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Structures & theories of immersive theatre

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Posted on August 15, 2024August 15, 2024


OUTLINE THE PLAYER JOURNEY



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.

You shouldn’t be writing for lore boys anyway.

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.

Posted on July 26, 2024August 31, 2024


THE MAGIC CIRCLE



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.

 1. 1
 2. 2
 3. 3

 * Previous
 * Next

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…

 1. 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).
 2. 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.

Make it stop.
Posted on May 10, 2024May 10, 2024


BACKSTORY IS NOT STORY



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

Ready? Strap in, this one’s a rant.

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

What’s up with that?

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

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

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

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

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


BACKSTORY IS NOT STORY, GOSSIP IS NOT DRAMA, AND INFORMATION IS NOT INTERESTING.

Let’s break it down…

BACKSTORY IS NOT STORY

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

The killer must always be about to strike again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

VERSUS

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

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

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.

End rant.

Posted on January 2, 2024


SCENE: A DEFINITION



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 Story has 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.

Go on now. Surprise me.

Posted on November 9, 2023November 12, 2023


A TRIBUTE TO SLEEP NO MORE



Yesterday The New York Times announced that Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More will
close on January 28, 2024.

A million masked faces cried out that day.

Dear Reader, you are reading this thanks to Sleep No More. I owe my professional
life to Sleep No More. And why I love Sleep No More and always will above all
other immersives is because I know I am not alone in saying that it changed my
life.

Its legacy is an entire industry called immersive entertainment.

So many ambitions derived from seeing this one ambitious couple.

JULY 3, 2013

The date is seared in my memory.

No sooner was I off the elevator, but I got pulled into the narrow interrogation
room with Malcolm and Macduff. The intimacy of an actor shutting me into the
room. The violence of the swinging pendant. The interrogation. The tree! The
alliance formed. As a Shakespeare super-nerd, I quickly recognized this was Act
4, Scene 3 of Macbeth, a rather knotty rhetoric scene, as post-modern dance:
subwoofers blaring, my life slightly at risk.

Whoa.

I followed Malcolm all the way down to the first floor, and right before
entering the ballroom for the banquet, he turned around, pulled me aside, and
said “Shhhh…”

I was no audience member. I had an allegiance.

Go Team Trees!!!

Later that night I saw the tragedy of youth in Macbeth’s ambition, in a way no
spoken-word actor had ever conveyed, as he danced with the imaginary dagger
through the cemetery. I tried to help Lady Macduff when she stumbled at the
ball, and she held me close in her closet as she, in her drugged delusion,
called me her lost child. She left me with an origami pocket filled with salt,
the paper ripped from a Bible, to keep me safe. Reader, I have it to this day.

I keep a collection of my Sleep No More souvenirs under my jewelry case. The
mask collection goes elsewhere. If this feels like bragging, rest assured it is.
This is theatre you can brag about.

For the first time in my life, I left a play and refused to talk about it. How
could I even begin to talk about it? Silence was the only conceivable answer.

True to the show’s name, I did not sleep that night.

We did at least take a photo.

THE TURN

Returning home, my theatrical endeavors now felt hollow. Actors sometimes sneak
a sideways glance at the audience, live for the rare Friday night when there are
laughs in the house, hoping against hope that someone out there “gets it.” We
are so hungry for connection. But in truth, there is an impenetrable wall in the
theatre.

The Stage // The Audience

No connection. No immediacy. No relationship.

I was dreaming of the McKittrick Hotel, still haunted by the people there I
couldn’t help, the mazes within I hadn’t seen. I became that person (who first
told me about the show), proselytizing for a solid half hour about the sheer
wonder of the experience, only to forget and say “Oh yeah, and it’s all told
through dance.”

But no one minded my proselytizing, and friends were booking tickets. They did
not respond to this show like when I say I’m directing The Merchant of Venice or
performing in yet another Blithe Spirit. They booked tickets willingly and often
came back holding court about it just like I did.

Theatre has been trying to justify itself ever since film came out. The argument
usually boils down to the fact that theatre is live and therefore supposedly
more exciting. In Sleep No More, I saw what film could never do, leaning into
live-ness so much that I had been to the McKittrick Hotel. The place was mine to
explore, and the camera was my eye. The story I witnessed was no story,
flattened out by a stage, screen, or page, but a memory in my body.

