In the past couple of years, I’ve been honored to have a few creators invite me to join their creative process. Whether the relationship is ongoing or a single meeting, as a consultant, I always start with one request…
Show me your player journey.
WHAT’S THE PLAYER JOURNEY?
Think of it as a written outline of your experience. It walks through the show beat by beat, notably from the player’s perspective. Write down what happens, but strictly through the guest’s eyes.
This allows you to focus on what the players experience and when, and nothing more. It’ll show you what’s irrelevant, and what really matters. It will challenge you to consider onboarding and offboarding, when the crossover to the Magic Circle happens, what facts players learn, when they receive a goal, what twists happen when, how they achieve their goals, and how the whole comes to a fulfilling end.
The X factor of the immersive industry is the invitation for the audience to become players. To make the most of that X factor, we should consider first and foremost what the player is experiencing.
When Strange Bird Immersive is in the early stages of developing show ideas, each pitch takes the form of a two-page player journey. It sketches out the main story beats and sets, often defaulting to “insert plot-driven puzzling here”—the details do not matter as much as the whole. The competing outlines allow us to quickly identify what stories seem most exciting and what stories feel too boring or too complicated.
We’re looking for that sinker pitch, although sometimes a curveball shows up in the creative process.
When I’m invited into a project, the player journey quickly communicates to me your vision for the production. I get excited. I can see it happening! It will also reveal what decisions still need to be made and if there are any structural problems that need solutions. I have the context to see what’s working and what’s not.
WHAT’S NOT THE PLAYER JOURNEY?
When I’m consulting, creators sometimes want to share with me a lot of information. They’re excited about all they have developed. But details aren’t where you start. Details need context. And most details end up as “nice to know.” The first meetings should be dedicated to “need to know.”
Essentially, you can’t pitch a concept from the writer’s POV.
Skip the lore, at least for the first meeting. Instead, show me how you’ll get players to care enough to engage in the world in the first place. Only when they care, will the details mean anything at all.
HOW TO WRITE
Think of it like a short story. I prefer to use sentences instead of bullet points. It makes for a more exciting read.
Keep it short. Unless you’re outlining a multi-day experience, you shouldn’t need more than a few pages. Each sentence can be a beat.
If the project is in the early stages, don’t get bogged down by the details. A sketch will suffice. Feel free to write “…and then they work on some compelling plot-driven engagement/puzzles for a while.”
I write my own player journeys in a third person limited voice (I only describe what they see/hear/touch at that moment). Third person omniscient would not be useful here, so avoid that. If you’d like to give it more immediacy, you could write in second person “you.”
Remember that the player journey is for internal use only, so no need to make it a perfect piece of writing.
SAMPLE PLAYER JOURNEY
Once the players have booked the escape game Lucidity, they receive communication from Dr. Riley Newmark thanking them for volunteering for her experimental study in lucid dreaming.
Players arrive in an office lobby all in black and white that, when they look more closely, is by no means normal. Dr. Newmark enters in a lab coat to greet them, directing them to restrooms. She is spooked by a statue in the lobby, it’s apparently a new installation.
When everyone is ready, she leads the team to her lab: a small blue room outfitted with a desk, computers, cabinets, and a bank of seats with large halos hovering overhead. She invites them to sit. “Not to worry, the halos are not active yet…“
First look at Lucidity. We expect the halos to be active by the end of the year.
WHAT IF MY PROJECT IS ALREADY LAUNCHED?
As a writing tutor in college, I encouraged writers to do what I called “a reverse outline.” Look at the draft you just wrote and create from it an outline. If you find a paragraph that doesn’t say something new or doesn’t rhetorically follow from what came before, congratulations! You just identified a problem you can fix!
The same goes for a show that’s already running. Write down what players or guests experience beat by beat. Is the onboarding too long? Does the offboarding feel inadequate? Can you identify the moment players are given a reason to care?
An outline can show holes in your Magic Circle or places to optimize the flow. Getting that sweet sense of flow is what immersion is all about.
WAIT. YOU CONSULT?
For a blog reader? Absolutely! While I remain primarily dedicated to the Strange Bird brand, I relish the opportunity to explore other approaches in this medium I love best, and the chance to collaborate with a fellow creative is a both a privilege and a profound joy.
Let’s chat at Recon LA this weekend, or reach out to me via email. I would love to hear about your player journey.
In my last post, I defined a scene. Read it now, if you haven’t done so. It gets at the heart of good writing in any genre.
Ready? Strap in, this one’s a rant.
I’ll be honest. While I encounter weak scenes all the time in novels, television, plays, and film, there’s something about immersive entertainment that more often loses sight of what makes a good story.
What’s up with that?
Perhaps creators rarely have backgrounds as writers. Perhaps the creators have to do so much else to mount these insane productions that they forget about the writing part (which by the way… writing should come first. Or you’ll have problems. Just sayin’). But look: I get it. Just making the thing exist requires puzzle/interaction designers, set designers, set builders, software gurus, hardware gurus, electricians, prop fabricators, stage managers/game masters, painters, etc. It’s easy to forget in this avalanche of skills to add a writer to the team at project conception. (But please don’t.)
This is a skill, too. If it’s not one of yours, hire it out before you build a single thing.
Perhaps the problem might be that we don’t often have actors (or if we do, not many actors) for whom we can write more traditional scenes. The genre demands non-traditional scene writing. We instead tell stories through environmental engagement, voice overs, video recordings, maybe an actor here and there engaging with the audience. It’s easy to let these scenes fall into the trap of being exposition or world-building, also known as: irredeemably boring. Avoid this trap.
Maybe there’s other reasons. But understanding doesn’t lead to forgiveness. We need to step up our writing game in this industry.
To sum up my thinking on bad writing in the quippiest quip…
Backstory is not story, gossip is not drama, and information is not interesting.
Let’s break it down…
Backstory is not story
What happened before I arrive to the story is not where it’s at, because that’s not where I’m at. Even in a mystery plot, you need stakes in the here and now, a reason that you need to solve the mystery and soon. “The killer is still on the loose—and inside this snowed-in house” sort of stakes.
The killer must always be about to strike again.
Backstory is usually the history of the character or the history of the location or any other events that happened before my arrival on the scene. None of these is exciting, because it’s not happening to me, or even in front of me. You want to give players things that they do and things that they see. If you give them things that they learn, they’ll feel more like students back in school.
Worse yet is when backstory isn’t even a discovery point, but told to me at the beginning by a game master. People’s eyes glaze over when you tell them facts, especially when they’re standing on the threshold of an adventure. Reduce the facts, up the surprise.
