Business Practicals – Immersology

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…

In it for the money
In it for you
In it for them

Stuart then asked us to rank these Three Whys by priority. Different businesses have different priorities, and ranking the three from most motivating to least motivating clarifies decisions that you’ve made—or will make.

Let’s dive in…

for the money

Money is the most obvious why. Most people labor for money. It’s a bonus if they enjoy the labor, but money is usually the primary goal. Small business owners are no different. Many start with the dream they might just strike it rich. The rest at least dream of replacing or surpassing the income of their more boring job.

It is not exactly a glamorous why. Who wants to be a fat cat capitalist when you could be a starving artist? *Commence wild eye rolling*

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.

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.

Probably most TERPECA owners are them-motivated people. The games that make that list are irresponsible and off-the-hook.

Enjoy the gift.

My ranking

It will come as little surprise to my avid readers. For my part in Strange Bird Immersive, I am motivated by…

Them.
Money.
Me.

I want to move people. I want to connect at the heart. I want to make my audience feel violently alive, aware of the full span of their lungs, flush with possibility. I want to do that so badly. And I will rewrite it if you don’t get that.

Perhaps the order of 2 and 3 was surprising to you? Where I ranked money surprised me, too. Fiscally, we’ve always structured our business to run a responsible profit, but I’d like to go further still in pursuing that value. Lucidity was designed at the outset to counter the fiscally questionable structure of The Man From Beyond—without sacrificing quality, of course.

It’s wonderful to create things, the sense of purpose I have every morning shoots me out of bed like a rocket, but at the end of the day, I am very open to replicating our experiences in other locations (that is, to make money), rather than always pushing the boundaries of what I can do. Opening other locations some day also serves my primary goal of reaching more people.

How to measure a successful business?

Once I had this lens at my disposal, I started to understand the wide variety of businesses out there. It has made me far less judgy of other people’s approaches. There are many ways to define a successful business beyond maximizing profits.

I’ve always resented immersive experiences that can afford to abandon all hope of making the investment back, as it makes those of us who don’t have that funding look weak in comparison. But nowadays, I feel less angry with the ones who can throw profit to the winds and more grateful that they choose to spend their money on me. So now I simply say, “Thank you.”

I also understand businesses that stop making new things, are not in the most optimal location, or are not doing particularly marquee-worthy things but are perfectly happy as they are. The owners are pursuing a life that makes them happy. Is that a bad business? No!

So next time you play a game or attend an immersive show, speculate on what their why might be.

And I encourage you to make your own list. Maybe it will surprise you, like it did me. It will help to step back and understand yourself—and may help you make your best business decisions yet.

Recon 2023

One of the best decisions you can make for any escape room business is to attend Recon this year, August 19-20, 2023. It’s virtual, so it’s easy to attend. I’m not paid to promote it or anything; it’s just a phenomenal professional opportunity I look forward to every year. The talks will be gold, but the connections more so. I would love to meet you at one of the extended “happy hours” in the wee hours of the morning and hear more about what motivates you.

February 24, 2021January 12, 2023

Tail Risks: Escape Rooms vs. ERCOT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

experiential tail risk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hints mitigate tail risks

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

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

THE TAIL RISK TOOLKIT

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

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

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

Train Employees for Tail Risks

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

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

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

INVESTING IN TAIL RISKS

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

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

That’s got to help our bottom line.

THE EXISTENTIAL TAIL RISK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I shudder knowing we once risked this.

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

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

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

That’s what regulations are all about.

THE ASSHATERY OF ERCOT

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

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

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

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

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

Regulations are written in blood.

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

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

November 14, 2017February 1, 2019

On Reviews and Hosting Reviewers

Strange Bird Immersive has been lucky in our press. We recently had the immense pleasure of hosting Room Escape Artist, and we’ve even lured Houston’s local theatre critics to come out and PLAY a play, you know, instead of just sitting there.

Read the reviews…

Room Escape Artist: “an experience that realized what I’ve hoped to see from the escape room medium.”

Partly Wicked: “the single most memorable escape room I have ever seen.”

Houston Press: “superbly unique… meticulously conceived.”

Houston Theatre Awards 2017: Winner of Best Risk

THE CRITIC IS COMING…

Hosting critics in an immersive is radically unlike hosting critics in traditional theatre. Here are some tips I’ve learned along the way on how to make the most of it.

Schedule wisely. If you’re in an ongoing production, give your show at least 2 months for testing and iteration, so it can settle into its best form before the critic comes. This is true for immersives, but it’s especially true for escape rooms. The show we ran in January is not the show we have now: the puzzles are smoother, the tech is debugged, the actors can handle every interaction. Be patient, and it’ll pay off. If you’re running a short-lived show, try to dissuade critics from opening night/weekend, at least.