Whoa.

That Christmas, after my second visit, Cameron and I dared to ask, “Could we
make something like Sleep No More?” It seemed impossible. No way could Houston
support a year-round audience in the hundreds, nor could we handle the scale.
But we enjoyed brainstorming a show anyway.

Along came Then She Fell: 8 actors, 15 audience, 3,000 sqft. A scale we could
attain in Houston. Then we got serious. While developing show pitches, we played
Trapped in a Room with a Zombie, something that Houstonians were buying tickets
to. Then those pitches turned into escape room pitches. Escape rooms, to us at
least, seemed to be begging for context, connection, immediacy. The rest is
Strange Bird‘s history. I still don’t sleep well, because come morning, there is
so much possibility.

Would we have gone to those two experiences and seen our vision without Sleep No
More to frame them? I am not certain. The scale makes it impossible to ignore.
Its confidence always gets me, 22 actors across six floors, perfectly synched.
The massive statement that is Sleep No More makes a paradigm shift like we
experienced seem almost inevitable. Assuming I would have bought tickets to
these experiences at all (something of an assumption), I suspect I would have
dismissed Then She Fell as a performance art dance project and escape rooms as
cash-grabs aimed at nerds. Instead, I saw kin of the thing we loved the most.

Cameron described Sleep No More as “Mozart in the Stone Age.” When it opened in
2011, the United States had almost no exposure to immersive theatre.

Say what you want about “Tony and Tina’s Wedding”: it did not spark a sea
change.

Here lands this insane production, so far advanced in its understanding of
immersive craft that it is almost outside of history. It was shocking. I think
it still is shocking.

Attention must be paid.

THE LEGACY

I’ve told my story above as a synecdoche. Mine is but one testimony. There are
countless more out there. 450 people a night chasing actors in and out of the
Gallow Green shops, staying with Macduff as he cradles his dead wife, witnessing
Macbeth consumed by the trees. For twelve years.

I have spoken of the epicness, but its stability is as much a source for its
influence. I relished Sleep No More‘s stability, to have a work of genius to
point people to at any time. “Go to that. Then you’ll understand.”

I’d wager something like 80% of immersive theatre creators in the United States
would say Sleep No More was their first and primary influence. The percentage is
fewer for escape room creators, but I’ve met several (and their work is
excellent).

And how many audiences were created by Sleep No More? People with no interest in
creation, but still dreaming of the show nonetheless, hungry for the chance to
turn a story into a memory. They started putting “immersive theatre” into Google
and took chances on smaller and local productions, helping the industry grow.
They probably now play escape rooms, chasing after a taste of Sleep No More.

Neither immersive theatre nor escape rooms would be where we are without the
colossus that is Sleep No More.

And that is the true source of my grief. I grieve for the creators and consumers
of immersive entertainment who will never be born because they cannot stumble
into Sleep No More anymore.

But hey! They can still go to The McKinnon Hotel in Shanghai!

In 2022, we hosted about 3,000 guests at The Man From Beyond. That’s one week at
the McKittrick. Us small fry can’t begin to aspire to having the same cultural
impact. (Or revenue, for that matter.)

These are giant shoes to fill.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Something new will move into those six floors in Chelsea. I’m hoping for
theatre, not a night club. I’m hoping Punchdrunk still has a part in it. Maybe
they will make something as insanely precise as The Burnt City, which blew me
away with their use of modern lighting and controls. Maybe they will fulfill
their promise-threat of a cutting-edge non-masked structure.

Whatever comes next, the closing of Sleep No More marks the end of the First Age
of Immersive Entertainment. I do not think it is the Death Knell, but the death
of a colossus shrinks us more than the closing of the small scurrying mammals.

It is right to mourn the loss even as we turn to the new.

Thank you Punchdrunk for Sleep No More and to co-producer Emursive for giving it
the stability to influence so many of us. This show will be missed.

IT’S NOT TOO LATE…YET…

If you’re reading this blog and haven’t gone to Sleep No More, what are you
doing? Book tickets before it’s too late! It is both past and future. It will
ground you in the essential history of immersives and still offer you a glimpse
of what this form can be.

Final check in is January 28, 2024.