Never start your experience with backstory monologues. I recommend crafting an inciting incident in lieu of backstory. Move the past to the present as much as you can. If something bad happened to require the adventure, can players experience that bad thing, rather than being told about that bad thing?
With an inciting incident, you’ll probably discover you can get by with less backstory. Consider too if any remaining backstory may have a greater impact in the middle of the story, rather than at the crucial beginning, when we risk losing people forever.
Think about the story you want your audience to tell to their friends who weren’t there. The best stories will have them using the personal pronoun “I” or “we.”
“And then we caught her lying to us.” “And then we powered up the ship.” “And then we forged the will.”
VERSUS
“And then we read about the maid being unhappy.” “And then we learned why the pirate buried the treasure.” “And then we watched a video about the war between the Snarlofs and Boogatons.”
Let your audience be the subject and give them the very best verbs.
See how much fun they’re having?
The temptation to write stories that only reveal “what happened here” is strong in immersive theatre and escape rooms, I think because they don’t require a character present, and it’s a very easy way to link puzzles and narrative together, with every engagement uncovering secrets of the past. But these stories only exist in the past. Avoid them. What’s happening now is the story. Write for the here and now.
Backstory is not story.
Gossip is not Drama
Discovering gossip about characters is not inherently exciting. I see a lot of gossip in environmental story-telling experiences, where I learn character details and scandals of their secret lives. But if that does no work in the story, it’s just gossip. It’s a dead fact. You can have “nice to know” bits, but if your entire experience is only “nice to know,” then you have no story.
Say I learn that Sandy is secretly dating Andy. Cool, cool. How does that change what I want? Does that change what they want?
Put that gossip to dramatic use in a scene where: people want things, but then the truth is revealed, and the revelation thwarts someone. That’s how you make a big reveal.
I hold Sleep No More as an example of using details in sets and scenes as plot support and not gossip. If you see what Malcolm types on the typewriter, or what he keeps in the drawer, or what’s depicted in that photograph he just found, you’ll learn about what’s happening in the story.
Those who lean over his shoulder get rewarded (Malcolm in Sleep No More)
Meow Wolf’s installations are most often not a good example of this. Sorry, no, I’m not going to visit a second time just because I didn’t read all the diary entries on that computer.
Gossip is not drama.
Information is not interesting
World-building gets wayyyyy too much love. Maybe because of the cultural impact of super-franchises like Marvel and Harry Potter, where the worlds run deep, people think it’s a marker of top-tier writing. But no one memorized the ship names in Star Wars until they fell in love with the movies.
Let’s just say you don’t read this one first.
You shouldn’t skip world-building, but it’s not the heart of the matter. I do not care about the metaphysical underpinnings for the pseudo-technology, nor about what happened on this planet 100 years ago. Unless you connect those facts to my objective (or another character’s objective), I do not care.
World-building fleshes things out, but scenes are what matter. And if you trot out your world-building, it’ll be about as exciting as backstory. It’s information without stakes.
And like backstory, not a breath should be wasted explaining your world to the audience. They must discover your clever little details on their own.
I speak from experience. In The Man From Beyond, the ghost has power through electrical currents, so everything it touches in the game has burn marks on it, and intense electrical sound effects accompany the ghost’s actions. We never point this out to the audience, though; we leave it to them to notice or not.
I also speak from future experience: we could spend two minutes in the upcoming Lucidity show explaining the neuroscience behind Dr. Newmark’s break-through technology that supports group-wide guaranteed lucid dreaming. But we won’t. We didn’t even write a first draft with that in. It’s boring. Nobody but the geekiest of Lore Boys care.
“WITNESS MEEEEEE knowing all the granular details of your WOOORLD!!!” (War Boys from Mad Max: Fury Road)
Don’t write for Lore Boys.
There will undoubtedly be information the players need to know. Divide up your world facts into need to know and nice to know. Embed nice to know as environmental discoveries for solo explorers. Embed your need to know information in bookend or bottlenecked scenes where everyone has something at stake.
Yep, even with need-to-know facts, we need to care, or we’ll tune out. Make opening scenes raise questions that are only answered later via dramatized exposition. Make the facts matter to character objectives. Exposition goes down easier when it comes with a good helping of drama: desire, conflict, surprise, change.
Oh my, I seem to have discovered this bureaucrat secretly worships a demon! Cool, cool. How does that impact what the character wants, or what I want? Does my team need to be super quiet now because Baphomet is always listening?
Make it matter. And please. Resist the temptation to tell me all about the demonology.
Baphomet was formalized by Victorian occultist Éliphas Lévi as a figure representing the absolute in symbolic form, an expression of occult natural forces that are explained by his magical theory of the Astral Light, the context of which…and I’ve already lost you, haven’t I?
Information is not interesting.
Writing is not facts
When writing your experiences (ideally at the start of project conception), remember the difference between writing that matters and writing that just… exists.
Backstory is not story, gossip is not drama, and information is not interesting.
Just because you have words doesn’t mean they do any work.
Writing is 90% structure, 10% words
Scenes are the most powerful tool at your disposal and will be what people remember best. Create moments that thwart your players and characters, or that produce irrevocable change.
Start always with what happens to the audience in the here and now. Give them a narrative they want to tell afterwards… and you may not spend a penny on marketing ever again.
It’s the end of the gift-giving season, and I’d like to offer the kind of post that might spark some fireworks for creators in the new year.
Let’s define the word “scene.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. What’s the difference between a gripping scene and a scene that people tune out?
I think with The Man From Beyond, we wrote scenes based on instinct, without a firm definition of “what makes a scene.” A fair amount of what writers do I think is instinct based on osmosis from years consuming storytelling across all sorts of media.
Writer’s workshop in progress.
To quote the artist-musician Brian Eno, intellect is often catching up with intuition.
But when you do have a firm definition and can stand back, do the intellectual check (not just the gut check), to see if you have written a scene, your work will achieve true consistency.
Basic definition
Merriam Webster: a scene is: “one of the subdivisions of a play,” but also potentially “the place of an occurrence or action,” as in “the scene of the crime.”
Oxford: a scene is “a part of a film, play or book in which the action happens in one place or is of one particular type.”
A scene is a discrete part of the continuous action of a story. It is often defined by a particular place, changing when the location changes, or when someone enters or exits. Something certainly is happening in a scene. Note that both of those definitions include a nice little word, “action.” Maybe begins to suggest movement.
