing meta-tracks (reminiscent of my favorite video game, The Stanley Parable, notably a CYOA). I laughed at those. But the story didn’t capture me, and I found replaying to be tedious work. At least if you have to see something again in Sleep No More, it’s usually freaking exciting!

I don’t think anyone wants to convert all of their storytelling to this form. But is film CYOAs a break-out genre we’ll see more of? I doubt even that. Bandersnatch felt like a gimmick instead of a pioneer.

the hard problems of choice

I get the impression that some immersive designers think increasing audience agency always makes for a better experience. I don’t. The Activity Spectrum is not qualitative. But I do think the more agency you grant, the more behaviors you need to prepare for, and I think the experience can very easily become unfulfilling. Like Bandersnatch.

If you’re designing with choice…

  • Be ready for players to “black hat” your world and make choices just to watch the world burn.
  • Don’t forget to write a detailed story for every branch. Choice is no substitute for story.
  • Present clear choices—players need to know when they are making a choice and what each option is
  • Give choices clear stakes and meaningful outcomes (that is, if you don’t want to jerk around your players)
  • Design carefully for how many people make the choice. Having multiple people make a choice (the jury) or having one person choose for the rest (the rogue player) can be un-fun.
  • If you’re banking on repeat customers, make it evident as they go through the experience that there’s a ton of content yet untapped

Which is to say, I’m a choice-skeptic. Some of these are hard problems.

I hear talk of CYOA-type things a lot, but I don’t even know of one that’s been produced yet, let alone played one. If you have, let me know. Let’s talk! Prove this skeptic wrong.

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Relocating a Site-Specific Show

Strange Bird Immersive has officially reopened! It was an all-consuming journey, one I’ll recount in future posts, but more fascinating than the nuances of construction we had to master I think is how The Man From Beyond has changed.

What follows is a chronicle of some of those architectural changes and how audience responses have changed, so brace yourself for level-one spoilers (with photos and everything!) of what’s inside Madame Daphne’s. No puzzle solutions or plot points are spoiled, but you’ll see furniture and hear about function. And I’ll warn you clearly when there’s something level-three. So if you’re the type who travels for immersive experiences and wants to know absolutely nothing, go ahead and skip to the next post.

When we decided to move to an expansion location in Houston, we knew we didn’t want our award-winning show to change—at all. Escape rooms are delicate soufflés. Something as minor as a font change can take a clue from seen to unseen. We wanted to limit the changes as much as possible to avoid throwing off that balance we had worked so hard to achieve in our original location.

But changes are inevitable. In proscenium theatre, you can plan a show to fit on every major stage in the world, no problem. It’s cookie-cutter theatre. In site-specific theatre, there are some features of the space that you can’t change or can’t afford to change and you have to find a way to make it work in your favor. And then you have to do it all over again when you move.

Is strange bird really site-specific?

Many immersive theatre experiences find a location first and then create around that. Many escape rooms do this, too (which we kinda sorta totally recommend doing, because custom walls are expensive). This location-first, creation-second approach makes for a deep union of architecture with experience and earns the name “site-specific theatre.”

By the time we were real estate shopping for The Man From Beyond in the fall of 2015, we had written the show. We knew what furniture we needed and even had a layout. When we found just the right space, we still had to add two custom walls. So in the common use of the term, we really weren’t that site-specific. Of course there were many details we still had to figure out by the time we moved in, and we did what we could to embrace the space, rather than fight it.

When we submitted our floor plan to the architect of our new space, we planned for the parlor to be identical in size. Flipping the orientation of just one piece of furniture, or the location of the parlor door, hell, even the direction of the door’s swing, would throw something out of balance. The second time round, we built even more custom walls (to say nothing of our next show, Lucidity), so in a way, we became even less site-specific. Still, we had to adapt to the new space, and how people are responding to those changes, when all else is the same, is fascinating.

Ceilings

The original Silos location had low ceilings covered in pipes. PIPES EVERYWHERE.

You gotta have a vision! (Original Silos Studio 213, pre-construction)

Seriously, who would put a Victorian séance parlor in this industrial space?