Check out my First Timer’s Guide: some prep and framing will benefit you greatly
going in. Also note that you’ll need to be aggressive with other audiences.
They’ve been overfilling it for years, and the final shows are likely to be
packed with die-hard fans (who are a bit obnoxious, honestly). Some people are
very turned off by that aspect, to the point of not enjoying it at all, so
consider yourself warned.

Me? I like the aggression part a touch too much. It is my hope against hope that
another show will come along in which I can unleash my true self: the
hyper-aggressive weasel.

See you on the stairs. I’ll be the Woman in the Red Dress, running the Malcolm
marathon on my tenth and final visit.

Posted on August 7, 2023August 7, 2023


KNOW WHAT MOTIVATES YOU



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…

 1. In it for the money
 2. In it for you
 3. 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…

 1. Them.
 2. Money.
 3. 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.

Posted on June 13, 2023June 13, 2023


MAPPING YOUR EXPERIENCE



Time to close out my series on Bookends and Bottlenecks with a gift.

In order to take control of your structure, it helps if you can see it. This is
where a map comes in handy.

You can call this visualization a number of different things: map, diagram,
experience flow, puzzle flow, flowchart. There are many different ways to make
one and many different tools to get you there. But make one, and you’ll see your
experience in a whole new light.

This post will walk you through how I create an experience flow from the player
POV.

THE LAYOUT

As my physics teacher taught me, time is always along the x-axis, so that’s what
I do here. This translates into a long landscape instead of a long portrait, but
I think they are easier to read this way. I like to print these, so if I find
myself running out of x-axis space, I snake the rest of the flow down below the
first part or spill over onto a second page.

The y-axis represents paths through the experience (over time), with shapes
along those paths for what are a variety of events.

The shapes represent…

Scenes: a passive beat with no “solve” action, so this can be narrative beats or
out-of-world hosting by a Game Master.

Starting Point: this is a easily-discovered prop or set piece that delivers a
clue. (If a starting point is a hard-to-find item, I’ll pair it with a solve
action symbol).

Solve Action: represents the brain time (“aha!”) plus the physical action taken
to unlock a new thing. I like to delineate these into “Plug-in Action” (perform
this task or put this key into a keyhole somewhere) and “Decode Action”
(anything that is harder than a simple task). Every action in an escape room is
something a team can get hung up on, so it makes sense to map any action that
may need a hint. Plug-in steps are green squares—”green for go!”—and decode
steps are red squares for “this one’s gonna slow you down.”

Result: like a Starting Point, a Result is typically a prop, set piece, or other
kind of information, but is gated behind an action. It can be the starting clue
to a new action or a meta-level object that ends a path.

Here’s a look at the shape legend I use…



I also include room breaks (where applicable) and act breaks (which don’t
require room transitions, but a room transition will most likely be an act
break), noted via lines and labels. I break our shows down into: Act 1: inciting
incident (usually scene-heavy); Act 2: escalation; Act 3: turning point; Act 4:
climax; Act 5: fulfilling finale (usually scene-heavy).

I’m betraying my Shakespearean background here with a preference for five acts.
Three is fine. But you really ensure your middle has movement by breaking it
into three parts rather than lumping it together as one. Just saying.

I draw arrows, always going left to right, between shapes to represent the
connective tissue of how a key (starting point) leads to unlocking a drawer
(plug-in action), which leads to a paper clue (result/new starting point). Some
arrows are short, where other arrows stretch all the way across to the end (say,
if players can gain something early that they need at the end, but gaining the
rest of the items take more complicated paths). To make it most legible, I keep
my paths as in-line as possible.

Lastly, I include text labels on or beneath each of these shapes to identify
what precisely it represents. Putting a label inside the shape itself works
best, which some programs allow you to do. Important to keep labels succinct,
but the map loses a lot of its communicative power without them.

It can prove impossible to be fully comprehensive. You don’t need to be. I know
I don’t include a shape for every required action (solve cryptex, figure out how
to operate cryptex, fish out tiny note inside, read tiny note, etc.). Remember
this is for you and your team to best communicate the guest experience.