But a two minute bit in which I make oatmeal is not really a scene, now, is it?
But what if… I’m signing a song to the morning sun, open the pantry to make my oatmeal, but discover that it’s gone, I forgot I ate it all yesterday. I break down sobbing on the kitchen tile floor because I fear I am beginning to lose my memory.
Now that’s a scene.
A scene is…
Change.
It’s that simple. The scene begins, your character expects one thing to happen, but then: SURPRISE! Something else happens instead.
If nothing changes in your scene, you have a wheels-spinning-in-place or slice-of-life bit that, unless you’re dedicated to some serious post-modern story-telling project, should be cut from the final edit. No one wants to watch me make oatmeal when it doesn’t at least overflow.
Drama in a bowl.
Put even more simply: you should never see a scene of someone knocking on the door and being cordially let inside.
I see this mistake a lot in all sorts of media: nothing changes by the end of the scene. Everything goes exactly as you expected, or worse, they TALK, and nothing happens. It’s boring, just like life. This mistake is being made at all levels of professionalism, beginners and Hollywood pros.
I prefer to call moments in which nothing changes “vignettes” rather than “scenes.” It’s a snapshot, a static moment, rather than an event. Vignettes are fine, you can make a whole show out of vignettes if you want, but events are more interesting.
Start looking for scenes as you consume your stories. Ask: did something change? Or did everything end just as it was when it started? You’ll find the scenes you enjoy the most involve change.
I sometimes like to say “a scene is surprise” because “surprise” is a bit more specific than “change.” Change is a little nebulous, but surprise is a more concrete box you can check. In a scene, someone needs to experience surprise. Something someone didn’t expect to happen, happens. In an immersive or in an escape room, the character can be surprised or your players can be surprised. Either one works! But you need to subvert expectations in every scene.
Thwart Your characters
Of course, it’s not enough to have a jack-in-the-box go off in your scene. The surprise has to mean something to someone in the scene.
Best served with stakes.
Your characters need to want something, what is called motivation. The character enters the scene wanting something. By the end of the scene, the character either is thwarted in their desire, or undergoes a redirect—they see a new avenue for getting what they want that they now must consider. One or the other.
Only by the end of the entire story can the character get what they want. (Or not—up to you.)
So let’s say my characters (or players) need to stay hidden in an attic. Then they bump into an old jack-in-the box. And the enemy finds them! STAKES.
Scenes in Escape Rooms and Immersives
What makes escape rooms and immersive theatre great is they deliver embodied surprise. It’s more powerful than the flat surprise happening to characters on a screen. People love discovering new things for themselves, whether that’s what’s in a previously locked box or what’s behind a closed door. Design for surprise, always.
A portal in Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return (Santa Fe). Meow Wolf loves surprise so much, they insist on closed doors everywhere that wreak havoc on their crowded crowd flow.
But surprise should come from more than just set and props. Characters can surprise players, too. You’ll use your non-playing characters best if they deliver unexpected things to the players. Remember that people are wayyyy more dynamic than sets.
And it can go the other way, too: players can surprise characters. Which is really exciting and totally not a thing that can happen in traditional theatre. As a performer, I love nothing more than when a player surprises me. As a writer, I create opportunities for the players to participate in the scene as the deliverer of surprise, the catalyst of change. It can be even more thrilling than “what’s behind that door.”
So if you have a video or voice over in your immersive, whether at the opening, closing, or in the middle, make sure it’s delivering surprise. If you have a live actor… oh, the possibilities! Actors love nothing more than delivering or receiving surprise. It’s really this little thing called drama.
The actor’s favorite element. Maybe everyone’s favorite element, really.
But even if you have no non-playing characters in your world, you still have scenes with your players to write. Write them for movement.
What is story?
Story is scene writ-large. Something BIG needs to change in a story. If the world is the same when I leave as when I entered, what’s the point?
If you’ve played a lot of escape rooms or done a few immersive theatre pieces, you know a big change doesn’t always happen by the end. I’m not a fan of it. These are not the experiences that stay with me.
Recommended Reading
If you’re inspired by this post, treat yourself right now to Pulitzer Prize winner David Mamet’s absolute power-screed on writing drama. It’s a rant to the writing staff of The Unit. It’ll take you all of five minutes to read. He says it all better than I do—and with more expletives.
Do not disappoint David Mamet.
An excerpt (yes, it is in all caps): “IF THE SCENE BORES YOU WHEN YOU READ IT, REST ASSURED IT WILL BORE THE ACTORS, AND WILL, THEN, BORE THE AUDIENCE, AND WE’RE ALL GOING TO BE BACK IN THE BREADLINE.”
Cameron and I enjoy reading this out loud every few months.
If you’re up for deeper dives…
In my self-guided tour, I found myself where many writers end up: at the feet of Robert McKee.
Robert McKee’s book Storyhas informed a great deal of my thinking, as has his equally excellent Dialogue. Heck, while you’re there, dive into Character, too.
To whet your appetite…
From Story: “Scene is unified around desire, action, conflict, and change.”
“Big helpings of static exposition choke interest.” (Dialogue)
“When scenes fail, the fault is rarely in the words; the solution will be found deep within event and character design. Dialogue problems are story problems.” (Dialogue)
“All stories dramatize the human struggle to move life from chaos to order, from imbalance to equilibrium.” (Dialogue)
“Plot is character; character is plot.” (Character)
There’s also the screenwriter’s book Save the Cat by Blake Snyder, which (in)famously offers a beat sheet, outlining the minute by minute moments of a successful film.
From Save the Cat: “Danger must be present danger. Stakes must be stakes for people we care about.”
If you’re an immersive creator, you will want to adapt this advice for our medium, which adds the twist of turning our audience into characters we need to write for. To quote David Spira of Room Escape Artist, “Immersive experiences are about living the moment: not showing and certainly not telling,” which challenges us to develop a new story-telling approach. That being said, I feel strongly we are closer to screen (images) than stage (words), so keep that in mind.
As the date for this year’s virtual Reality Escape Convention approaches, I am getting HYPE by remembering my biggest take-away from last year’s in-person convention in Boston. It’s been in my head ever since. If you bumped into me in the past year, I probably waxed on a little too long about the idea. I love this idea. Time to share it more formally.
In a workshop entitled, “Reflecting your Business in your Brand,” Stuart Bogaty of Trap’t challenged us with the question of why we were in business.
He said there are typically three root whys…
In it for the money
In it for you
In it for them
Stuart then asked us to rank these Three Whys by priority. Different businesses have different priorities, and ranking the three from most motivating to least motivating clarifies decisions that you’ve made—or will make.
