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.
Flashback to Boston 2022, Cameron and I gave a talk on “The Magic Circle: Delivering Game Changing Immersion” at the Reality Escape Convention. It was part tell, part show, and everyone in that room left with a pledge to deepen their immersive experiences. One creator told me they implemented a key change that very day, and I’ve heard the term “Magic Circle” in discussions ever since.
It had a real impact.
With permission from the RECON team, ever eager to propel the industry as I am, I am presenting the core content of that talk here to share with a wider audience.
The immersion technique you’ll read about today you can implement without great expense, perhaps even before the day is done.
If you enjoy this article, RECON 2024 is coming up in Los Angeles, August 18-19. You’ll hear from thought leaders in the industry, on topics from game iteration and storytelling to marketing and managing contractors.
Let’s begin with a tale of two escape rooms…
Code Name: Eagle
Your game master greets you in the lobby. You sign waivers, use the restroom, lock up your stuff, the game master teaches you how to use a directional lock.
Once escorted inside the room, your team is immersed in a replica fine arts museum. It’s beautifully lit. You can see the brushstrokes on the paintings, and a statue looms over you. There’s a lightning flash through a window, and a thunderclap follows. The GM grabs a remote and turns on the TV above the door. You watch a 2-minute rules video. Then you watch a 2-minute scenario video, telling you are heist team, Code Name: Eagle, here to steal a painting.
“My name is Susan, call for Susan if you need a hint!” She starts the clock and leaves. When you ask for a hint, you get a memo on the TV. When your team successfully nabs the painting, Susan opens the exit door and asks…
“DID YOU HAVE FUN???”
Now imagine a different game.
Code Name: FALCON
Your game master greets you in the lobby. You sign waivers, use the restroom, lock up your stuff, the game master teaches you how to use a directional lock. You GM leads you down a hallway where you watch a two-minute rules video.
The GM hands you a backpack, opens the game room door, and quickly shuts it. Your team is immersed in a replica fine arts museum. It’s beautifully lit. You can see the brushstrokes on the paintings, and a statue looms over you. There’s a lightning flash through a window, and a thunderclap follows.
Suddenly you hear a sound from the backpack:
“Schrk. Team Falcon. Are you in the nest? I repeat. This is your hacker, Phoenix. Are you in the nest?”
You open the backpack, find the walkie-talkie, and say, “We’re in, Phoenix. What do we do next?”
“First, you need to find a way to disable the cameras. Communication is risky, but let me know if you need my assistance. Over.”
When you ask for a hint, Phoenix is there for you over the walkie talkie. When your team successfully nabs the painting, Phoenix yells, “GO! GO! GO! I’ve got the systems down for the next ten seconds! Make your escape NOW!”
You rush out into the hallway, painting in hand, and then your GM aka Phoenix congratulates you on a successful mission.
Which would you rather play?
Do I even need to ask? I didn’t think so.
But these games and their customer journeys are close cousins. They have the same hosting ritual, the same rules video, the same set, the same puzzles.
What’s different is the commitment to the Magic Circle. The creator of Code Name: Falcon respects the world of the heist, taking it as a truth. Players experience the immersive adventure of a heist, just as the owner promised they would get on the website.
Here are competing schematics of the two games.
In Eagle, the greeting and lock tutorial are outside the circle, with the game inside. But the Rules Video, Scenario Video, Hint System, and Congrats, keep breaking the Magic Circle, constantly reminding the team that this is just a game.
In Falcon, everything that addresses the experience as a game takes places outside the game room. The Rules video is in a hallway. There is no scenario video, in its place is an in-world introduction. The hint system is in-world, even the exit from the game stayed in-world, with the out-of-world congratulations happening outside.
And the cost difference between a Magic Circle and no Magic Circle? A walkie-talkie, a backpack, and training GMs to talk like the Hacker Phoenix. Oh, wait, actually it may be net cheaper, as Falcon doesn’t require a scenario video. A little bit of script took its place.
This is a magic less about money and more about commitment.
the Magic Circle Defined
The Magic Circle is the boundary between the ordinary and imagined world. The border is a transition point, a threshold. Within awaits a new world with new rules and the need for new behaviors. Weddings, conferences, sports, board games, rituals, these are all Magic Circles we encounter in our every day.
Hallowed.