Clean. Your critic will be inside the world and potentially free to explore. You do not want to be called out for dust bunnies.

No last-minute changes. As we’ve learned the hard way, a very small change can create new bugs, new audience behaviors you didn’t anticipate. We always try to run a mock-show in real-time whenever we make any technical changes, but physical changes can only be tested with fresh, new minds—a lot of them. What may look like an innocent dogtag to you may be somebody else’s slotted screwdriver.

You may want to perfect things for a critic, but don’t do it the day before, or even a week before. You want to deliver a vetted show.

Conquer self-consciousness. Actors get pretty revved up (usually for the worse) when they know a critic is in the house, but they never have to face that stone-cold gaze. Here? Neither of you gets to stay anonymous. That’s scary. A theatre critic is likely to freak, too, because they’re used to the armor that anonymity gives them.

If I had to guess, they probably didn’t become critics out of an intense love of actor eye-contact.

Immersive work is intimate, it’s close-up, it’s scary. There’s no place for them to hide what they’re thinking: the actor will see it on their very faces. Be ready for both parties to feel even more self-conscious than usual. Hopefully your immersive is already designed to limit feelings of self-consciousness, but be ready to conquer this demon more than usual. Don’t give the critic any more attention than anyone else present. Your Meisner gut may even tell you to back-off from them.

No “red carpet” treatment. You want to be on your A-game, but you don’t want to be on your “suck-up” game. They will notice. The critic is here to experience the same show the public would experience. Otherwise, what use is their review? If you have any special moments or one-on-ones, don’t default to selecting the critic unless you’ve received the usual positive signals from them that you always look for when singling out audience members. Bad one-on-one selections lead to bad one-on-ones, period.

Be professional. Take criticism graciously. Take praise graciously. To be reviewed at all is a privilege not every artist gets. Because of the intimacy, you may feel like you have a relationship now. You don’t. If the critic wants to be friendly afterwards, follow their lead—don’t be the initiator in the relationship. A lot of critics prefer to duck out and never see you again, even if they loved it.

Everyone’s a critic. The only publicity in this business that’s worthwhile is word of mouth. Every guest who crosses your threshold could potentially rave (or rant) to their friends—or on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, or TripAdvisor. Every guest is someone worth winning, so make the most of every show and make the red carpet standard.

Which really means you’ll be doing a lot of cleaning.

September 21, 2017February 1, 2019

The Safety Rant (with bonus waiver rant)

Two weeks ago, the Everything Immersive community was up in arms over a very serious safety infraction that resulted in injury to audience members and could have resulted in death. We were all understandably shaken by it.

No Proscenium reports about the incident here.
A harrowing first-hand account of what happened is here.
No Proscenium also talks about safety with leaders in the immersive haunt genre in their recent podcast (starting about 22:20) here.
Too long, didn’t listen: if you’re not an expert in the field of carpentry or aerial hi-jinks or waterboarding or what-have-you, consult with someone who is an expert to make sure your intended use in the show is as safe as possible. Also, TAKE THE TIME TO BUILD YOUR IMMERSIVE RIGHT. These things do not go up in a couple of months. Only sloppy and unsafe shows go up that quickly.

Since Immersology serves as a platform for the practice of immersive theatre—the big picture, if you will—I feel a need to weigh-in officially on the issue of safety, something we cannot take for granted in this genre.

Immersive designers: your audience is active. They may behave unpredictably. Your behavior to them is also unpredictable. You’re probably planning to do unusual and surprising things to them—that’s why this is fun. For fuck’s sake, make it safe. Really, really safe. That includes, but is not limited to…

No lifting, overturning, or throwing of furniture or other heavy objects
Creating clear safe spaces for the audience during vigorous action sequences
No audience-navigation in complete darkness
Poorly-lit stairs or other uneven surfaces feature glow-tape

First aid kits and fire extinguishers on-site (and every company member knows where they are)
No one locked in or locked up (handcuffs) without a user-operated safety release
All lighting instruments safety-cabled
Emergency lighting in case of power outage
Limited use of glass, and if there’s glass in the space, that space is monitored
No unfinished wood

I really don’t need to be immersed in splinters. Sand it, stain it, seal it FFS.

Clear rules of engagement for the audience
Proper advance warning for potentially awful stuff inside the show—whether that’s a strawberry cocktail (I’m allergic), forced enclosure in tight spaces, crawling, spanking, simulated drowning, etc.

These are the basics—and they apply to escape rooms, too, who in my experience are the more egregious violators of the above.