Let’s dive in…
for the money
Money is the most obvious why. Most people labor for money. It’s a bonus if they enjoy the labor, but money is usually the primary goal. Small business owners are no different. Many start with the dream they might just strike it rich. The rest at least dream of replacing or surpassing the income of their more boring job.
It is not exactly a glamorous why. Who wants to be a fat cat capitalist when you could be a starving artist? *Commence wild eye rolling*
I hate you, RENT.
Let me push back against that idea. Money is an important why that (I swear) some people prioritize too low.
Yes, there can be a certain commercial sheen in a work created just for the money: it can feel shallow, passionless, rudderless, baffling the viewer into asking “Why does this exist?” Such experiences usually exit through the gift shop. But valuing profit does not guarantee that fate.
Profit and art can not just coincide, but should. Artists who neglect profit either stop being artists (we have to eat, too, you know), or depend upon a patron or outside source of income that, again, makes them and their work extraordinarily vulnerable. I abhor the notion that to make something that is profitable—that “the people like”—is to bastardize the purity of your artistic vision a priori. But I digress.
I really hate RENT.
The degree of devotion to money can vary, from “maximize profit at all costs” to “as long as we’re in the black every month.”
Of course, go too far into maximizing your profits, and you diminish your product. That’s the story of most escape room chains. They prioritize growth to the point of destroying their product and thereby risk the entire escape room industry with their broken games and lost-at-sea game masters not even empowered to take a freaking SHARPIE to a prop where the Sharpie marks have completely faded!!!
“You can do it—fix it now! I’ll just stand here and wait! What do you mean, no?”
Not that I’m speaking from an explicit experience or anything.
The Escape Game is a great example of a business that has money as its primary why, but hasn’t sacrificed the quality of its product in that pursuit. They understand that the best way to make money is to deliver a consistent product that delights a wide range of guests with best-in-class customer service. Rather than create new games for each of their locations, they perfect the ones they have—a cost-saving measure if there ever were one in this industry (I don’t know about you, but working on something new is so damn expensive). I recommend their games to locals and traveling enthusiasts alike.
You can tell that money is their goal because they went back to public bookings after the pandemic, which we all know makes for a weaker product but a better bottom line. But rumor has it if you contact them that you are an enthusiast who is (coughcough) likely to ruin other people’s games (cough), they may offer to make your booking private. Enthusiast money also speaks, apparently.
The Escape Game’s games will never top TERPECA, but they shouldn’t. That wouldn’t be in service of their top priority.
For you
Most small businesses owners could make more money working for somebody else. But that’s not what they want the most. They want something more—a challenge. They start a small business to serve themselves: to be their own boss, to do work they enjoy, to give themselves the space to showcase or grow their talents.
Maximizing profits rarely requires maximizing human potential, leaving so many of us bored and unexplored.
The world is crowded, and people are so creative. They have to claim their own space if they are to explore their creativity fully.
That is one of the things that made me fall so hard for the immersive arts. While the barrier to entry is not as low now as it once was, the immersive arts promises careers that previously were under lockdown, with only Hollywood and Broadway producers holding the keys. Start your own business, and look who’s holding the keys now?
Ever played a game where the creator wants to show you something in progress that they’re working on? Or give you a backstage tour? They always have such joy in their voice. I love it. That’s someone who is in it for themselves. Their self-exploration is what drives the business.
These types of businesses are called lifestyle businesses, as they exist to yield a desired lifestyle to the owner. Such owners may reach a point of contentment with their business, where it’s enough for them to maintain what they have. They don’t need to open new locations because adding more of the same work for more money isn’t a bargain that sounds attractive to these types.
Or they’ll go the opposite route, and it’s never enough. They will be always working on something new and something more ambitious than, quite frankly, it needs to be. But if you are ultimately serving yourself with your ambitious build, then maybe it is as ambitious as it needs to be.
If Felix Barrett’s recent press statement is to be believed, Punchdrunk has produced their last masked show with the closing of The Burnt City and will pursue new structures ahead. Which I think is wild—they have a model that works. But that’s what a business in it for the owners would choose to do. They’re bored. They crave what is new.
Look, Felix, but I’M NOT BORED. The Burnt City is exquisite.
For them
Finally, we come to those who are externally motivated by them, whoever they are: the audience, viewer, player, customer. These creators will spare no expense to deliver something that truly wows the receiver. The sky is not too high.
It’s as if they are in the business of gift-giving.
Are they in love? I wonder.
These owners will be especially keen to receive feedback and adapt the product accordingly. They will want to make sure it works for the gift-receiver. They will often act irresponsibly when it comes to money.
People who prioritize their audience are how we get such indulgences as Molly’s Game and The Dome. Rumor has it neither will make their money back, but rumor has it the creators just don’t care. That’s not what they set out to do. They set out to blow your mind. That’s what matters.
Patented Dome Smiles™
Probably most TERPECA owners are them-motivated people. The games that make that list are irresponsible and off-the-hook.
Enjoy the gift.
My ranking
It will come as little surprise to my avid readers. For my part in Strange Bird Immersive, I am motivated by…
Them.
Money.
Me.
I want to move people. I want to connect at the heart. I want to make my audience feel violently alive, aware of the full span of their lungs, flush with possibility. I want to do that so badly. And I will rewrite it if you don’t get that.
Perhaps the order of 2 and 3 was surprising to you? Where I ranked money surprised me, too. Fiscally, we’ve always structured our business to run a responsible profit, but I’d like to go further still in pursuing that value. Lucidity was designed at the outset to counter the fiscally questionable structure of The Man From Beyond—without sacrificing quality, of course.
It’s wonderful to create things, the sense of purpose I have every morning shoots me out of bed like a rocket, but at the end of the day, I am very open to replicating our experiences in other locations (that is, to make money), rather than always pushing the boundaries of what I can do. Opening other locations some day also serves my primary goal of reaching more people.
How to measure a successful business?
Once I had this lens at my disposal, I started to understand the wide variety of businesses out there. It has made me far less judgy of other people’s approaches. There are many ways to define a successful business beyond maximizing profits.
I’ve always resented immersive experiences that can afford to abandon all hope of making the investment back, as it makes those of us who don’t have that funding look weak in comparison. But nowadays, I feel less angry with the ones who can throw profit to the winds and more grateful that they choose to spend their money on me. So now I simply say, “Thank you.”