I believe the term first appears in Homo Ludens (1938) by Johan Huizinga, a Dutch cultural historian. The book examines the importance of play in developing culture.
“Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the playground. The arena, the card table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function playgrounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.” (Homo Ludens)
Take that in. Read it again.
If this sounds like I’m suggesting that the play of an escape room is in fact sacred, well, I am. We are talking about magic, after all. This is higher plane stuff, the stuff that makes life worth living.
Kids treat play seriously. Adults need play just as badly, but they need commitment from the designer to feel comfortable joining in. They need a leader.
We’ve all had that embarrassed game host, apologizing in body language or even in words for how silly all the make-believe they’re about to deliver is, only half committing to it. And then the experience itself keeps interrupting you with reminders it’s just a silly game. That higher plane couldn’t be further out of reach.
Be the lead kid. Dare to plant your feet and ask the question, “Will you play with me?” More than mechatronics or smoke machines, committing to the Magic Circle is the difference between a nicely decorated game and a cinematic adventure.
I still want to play pirates. I bet you do, too.
But that lead kid commitment must come from both the designer and the staff.
within the Circle
Once players are inside your world, you want to ensure consistency. Follow the simple rule of thumb, familiar to actors…
…except think of it on the scale of the whole world, rather than just the people in it.
You’ll want to start with a fully believable space. Finish your set, floor to ceiling. Leave no trace behind that you built this world from Home Depot.
Lighting fundamentally transforms your space into another world. Lighting is seriously powerful magic. If I could snap my fingers and improve one production value at every escape room facility, it would be the lighting.
Worklights. Only employees ever see this. No shadows = no soul.
Game play lights. Much better.
Séance lights. Shadows abound.
Consider appropriate sound for the world. Are there any practical sound effects, like a fireplace crackling? Would score help create a sense of a plane elevated from the normal world? Yes, yes it would. Think about diagetic and nondiagetic sound.
Puzzles also need to fit in the world (see my post on immersive puzzle design). Make sure every puzzle has an author, a reason to be in the world.
To preserve the circle, you’ll also want immersive hinting, which means a character in the world who wants to see the players succeed.
But Magic Circles are not just production design. They’re also people design. Consider if you want actors in your experience. Just one committed actor is a giant immersive bomb.
The greatest magic is in the eyes. (Chaney Moore as Madame Daphne)
Make sure you make a clear choice and communicate it to your staff: are you an actor, yes or no. I’m tired of being greeted by a GM who is half-acting-it. Half-acting is worse than no acting.
And actors aren’t for everybody. We get it. It’s a whole other art form to master. Should you opt not to have actors in the world, note that commitment to the Magic Circle makes a couple demands…
Your Magic Circle must begin at the game door (otherwise your hosts will need to act a bit, since the world spills past the door).
You cannot allow any out-of-character hosts in the game room.
Look at this. Take it in. It’s ridiculous. It’s blasphemy.
This person does not belong to this world.
If I called you out just now, you’re not alone. Everyone does it. It’s inconvenient to brief teams in the hallway, and yes, I know logistics matter. But do they matter more than your guest experience?
The most exciting part for the guest is walking into the room for the first time. Throwing on the brakes to talk to them about the rules while they steal glances of your cool world like naughty children is an unmitigated disaster. It shatters their immersion immediately. Let the team ride that high and start their adventure the moment they cross that threshold.
Finally, consider script design. The best Magic Circles host beginnings and endings to the story within the world proper. It was the bookends that really brought the Code Name: Eagle game down, with the drawn out in-room hosting and the dreaded “Did you have fun?” ending. Craft an inciting incident to spur players to action, and deliver a fulfilling finale where players see the impact of their actions on the world.
What matters more than the magic circle?
When the experience goes well, you shouldn’t be breaking the Magic Circle. But sometimes things go a little sideways, and you need to break character. I’ll spotlight in a later post the Disney Parks 4 Key Hierarchy, but suffice it to say for now, we recommend training your staff to break character for the higher values of safety (#1) and courtesy (#2). Especially for safety or to correct an issue with the show, calling “Hold!” is most effective.
“Hold, please! There’s been a mistake. X did not work like it should. In order to preserve your experience, I am doing Y to correct the issue. Thank you, please resume playing.”
Where to put the threshold?