We fought the pipes. We painted them black. Can confirm the color black does an amazing job of making things disappear. We also hung bolts of landscaping fabric to cover the hideous chicken-wire ceiling that frankly had a certain smell to it.

Painting ceiling pipes requires a hard hat. I learned that the hard way.

On the plus side, the pipes were great for hanging theatrical lights. They also did a phenomenal job of masking our deep magic, the magic we don’t want you to discover. With such a ceiling, who’s to know that junction box is a fake?

The ceilings in the parlor sloped, from about 8 feet to 10 feet. We used this to our advantage by putting our show-stopper piece, the historic mantel, at the high end. It had a certain psychological effect. But it did mean that another very impressive piece of furniture, “The Cabinet of Mysteries,” was crowded on the low-ceiling end and had a pipe that blocked the sign on top. Honestly, we’re lucky it fit at all.

Less than ideal.

In our new location? The ceilings we inherited are 12-feet high with black acoustic tile. It’s like night and day. The results? “The Cabinet of Mysteries” looks GREAT…

…but we’ve had to re-design all of our ceiling magic, and that includes a whole new mechanical device as well as software recalibration. Many elements are all in “beta test” again, against our will. Good news is they’re working well so far, but I don’t trust anything until it’s fired correctly 100 times.

On the plus side, the ceilings are high and clean, and while our previous guests may not have thought it was a show about pipes, our new guests have to suffer none of that subconscious crowding.

When Madame Daphne opens that door, they gasp. They never gasped before. It’s the same hand-stenciled wallpaper, the same furniture, the same lighting and music, but that gasp is all-new.

It’s the ceilings. I’m certain of it.

For love of a pipe

The old space had this gigantic elbow of a pipe coming out of the wall.

The infamous elbow, showing here to the left (along with our early “work light”)

It was about 5-feet high, jutted out, and didn’t even have the decency to be in a corner. Prime placement for “I hit my head in your escape room!” To mask it, while also drawing attention to it, we draped a red silk dupioni curtain over it.

No one ever hit their head—success!! The curtain also made for a lovely cinematic nook for our projector videos, encouraging people to gather around the projector as a team, rather than view it from across the room. It also softened the harsh white rectangle of the projector screen itself.

We loved our solution to that damn pipe so much we rebuilt the pipe. No joke. Same height and everything. We didn’t even debate it.

The pipe lives!
A matter of inches

Due to an architectural curiosity in the new parlor, the desk is about three inches closer to the corner than it used to be. No big deal, right? Wrong. Turns out every team isn’t noticing a detail about the desk until clued about it. It went from 90% notice to about 10% notice. Which, luckily in this instance, is actually better! We wanted them to need the clue. But seriously. Three inches! What was I saying about escape rooms and soufflés?

Rules Hall

The layout of our rooms in our original location left this little hallway, 5 ft by 10 ft connecting two spaces. While I initially imagined we’d just walk through this space, when the reality of decorating these spaces descended, I realized we could use a separate transitional space, for one little scene only: the reading of the rules.

Thus, Rules Hall was born. While all immersive entertainment needs a reading of the rules at some point, I doubt we’ll always create a separate space just for rules. But Rules Hall makes for excellent theatre: the darkness focusing player attention, the medium’s sinister teasing ramping up their anticipation, the cramped quarters making the parlor reveal more breath-taking.

Needless to say, Rules Hall is back, and just as small as ever.

Level-THREE-spoiler thing

But we couldn’t rebuild everything.

In our earliest blocking rehearsals, it occurred to me that we could use the stairs outside the studio as one of our sets. It was my favorite site-specific choice that we made.

We’ve done what we can. In our new location, Strange Bird has ownership of the world outside of Daphne’s, so this scene has become psychologically safer for players, which is both good and bad. We re-created the same stark aesthetic: bright lights, white walls, the need to whisper. But we could hardly rebuild the stairs themselves. A bench suffices, and while the cinematic picture of this moment has improved, it’s not inspiring quite the same flavor as the stairs. I miss them.

END OF LEVEL-THREE SPOILER.