I also understand businesses that stop making new things, are not in the most optimal location, or are not doing particularly marquee-worthy things but are perfectly happy as they are. The owners are pursuing a life that makes them happy. Is that a bad business? No!
So next time you play a game or attend an immersive show, speculate on what their why might be.
And I encourage you to make your own list. Maybe it will surprise you, like it did me. It will help to step back and understand yourself—and may help you make your best business decisions yet.
Recon 2023
One of the best decisions you can make for any escape room business is to attend Recon this year, August 19-20, 2023. It’s virtual, so it’s easy to attend. I’m not paid to promote it or anything; it’s just a phenomenal professional opportunity I look forward to every year. The talks will be gold, but the connections more so. I would love to meet you at one of the extended “happy hours” in the wee hours of the morning and hear more about what motivates you.
Today I’m exploring the trickiest part of the structure: bottlenecks.
Escape rooms and immersive entertainment are wild, over-stimulating experiences with so much happening all at once. That’s why we love them. Bottlenecks, however, offer moments where one and only one thing is happening, and that moment of focus offers the designer the best opportunity to deliver surprise (narrative, scenic, puzzle, or otherwise).
Defining Bottlenecks
Bottlenecks are moments in an open-style experience where nothing else can be done BUT this One Thing. The One Thing could be a puzzle, or it could be a scene.
At bottlenecks, you have the complete attention of all the players. Immersive entertainment struggles in not having control of the camera lens like a film director does, but for the length of the bottleneck, you have camera-like focus. What would you like to bring into focus?
Wait, Aren’t Bottlenecks bad?
You’ve probably heard escape room enthusiasts gripe about bottlenecks. They complain about having only one puzzle to solve, and disliked it either because: they were left out of the solve, or the solve took too long, or both. (I’m looking at you, Mayan Sudoku.) It’s a common mistake to encounter in the genre.
But a bottleneck is neither inherently good nor evil. It is a neutral tool, and its moral qualities depend entirely on how you employ it.
Unlike traffic, which is always evil (please, let’s all learn how to Zipper Merge)
If you have a bottleneck puzzle (or what designers call a linear moment in gameplay), try to involve as many people as possible. If you do, the time to solve your bottleneck puzzle can expand. A cutscene should also engage everyone present.
If you can’t involve everyone in your bottleneck puzzle, then keep the puzzle short and simple, so people don’t begin to notice that they’re standing around while someone else tackles the puzzle.
If it’s a bottleneck scene, it should be under two minutes. A rule I’ve derived from experience: we used to have a bottleneck scene that was three minutes. Attention held much better when we cut it down by thirty seconds. It’d be even better if it were two minutes. Think of scenes at bottlenecks as cutscenes. You can’t go on for long, or the player will press X to skip.
Designing both for team engagement and time spent will reduce its villainy. And a bottleneck can be used for so much good…
Plan Your Bottlenecks
Unlike beginnings and endings, bottlenecks do not happen naturally. They are not easy to slip-in after the fact. Plan your bottlenecks as early as you can in the design process.
When you begin structuring your experience, you probably have a few surprises, wow moments, and unexpected turns in the story line. Great! That makes things memorable. You’ll want to make sure each and every one of those turns is placed properly at a bottleneck.
In an open-world experience, if an amazing moment is not at a proper bottleneck, some guests will miss it. Maybe they were pages deep into a logic puzzle across the room or even in a totally different room. And hey, not everybody gets to see every cool thing in an experience—it’s okay if some players miss anything that is nice-to-know. But it’s not okay to miss anything need-to-know. Big reveals, and especially plot twists, are must-see moments. If you do not deliberately structure the experience to have a bottleneck at that moment, you risk leaving some of your players behind.
Not properly structuring wow moments is such a common problem in the escape room industry, that on their escape room tours, Room Escape Artist made a player rule that if you suspect something really magical is about to happen once you input a solution, you call out to everyone in your team, “HEYYYY EVERYONE!!! I’M ABOUT TO ENTER THE CODE, AND I THINK SOMETHING COOOOOOL MIGHT HAPPEN!!!!” The fact that I have adopted this rule whenever I play tells you how structurally broken so many experiences are.
But I know we can get it right.
Built-In Bottlenecks
Good news is many escape rooms have built-in bottlenecks. The end of every game is a guaranteed bottleneck, so send a team off with a wow!
Games with multiple rooms also have built-in bottlenecks. Often when a team enters a new room, they have completed all the puzzles in the previous room (although not always). When they are working on the last puzzle in a room, they are at a bottleneck.
At the end of each room, I recommend…
Create a final puzzle in the room that the other puzzles funnel into or unlock (this is often called a meta-puzzle). Make this bottleneck puzzle a memorable puzzle, and involve as many players as you can. (But make sure it doesn’t overstay its welcome).
Reveal something magical when it’s solved.
Have a scene, whether via live actor, video or voice-over that progresses the narrative, preferably in a surprising way. (But make sure it doesn’t overstay its welcome).
Reveal the entrance to the next room, preferably in an epic way.
Okay, yes, this is more a wish list than a checklist, and plenty of fantastic games don’t do these things. Even Strange Bird doesn’t do all of these things. But it’d be really cool if we did.
The order of the wish list matters. Note that Event Number 3 “Cool Scene” does NOT come after Event Number 4 “New Room Revealed.” If you reverse that order…guess what you get?
A bunch of hyped-up players yelling over your epic villain escalating the stakes. I love narrative, but even I struggle to have the discipline to listen and “SHUSH!” everybody when we enter that new room. Nobody likes being shushed.
Don’t squander your moments of perfect focus by putting beats in the wrong order.
Whenever I hear escape room creators claim that players don’t care about their story, I always suspect the game is not structured so that players can follow the story.
It takes a lot of discipline to get right.
Bottlenecks within a room
You can design bottlenecks within a single room, although it’s trickier than working with room transitions.
Even if players are at a proper bottleneck, and nothing is left for them to solve, how do they know it? If a player doesn’t feel they are at a bottleneck, whether they are or not will not matter: they will keep playing.
A progress meter—whether literal or metaphoric—can be useful here. If players have been collecting things, and they know they need three of those things, and they just got the third, and they finally get to use all three things (OMG!!!)—you’ve got a great moment for a Bottleneck Wow-Surprise. When the progress meter hits 100%, players know that they have done the task, and they can safely focus on only what’s in front of them.
Linear Gameplay
Some escape rooms are structured where one puzzle leads to another, which unlocks another, etc. We call this a “linear game.” I haven’t played many purely linear games. Most games employ moments of linear gameplay and other moments of open-path gameplay, where multiple puzzles are available at once. A good mix provides a good balance.