Every Magic Circle has a transition point, a threshold that you cross where you go from the real world into the ritualized play. Consider carefully where you want your transition to be.
Disclaimer: Some circles are larger than others. That does not make them better. More time in the magic circle is not a priori superior. The following lists in order from smallest to largest, but as you’ll see, the choice affects more than time spent immersed.
At the game door
This is the most common option for an escape room. This is where the Code Name: Falcon game has its threshold. This frees your hosts to be out-of-world and able to address guest needs best. If you run a business that needs to answer the question “What’s an escape room?” then at the game door is the best place for your transition.
The famous adventure of The Dome begins with this really cool door. On the left: lockers.
At the game door works best for…
Business model: street retail with walk-ins, an entry-level market
Customers: new players and families
Acting: none (unless hint mechanism is a live performer)
At the hallway
At the hallway is the best of both worlds: freeing you to have an out-of-world lobby, but allows you to create a deeper story that unites all your games. You can have rooms in a hotel or time travel portals or a gallery of magic paintings. Your briefing room can even be in-world.
I don’t know of any companies that draw the circle at the hallway, but it has a lot of potential.
At the hallway works best for…
Business model: stand out in a crowded market
Customers: works for new players but also appeals to a seasoned player base
Acting: required only for hallway hosts, if any
At the front door
At the Front Door is challenging but rewarding.
Escape My Room in New Orleans, famous for their immersive lobby experience.
The challenges: you can’t explain what an escape room is (and players will feel pressured not to ask out-of-character questions). It requires commitment from all staff—can you get that kind of staff? And the rules of the game have to be in-world.
The reward: you deliver the maximum sense of adventure, since there’s no onsite transition from being a player of a game to being the protagonist in an adventure.
At the Front Door works best for…
Business model: by appointment only, obscure retail location, premium pricing
Customers: experienced players
Acting: all staff
A “cold start” escape room, which plunges you immediately into the adventure, skipping the lobby experience and all pre-game hosting, is a variant of “at the front door.” Recommended for educated player markets who don’t expect a bathroom when they arrive onsite (see: Spain).
After booking
The first email after booking, while not a physical threshold, is a threshold nonetheless. After booking makes otherwise bland communications special, heightens anticipation, and preps players for imaginary play.
This is where our Magic Circle begins.
At the website…?
We don’t recommend a fully immersive website. It leads to customer confusion. There is such a thing as being too immersive.
It’s funny, sure. It’s also false advertising. (Brittney Jones as Madame Daphne)
The Cross-Fade
Punchdrunk takes a more gradient approach to the Magic Circle threshold. Rather than a hard line, as I have depicted above, they think in cinematic terms of a dissolve from the real world to the fade in of the imaginary world. If you’ve been to Sleep No More, it’s not clear if the staff checking you in are in the world of the hotel or outside it. But they do have a certain attitude and a certain dress that guides you to think things are already special. Elevated.
Once you’ve traversed the dark maze and emerged in the Manderley Bar, the cross-fade is complete and you are inside the circle.
Oh yes, you most certainly have arrived (Manderley Bar at the McKittrick Hotel, Sleep No More NYC)
show, Don’t Tell
It was around this time in our original talk that the Raven Queen made an unexpected appearance, introducing the room to Exhibit A, an everyday citizen lost in the haze of his phone. Could the people in the room give him a reason to look up?
I could describe it, but like all good immersives, it was very much a you had to be there thing.
You really should have been there.
There was no physical threshold we could cross on the talk stage, but through changes in costume, lighting, sound, and character, we created a new world and spurred the audience to new behaviors. It really was magic.
Draw Your Circle
To quote the Raven Queen, to create is the power of the gods. Do not take that responsibility lightly. Respect what you create. We are all Exhibit A, and we need to play.
Hold true to the magic in your circle.
Just because it is fake does not mean it is not true.
A promise at the threshold.
Recon is the real deal
Credit for this post goes to myself (Haley E. R. Cooper) and J. Cameron Cooper with special thanks to the Reality Escape Convention 2022 team for helping produce the talk, from getting the lighting right to those envelopes we hid under all those chairs.
RECON gathers people most passionate about the escape room industry for a intense weekend of ideas and camaraderie. I never miss it. It’s full of surprises. Last tickets still available for August 18-19 in Los Angeles.
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.
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).
Sparesand 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?
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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