Tarot Reading room

The most obvious change to veterans of the séance is in Madame Daphne’s Tarot Reading Room. Due to architectural restraints (we tried to preserve as many extant walls as possible), the room ended up longer and a foot less-wide than the previous space. This done screwed up the furniture.

Now instead of being tucked to the right of the entry door…

Silos layout

Daphne’s table is as far from the door as possible, past all the other furniture.

Houston Design Center layout

In the old space’s corner, she would often startle people, which was a sort of fun, but not elegant. Now, the visual is better: BAM! There she is when you open the door. Being further in challenges guests to venture deeper into the room, and if a line forms to greet her, everyone is immersed in this new space rather than waiting outside. But so far they seem far less inclined to sit on the couches. Perhaps there’s more room, or they don’t see the couches they passed by in the new configuration? Both of our Daphnes are reporting that they have to invite them to sit.

There are also a couple of moments with the mirror behind Daphne’s table; now that it’s not by the door, one of them is a bit awkward (but has to be powered through), and another moment we’re often cutting on the fly, because no one is there to see it. Little changes like this can have a big impact.

Old Tarot Reading Room layout (Silos) versus the new layout (Houston Design Center)

I’ve already had one veteran praise us for moving Daphne’s table, as if it were calculated. Truth is, it was the only layout in that room that worked! Not all design is deliberate, although it always reads as such—which means you do always have to own it.

You’ll notice in the new layout that we have an inexplicable second door in the middle of a wall. This is for players to exit from—the distance to exit could not exceed 75 feet, and with the door we wanted players to enter from, the path would have been over that mark. For experiential reasons, we wanted them to enter through a different door. For reasons of safety, we needed a second door. Thus, the Star Door was born.

My favorite thing I painted, and I painted a lot of things.

Again, not a thing we chose to do deliberately, but we do have to own it. The treatment of this door is totally a thing Daphne would do, and the reverse side is totally a thing Adrian Rook would do. World-building wins all-round.

Overworld

By far the most drastic change in our relocation is the addition of a meta-lobby space. Originally we conceived of renting out individual studios for each Strange Bird experience. This is why the Tarot Reading Room functions just like a lobby—we needed a space for players to gather “in-world” before the experience officially began. Of course, we never mentioned the phrase “Escape Room” in this hallowed space.

When we opted for many reasons to expand to a single, larger location, we had to take on a lobby to connect our different experiences, just like all the other escape room companies.

But what does a Strange Bird lobby look like? What do Strange Bird restrooms look like? How do we want people to feel and act in this extra-lobby space? We knew we wanted to keep our commitment to immersion, so if this isn’t an escape room company’s lobby, whose is it?

I took to calling it the Overworld. Just like in Zelda, our Overworld connects each of our games into a cohesive world, the games in turn functioning like self-contained temples.

The Overworld has its own story to tell and its own emotional effect, an ideal prologue to every game we’ll ever create. And when the time comes and Madame Daphne opens her doors, she’s greeting guests who are more excited and even more eager for interaction than before. The ice has already been broken.

In order to make a clear delineation of who is in charge of which spaces—I am the set dresser of our rooms, at the end of the day—we went with strong bright lights and a black, white, and chrome aesthetic. It is very modern and very now.

And you notice when it changes. When you enter Madame Daphne’s, you know you’re in somebody else’s space. I also suspect we won’t get any more people wondering if they have suddenly time-traveled to the 1920s when they step into her parlor. Our experiences are designed to be as real as they come, and our Overworld reinforces that.

The Overworld is also architecturally weird. It’s just a little bit disorienting—always an immersive plus. And it is impressive. I recently overheard a player conversation, “ARE THOSE DOORS REAL?” “I THINK SO???”

Ultimately, more space means the experience is bigger. It feels like you’ve arrived someplace special. Now that’s a change I can live with.

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On-theme vs. Immersive Design

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

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

At the top is true enlightenment.

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

CASE STUDY

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

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

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

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

Winning team photo (U-505 successfully captured)

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

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

Note how essential the character becomes to the immersive challenge.

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

It’s a high bar.

Just what are escape rooms selling?

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

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

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

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

How to achieve immersive props and puzzle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immersive props in immersive theatre

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

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

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

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