Deploy a linear structure when you have puzzles you do not want players to miss—whether because they progress the narrative or are just ridiculously cool.
An early play test of our upcoming game Lucidity revealed that we needed to restructure a room. The room initially was fully open-path, but when play-testers argued we had both “Wow” and narratively crucial moments inside the puzzles, we restructured the room to a more linear format. Of course, that led to redesigning puzzles from 1-2 person solves to 4-person solves, since linear puzzles just aren’t fun if you’re left out.
Can you artificially create bottlenecks?
Let’s say you already have an experience but, try as you might, can’t rewrite it with proper bottlenecks (restructuring is hard, I know.)
A foundation is not easy to fix.
But if a bottleneck only works if players think they are at a bottleneck, can you fake a bottleneck? Yes. Yes, you can.
We ran into this problem in The Man From Beyond when we had a scene at a moment that was not a true bottleneck. Many players played over the scene.
Then we took the lights down. It didn’t work. Then we got a new dimmer pack to isolate in light the thing we wanted in focus and and then took the rest of the lights WAYYYY DOWN. It worked. Much to our surprise, lights can direct player focus. It’s not perfect, but it helps patch over a missing bottleneck. Take note that we found this only works if you are insanely aggressive with the look (if you’re pulsing an object, it needs to be seriously strong; if you’re picking out an object, literally black out everything else.) Go big with the look, and then go one step bigger.
Video is even better than lighting. If you black out a room and use a video, you can mostly claim player focus. Mostly. A handful of folks still won’t take the hint, though.
Unfortunately, we can’t report in our experiments that sound can hone player focus. It’s too easy to yell over.
Now an actor…an actor in a spotlight (thus: combined with aggressive lighting) may be able to hone attention during gameplay…but it’s still not going to be one hundred percent. It’s not an experiment I am eager to run.
And if you have a true bottleneck, video, live-actor, spotlights, and sound can also help enhance focus, so employ these tools generously.
Fake a bottleneck if you must—and we do—but at the end of the day, being interrupted while you’re exploring something else will never be as fun as all the threads coming together in a proper bottleneck.
Check your structure before you wreck your show.
Bottlenecks in immersive theatre
Immersive theatre has more wide-ranging structures than escape rooms. Some experiences are linear (like dark rides), so directing attention is easy, whereas others are fully open-world, which poses more challenges for mid-experience focus. While strong bookends are a common tool in immersive theatre, bottlenecks are rarer.
The industry’s go-to touchstone of Sleep No More has some clever near-bottlenecks. While they are not guaranteed to capture everyone like the finale does, the Banquet and the Rave typically capture every audience member at least once per show, via the magic of the sheer number of characters present at the scene. Rather than collecting interesting objects for a puzzle, they are collecting interesting people for a scene. It’s clever.
TL;DR
Games are chaotic. Bottlenecks are your besties. Bottlenecks are the best tool for creating player focus mid-experience. (Lights and video are okay, but consider them as band-aids). In an escape room, involve everyone in bottleneck puzzles, and keep bottleneck cutscenes under 2 minutes.
And remember this is not the moment for your villain to start a monologue.
Plan bottlenecks as soon as you can in your design process, and you will get perfect attendance at your Wow-Surprise.
So…what do you want to bring into focus? I can’t wait to see it.
In Bookends and Bottlenecks, I explored the structure Strange Bird Immersive uses to tell stories within the chaos of an escape room. I then specifically investigated the value of an inciting incident in an escape room. Giving players the motivation to act will make their achievement at the end of the game all the more valuable.
Let’s look now at that moment of achievement: the fulfilling finale.
Did you have fun?
Escape rooms have myriad goals: you need to escape the room, or get the McGuffin, or change something in the space, like lifting a curse. But no matter the goal, the ending is almost always the same.
Your Game Master opens the exit door and says…
“DID YOU HAVE FUN???”
No matter how on-point our GM has been through the experience, I absolutely loathe them in this moment.
Why?
They just cut my adventure short. They broke the magic circle of the world, signaled the end of the fun—not two seconds after the most thrilling moment of the game!
Imagine you’re riding a roller coaster, but right after the highest drop, the train suddenly stops, and the park employee says “Get out, its over.”
Whiplash guaranteed.
Escape rooms are phenomenal vehicles for emotions. They thrill us. We need time to come down from the climax.
THE WORLD MADE RIGHT
Something is wrong with the world in the game. (If you deliver an inciting incident like you should, the players will even see how the world gets all wrong). You then ask the players to make things right.
To be explicit, making things right feels great!
They feel like heroes, just without all the spandex.
Players need time inside the world to enjoy their accomplishment.
If they helped a character out, show how things are now better for that character.
If they just saved the world, have the hint-mechanism character report back to the team the vast significance of what they did.
If they obtained the vaccine, maybe they disperse it into the air. Maybe they hear on a radio, walkie-talkie, or in-world TV about how many zombies are turning back to humans.
If players are escaping a serial killer, maybe you give them the opportunity to call the police at the end.
If players just got the key to escape the room (the simplest escape room story), let them open the door and rush into the hallway.
Find a way to remind the players of what was at stake and show the impact of their efforts. A conclusion will elevate your game from just another escape room into a froth-worthy adventure.
You know. Like that thing you sell on your website.
The blurb is the product you are selling. Deliver on the promise of your premise.
Take the time
The concluding bookend should be off the game clock. The players achieved their goal, and now they get to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
You can take as long as you want to end the story. It can take thirty seconds or much longer. I think the end of The Man From Beyond from climax to player exit is 15 minutes long.
I know this industry’s greatest pain point is throughput—we all have ceilings on how many games we can run on a Saturday. And I admit The Man From Beyond is too damn long for what we charge.
But concluding your narrative adventure should not be optional. I promise, you can do it without adding 15 minutes between your game times.
What about losing?
Readers of Immersology know by now that I have a very strong bias for designing escape rooms to be won by the vast majority, if not all teams.
But even The Man From Beyond has a losing scene. We hate running it, because the world is not made right again. But we do take the time inside the world to bring players out of the game, to come down from the high of “there’s one minute left on the clock!” In fact, one of our characters is made quite happy by the losing condition.
Write a losing ending. Don’t cheap out and have the Game Master come in. Maybe you can find a way to make losing fulfilling—often horror escape rooms are more interesting when you lose them than when you win! Yes, losing is no fun, you don’t get to feel like heroes, but a losing scene will bring the adventure to a close. Players will appreciate your commitment to the story.