SIMPLE EXPERIENCE FLOW

Here’s an example of what a (silly) two-puzzle escape room might diagram like:

Table Maze…? Okay, yes, I confess I’ve been watching a lot of Survivor.
(Designed in Whimsical)

At a glance, you can see a lot about this experience…

While there are multiple path lines, it’s ultimately a linear experience, as
everything found feeds a single path. (A more proper open-path would have
multiple steps per path line before funneling down.)

However, people won’t necessarily be standing around waiting for the Table Maze
crew. There are other rewards in the environment happening. But once the two
cards, ball, and the poster have been found, then teams might grow more
impatient.

There are two major solve moments: table maze (assuming a challenging one) and
the 4-digit lock. Finding the objects, reading the poster, and unlocking a crate
should be quick actions. Hence my classification of this as a two-puzzle game.

Players will need to have found a fair amount to get past the 4-digit lock:
poster, two cards, and the final card from the solved maze path. If any one of
these items is missing when they hit this point in the experience, players can’t
progress. Ideally, players have everything by the time they finish the table
maze, but not always! The diagram helps GMs keep things straight (say, if the
poster hasn’t be read yet, they’ll want to be on stand-by with the poster hint
ready).

It has weak gating. The flowchart does a nice job of showing “There are things
you can find immediately, but they don’t become useful until later.” You can
find the ball but until you discover the table maze, you’re absolutely baffled
by a ball. As a design choice, weak gating isn’t inherently bad, especially if
players don’t puzzle over it for too long. It can be fun in that there’s an
“Aha! So that’s what this is for!” moment, much like foreshadowing in
literature. But it can also be a time sink. Like all things, watch and see what
works.

This puzzle flow also reveals to me that there’s a potential for players to spin
the final digit on the four digit lock before the table maze has been solved.
I’d want to swap out what the maze dispenses with either two cards (and remove
one card from the beginning), or potentially have the maze reveal the
ordinality. Jumping the flow is bad, mmmkay?

COMPLEX EXPERIENCE FLOW

Here’s what a whole game might look like in my style, unlabeled. Don’t worry,
this is based on nothing, I promise. (Besides…can you have an experience spoiled
by staring at an unlabeled map anyway?)

Completely made-up experience flow, featuring the five-act structure (Designed
in Google Drawings with direct arrows instead of elbow connector arrows, suit
your fancy)

At a glance…Act 2 has two paths, Act 3 has three paths, Act 4 is all
linear/bottleneck. The structure is relatively simple, so there won’t be a sense
of chaos in this game. There’s one meta puzzle that requires four items/pieces
of information and actually requires an item gained from Act 2 (so if that’s in
the previous room, players may have to run back to get it). There are nine
decode actions and three simple plug-in actions, which may be a little light for
60 minutes, but it depends on the puzzles, of course.

Here’s a more complex flow, that I made in 2015 after playing my first escape
room that I ever loved. This game is now closed. No act breaks here, because it
was all one messy, joyous experience. Imagine arrows in place of lines, please;
apparently I started my mapping journey in Illustrator (?!?), which I’m an
expert in and would recommend as a mapping program to no one.

At a glance…the game has two objectives with completely independent paths (so
you could get the door open, but not yet have the MacGuffin, an unusual
structure). Lots of gathering of similar items, like puzzle pieces or all the
things you need to get a clue from a DVD. The main meta—the HBG combo
lock—requires the completion of four different paths. Each path ends in a
letter, which gives a sense of progress towards the end goal. Lots of “search”
items (as befits a game from 2015), where the “starting point” symbol is paired
with a “plug-in action,” since finding something cleverly hidden can’t be taken
for granted.

With so many starting points and paths available, you can guess that this game
would keep a large group occupied. 9 decode actions and 23 plug in actions. Wow.
That’s a lot of quick hits!

Looking at this map makes me miss old-school games.

WHICH PROGRAM?

I started making Strange Bird’s maps in 2015 in Google Drawings. Like any
illustrating program, Google Drawings is frustrating. It wasn’t built for
flowcharts, but I got it to work for me. Google Drawings is available as a
document type through Google Drive, so you’ll need access to that. I cannot in
good conscience recommend it to anyone, but after all the suffering, the result
is a very clean map. Main pro: it’s free and stays free.

There’s a wide array of programs to choose from these days. A critical feature
you’ll want is arrows to snap to shapes, so that when you move the shape, the
arrow follows it. It’ll also help a lot if you can label the shape itself, so
that your labels also follow as you move shapes. Test before you dive deep into
a program.