A resolution by any other name would smell as sweet
In literary studies, endings go by many names.
Fans of the linear Aristotle’s Poetics call it the denouement (French for “unknotting”). The world was knotty, but the conclusion unties the knot, re-stabilizing the world. It brings a quiet moment of peace.
You probably learned this map in English class
Fans of the circular Hero’s Journey call it The Return: the moment the hero goes back home, but home is now different, after the hero’s transformation.
A less well-known dramatic structure map worth studying.
I like to call it the Fulfilling Finale. This phrase makes it clear what you need to do. I like the image of feeling full after a meal, not rushing up from the dinner table the moment you cleaned your plate. I also like alliteration a lot, and it pairs well with the pithy “inciting incident.”
At the risk of hubris, here is my map…
Note that the entirety of this map happens inside the imaginary world (aka the Magic Circle).
Whatever you call it, make sure your resolution accomplishes two goals:
One factual: How the world has changed.
One emotional: Come down from the climax.
A strong ending turns a game into a memory your players will carry with them. Stick the landing.
Make it memorable.
For more on escape room finales, check out Richard Burns’s article on Room Escape Artist, “Untie Your Escape Room Stories.” Let the reader note, Richard and I are actively searching for something we disagree about.
The bookends of the experience are off-the-clock and where you can invest the majority of your story-telling, since there is no game to compete for player attention. I’d argue the beginning bookend is more crucial than the end, and could be the difference maker between just another escape room and an immersive adventure. Let’s focus on that beginning.
Most escape rooms take the easy way out for beginnings: they tell you the opening part of the adventure, whether through a game master reading a script or through a polished video. “You were wrongly imprisoned for a crime.” “You got lost in a cave.” “You awoke the tomb’s curse.” “The cat stole your keys and ran into the neighbor’s backyard!”
Wow, that sounds exciting. But note that word tell. No one likes being told.
The right is a far more exciting thing to experience than the left.
What if we follow the mantra of all writing—and show rather than tell?
Most escape adventures start in Act 2 and skip Act 1. That’s like skipping the foundation of a house. It takes more work, but imagine how magical experiencing an inciting incident could be!
The game master takes you down a dark hallway where your team stands trial. An actor—or large projected video—of a judge sentences your team to life for murder. You have no idea what she’s talking about! You didn’t do it! Nooooooo!
Too late. You already had your right to a fair trial!
The game master, now a warden, ushers you into your game: a jail cell escape room.
How much more motivated are you now to break out and find the evidence that ensures your innocence?
What if you’re touring a cave with your GM-turned-tour-guide, your lanterns flicker off, there’s sound effects of a cave-in, and when your lantern is restored, they’re gone? The GM yells through the “cave-in” (entrance door) and implores you to find another way out!
What if you’re poking innocently around a tomb door, and awaken the curse? You had no idea this place was cursed! (There’s so much magic in that moment when the supernatural first reveals itself.)
What if a cat-puppet appears from a tree hole, seduces you into petting it, and then steals your keys? Now you need to break into your neighbor’s backyard!
Mischievous Mr. Mistoffelees strikes again!
Are you having fun yet? I am, just imagining these games.
The inciting incident is the moment where something changes in the world that spurs our heroes (the players) to action. Without that moment, they could go about their lives, but with it, they must do something to right the world that will transform them into heroes.
All of these moments are moments of surprise. Escape rooms are all about surprise. And so are stories!
Showing the inciting incident makes escaping, obtaining the McGuffin—whatever the game goal is—meaningful. Telling the inciting incident results in a conclusion that has no weight. I can’t tell you how many games I’ve played that ended in “Yay…we got the…thing…that somehow helps a problem I’ve forgotten about…?” Things that happen to us have a lasting power that things told to us do not.
What about in media res?
In media res is a storytelling technique that plunges the reader/viewer into the middle of a story that has a long chain of events preceding it. It challenges the viewer to piece together what has happened before and gives the opening a strong sense of urgency. (Note that usually in media res still has an inciting incident for the plot. Think Luke finding the droids on Tatooine in Star Wars—the story doesn’t begin with the Empire takeover.)
In media res works if you are using the players as viewers. Think of Sleep No More: there’s no inciting incident for you, the viewer. You are not called to be heroic, nor is there anything you can do to help. The characters do experience an inciting incident…
The witches’s prophecy in the Hotel Lobby (Sleep No More)
But inciting incidents are necessary for the characters, not you, the guests. Immersive theatre can use in media res when the audience is purely passive, but escape rooms cannot, as the players are far more than viewers.
That’s what’s so cool about escape room stories. They are second-person narratives, first and foremost—you are at the center of the story, and what happens to the world depends on you.
You can encounter characters that are in media res in escape rooms, and that can make things exciting. But if you cast the players as previously-motivated characters rather than giving them the spur on the spot, they’re going to have trouble feeling properly motivated.
Where to begin the story?
In The Man From Beyond, Strange Bird invites you to a Houdini séance hosted by Madame Daphne. Then something goes wrong in the séance that has never happened before. You see it happen, and it is surprising. And because you are the ones who happen to be there, you have to do something.
The Man From Beyond starts at the beginning of your story; before arriving at Madame Daphne’s, your life was normal. We like to craft stories that hew close to reality. But what if you want a more complicated casting of the players and a less reality-based world?
In Hatch Escapes’s Lab Rat, you are cast as rat-sized humans in a human-sized rat world. How did the world come to be this way? They don’t show that—they don’t even tell that. But an event does happen that starts you on the adventure to save yourselves. That works great!
You can start at the moment that a usual world becomes unusual or from within an unusual world. Just because there’s been an apocalypse does not mean you have to show the apocalypse (although that would be very cool!). But at the very least, show the threat of the present world and then the moment of discovering that if we do X, the world will be better. That will really make me want to do X!
Whatever the role of the players, give the players the motivation to play—a narrative motivation that goes beyond “win/lose.”
How long to spend on the inciting incident?
The Man From Beyond spends 30 minutes on set-up and inciting incident (Act 1 in our five-act structure). That’s insanely long and a large part of what makes us a premium escape room. We specialize in immersive theatre, and our professional actors are exquisite.
I would not spend that much time on the inciting incident without live actors. Live actors (or live puppets—puppets are AMAZING—see cat puppet above) can hold attention better than any other story-telling vehicle. If you’re not using actors, keep your openings short.