For this post, I’ve tried out some other programs…

ONLINE SUBSCRIPTION PROGRAMS (WHIMSICAL, MIRO, ETC.)

For shared accounts, you only get three free flowcharts before they flip you to
the dreaded subscription model. But for a solo private account (and probably
there’s only one person in charge of these charts anyway?), you have unlimited
boards. You may encounter additional BS like low-res exports on the free tier.
The ease of use is superior to Google Drawings.

Of all the programs I tried for this article, I liked Whimsical best for its
sheer speed. I created its chart the fastest. It also doesn’t look hideous.

Flow from Whimsical Flow from the somewhat slower Miro. I formally apologize for
that choice of green.

DRAW.IO

Available online or even offline. Unlimited, open source, not going anywhere. I
liked this much better than Google Drawings, although it still presented a
couple moments of sheer rage. Not as fast as Whimsical but earns bonus points
for not being subscription BS.

Flow from Draw.io

OFFLINE PROGRAMS

I’ve heard from folks in the community that Visio from Microsoft is their
preference. Apple has a program on Macs called Freeform, but the arrows didn’t
snap to shapes, so I noped out of there fast. Illustrator is also a hard pass.
There are many more options I don’t know about. This rabbit hole is deep.

THE WHY

When I played my first dozen escape rooms, I mapped them by hand afterwards,
trying to make sense of the chaos: why did this game feel frustrating? Why did
this game feel fun? Answers were often in the structure: poor gating that gave
us stuff well before we could use it or brilliant meta-puzzles that gave the
whole team a sense of progress. It helped jump-start my education.

Once you start mapping your experience (imagined, designed, or already
produced), you’ll see many benefits…

Maps help you identify your bottlenecks. Bottlenecks are a neutral tool, and a
flowchart ensures that you have bottlenecks where you need them and not where
you don’t.

You can see clearly which moments are open-path and which are linear. When only
one path remains, expect escalating player frustration the longer it takes, so
it’s a good time to be hint-ready.

You can clearly see your meta-puzzles (puzzles that require multiple parts to
proceed).

It allows you to count your puzzles and gauge your difficulty. Remember each
shape is a step needed to win.

Gating issues and other issues of complexity show up, such as: they have to
carry this prop into the next room.

Once out of the design phase and your project has been built, the map is far
from dead. I use our experience flows when I onboard new employees. It reveals
what is needed for each solve plus the order of the solves, making game
mastering a touch easier. We don’t refer to the map regularly, as we internalize
it fairly quickly, but it’s indispensable in those early days when they feel
overwhelmed.

MAPPING BEYOND ESCAPE ROOMS?

Yes, of course! Puzzle games benefit greatly from flowchart clarity, but
diagrams can clarify a wide-range of genres. The maps above are event-based maps
from the guest POV, but you could produce maps from character or GM POV.
Whenever Strange Bird gets around to designing a sandbox like Sleep No More,
I’ll map characters in places across time. I once made a map of Madame Daphne’s
Le Coq levels of tension, which is fun. Come up with different categories! You
can make just about anything a diagram.

Get creative with your visuals. They can communicate like words never can.

BOOKENDS AND BOTTLENECKS

This how-to post wraps up a longer series dedicated to structure. Be sure to
check out the rest of the articles:

Bookends & Bottlenecks
Bookends: Inciting Incidents
Bottlenecks: Designing for Focus Mid-Experience
Bookends: Fulfilling Finales

Posted on December 19, 2022December 19, 2022


BOTTLENECKS: DESIGNING FOR FOCUS MID-EXPERIENCE



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, and then dove into what makes
for a fulfilling finale. (Hint: it’s not your game master asking “Did you have
fun???”)

Rocking my Recon Meme Shirt

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…

 1. 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).
 2. Reveal something magical when it’s solved.
 3. 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).
 4. 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.

Posted on August 18, 2022


BOOKENDS: FULFILLING FINALES



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.

Posted on May 16, 2022May 16, 2022


BOOKENDS: INCITING INCIDENTS IN ESCAPE ROOMS



In Bookends and Bottlenecks, I explored the structure Strange Bird Immersive
uses to tell stories within the chaos of an escape room.

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.


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