It could be three minutes, or even thirty seconds. Just long enough to 1) set-up a normal world, and then 2) deliver the surprising thing that incites them to act. It doesn’t require a special room nor hiring more staff. You can incite on the cheap. But it does require special thought and must include a moment of surprise.
Surprise them early and often.
Design your inciting incident to your strengths and resources. And trust me. It’s worth it. Without experiencing an inciting incident, your players get only the shadow of an adventure. With it, and they will remember what they did that day.
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.
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!
Dedicated to my sister who wanted me to explore the recurrence of the word gift in this blog,and my father, who told me over the phone to write this theory down!
With the close of the gift-giving season, I’ve been reflecting about the greatest gift I’ve ever received. Immersive theatre gave me something, something extraordinary, that goes beyond creative purpose and a career in the arts (both tremendous gifts). It gave me myself.
By which I do not mean I “discovered my true self.” We are always talking as if the truth is buried, and if we just have the right archeological tools mixed with the right tenacity (or the right therapist), we can uncover the True Self. The True Self has always been there, since birth, or at least since childhood, and it is our lifelong task to Know Thyself.
That is not what I mean. I mean that immersive theatre taught me that my identity is fluid, able to flex to given circumstances. It taught me that the “I” I call myself is much more expansive than I ever imagined.
The self: mesmerizing, horrifying, fluid.
Western notions of fixed identity
I cannot lay claim to intimate knowledge of Eastern traditions, but in the Western culture I consume, we think in terms of the True Self. Whether at birth or in the crucible of childhood, we supposedly solidify our identity early—and do not deviate from it. Children may learn and play, but adults are certainly set. Think about stories from your childhood that your mother likes to tell, and how they bespeak your present-day personality, crystal-clear even at a tender age. Adults are simply not expected to change much—that’s why marriages can supposedly work.
But marriages don’t always work, do they? Hmm…
We take quizzes online to uncover the True Self, want to know which Hogwarts house we’d be sorted into, exchange our Myers-Briggs personality types with friends, so we can better understand each other. I even buy into the Five Love Languages thing. Mine are, surprise-surprise, determined by the love languages my parents expressed to me as a child.
There are probably kernels of truth in this theory of the self, but like most theories, we’ve taken it way too far.
For one, it’s overwhelmingly fatalistic. There’s not much room for free will here. You chose your career because of who you are. You chose your partner because of who you are. You have kids because you couldn’t choose otherwise—it’s who you are. When really, aren’t we just making it all up as we go along?
Someone very dear to me once transitioned from introvert to extrovert. Verifiable Myers-Briggs reversal and everything. Everyone was shocked. We didn’t think a change like that was possible. Suddenly we were dealing with a whole new person, with different desires and needs.
But this shouldn’t be shocking. People change—yes, even as adults. Our identity is not ordained or gifted to us by a Creator. We craft our own identities on a daily basis, in our situations and our choices within them. I call this “the situated self.”
IDENTITY as what you do
At those awful, theoretical cocktail parties where strangers for some reason gather together, we ask and anticipate one simple question: “What do you do?”
That’s a very interesting question. It suggests that identity comes from doing, from the actions we take. But that’s not really what we’re asking. We really mean, “What’s your job?”—a more boring question. The answer to that question supposedly encapsulates identity, gives the querent a succinct portrait of the stranger. Additional follow-up questions include, “Are you married? What does your partner do? Do you have any kids?” And maybe, if you’re lucky, we get to, “What do you do for fun?” These questions cover how you spend your time. They get to “the point” fairly quickly. What role do you play?
Your life situation molds your identity. Being and doing are intertwined—that I agree with. We experience existential crisis whenever we lose a job, divorce, etc., in part because our identity is tied up in our situation. The situation is changed, and so identity must change. Now that most people don’t stay with one job for 30 years, we’re beginning to open up to the notion that people can indeed do many things and so can be many things.
IMMERSIVE Theatre’s NOTION OF FLUID IDENTITY
In traditional theatre, the audience does nothing. They are not active, they are not present to the performers. It is rare for audiences to leave traditional theatre with an expanded sense of self. That’s not what it’s designed to do.
Enter an immersive theatre piece or an escape room, and you—body and all—find yourself in a radically different situation, a place and circumstance you’ve never encountered before or dreamed possible. Whether you’re cast in a specific role as an Egyptian archeologist or just given a task to perform, you are role-playing. You’re doing new things and so try on a new identity.
Yes, it’s make-believe. But that doesn’t make it any less real.
Humans are ultimately conservative. We like life to be predictable, each day to follow a structure similar to the last. We don’t like shifting situations, we don’t want to change our identity. No one would ever elect to change careers every year. But for us to do out-of-the-ordinary things requires encountering an inciting event from which we must take action. The old way of doing things just won’t work anymore in the new circumstances. Something must be done, and we must step up to the plate.
That, my friends, is participating in a story. Stories require conflict, but we eschew conflict in life. Immersive entertainment creates a safe space for us to encounter an inciting event and so take extraordinary action and become extraordinary people. Nothing is at risk here, but the reward is very real.
In escape rooms and immersive theatre, I have: lied to an Alzheimer’s patient, embarrassed a naked man when his lover asked me to, drunk glitter Champagne, stepped on a friend’s foot without even noticing, pushed strangers out of my way, french-kissed a stranger, stacked a deck in a casino, reunited lovers, summoned a ghost, sung to whales, translated binary, kept secrets, squeezed through cell bars, jumped through a window, flown up and down four stories of stairs as fast as the man I was following.
This is me. These are actions I am capable of—in the right situation. I carry all of this knowledge with me now. And sometimes I like to fly up stairs in parking garages, just to check my current capabilities.
And I’m no runner. But I guess, in the right situation, I am.
Some of these actions I’m proud of, some I’m ashamed of, all of it I find surprising. Radical departures from my usual narrative of “who I am.” It’s empowering. And it’s in my body as a true memory—I was there. This is what I did.
This is the gift of immersive theatre: to call an audience to action inside of imaginary circumstances. It awakes us from our slumbering adult selves and invites us to play, to explore new identities, like children or actors do, and potentially, to take a new identity home. Talk about a souvenir.
Quality immersive theatre transports the audience into an easy-to-believe world, but falls short of requiring them to lead the story, as children or larpers do so easily, so un-self-consciously. That’s a good thing. It makes this kind of play accessible. The circumstance is all there for you. All you have to do is act. Go on, try on somebody else tonight. This could be you!
A blank slate.
And it is you. When an immersive experience is well-designed, I leave with a strong sense that I can be anyone, do anything. I can choosemy identity.
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