But there’s still a lot left off that list that we can do. Design “X” with an eye on that 0.01% chance that “X” fails catastrophically. If you plan to run a lot, you just might see that 0.01% come due. See what you can do to prevent that from ever happening.

But even with the smartest designers in the world, stuff can still go wrong. That’s where your well-trained actors can step in.

Calling Hold

Your actors are the enforcers of the rules and the guardians of the show. But they’re also committed to not breaking character, and they may want to carry on when something goes wrong. Break them of that instinct. Train them to call HOLD whenever they want to.

As creators, we think of HOLD as the worst thing possible, the nuclear option, the apocalyptic experience that breaks the magic. But I’ve been on the audience side of a very long hold once, and we didn’t care. We loved the show enough to wait in silence. I’ve also been on the actor side of a few holds, as escape rooms are rather notorious for something small but essential bringing the entire game to a halt. Really: your audience does not care. They’ll jump back in the moment you release them. In fact, they’ll recognize that you’re giving them the best service possible by addressing the problem, instead of letting the problem fester.

Get the whole cast comfortable with HOLD. Have a procedure for HOLD. Especially if a safety concern occurs, call HOLD.

Establishing safe space

Violent or dance-based immersives need to consider how they will train their audience to get out of the way—and stay out of the way. Third Rail Projects sits you in chairs, or they crawl up on set pieces you’re clearly not meant to access. The space of the McKittrick also has quality safe spaces: think of the step along the wall in the speakeasy during Banquo’s murder or the platform for spectators during the door dance. When it matters most, the actors and black masks make it quite clear that you are not to leave this space. Only an idiot would leave these spaces—although I’m sure someone has.

Black Masks

The cast of Sleep No More do an excellent job of crowd control and establishing spaces for their work, but it’s the Black Masks who really get the safety job done. They’re always there when it gets dicey: Lady Macduff’s murder, the prophecy rave, the banquet table you can’t join, the box you can’t crawl into.

If you’re building a sandbox show, consider if you need a few black masks to ensure safety both for audience and for actors. (They’re also essential to show-function: I definitely saw a black mask deliver Macbeth his missing pants once. Someone really wanted his pants that night).

Disney Keys

Ricky Brigante of Inside the Magic taught me on FB about the Disney Parks tiered-value system, known as the four keys. I think it expresses succinctly how actors should behave in immersives, and Strange Bird Immersive has since adopted the policy.

Not exactly the poster I’m hanging backstage, but you get the idea.

Here’s what I put in our actor code of conduct…

#1 – Safety. Safety must be the priority in every decision we make and must never be sacrificed for another key. Address directly any audience member’s safety concern, and if a safety issues arises, call HOLD until the issue is resolved.

#2 – Courtesy. Never forget that the audience is a paying customer, and you are performing a guest-service role. Stay respectful. When in conflict, courtesy should trump your character’s response (i.e. Do NOT get in a yelling match with an audience member, even if that’s “what your character would do”).

#3 – Show. Serve the story and play your character as much as you can—this is what they paid to be a part of. Do your absolute best not to break the world.

#4 – Efficiency. Try to keep on schedule. Use your time and resources wisely to maximize every guest’s experience.

Audience responsibility

But audience safety is not only up to the designers and actors. It is ultimately up to YOU, the audience member.

Yes, YOU are responsible for your safety, too.

I know you want to tail that actor, I know you want a hero moment, I know you’ll do anything to maximize your experience, but please, BE AWARE OF YOUR BODY.

That includes, but is not limited to…

Not launching your body in the path of an actor
Not launching your body in the path of an audience member
Not getting in the actor’s face (we’re human, after all, and don’t know you)
Generally being respectful of the actors. If you’re unsure how they want you to interact with them, default to passive-mode until they signal otherwise
Watching from a safe position or space
No lifting, overturning, or throwing of furniture or any other objects (FYI no escape room tapes a key to the back of a very heavy desk)
Taking care on stairs
Accepting your physical limits and not pushing yourself to a breaking point
Being ready to say NO anytime you don’t want to do something

You are the person who is in ultimate control of your safety. Please don’t “give yourself up” to these experiences so much that you never ask, “Am I safe doing this?”

Especially in the wild west of this new genre, you may enter an immersive space where the designers have NOT done any of the above. Be aware. Take care. And remember that you can always NOPE the fuck out of there.

Waiver 101

DISCLAIMER: the following is non-professional legal advice. This is the result of my personal research. Nothing can replace consulting a real contract lawyer. And FFS, stop copying the waivers of your peers.

Waivers: you’re probably doing it wrong. If you really want it to hold up in court, you need to give the plaintiff absolutely ZERO excuses for why they retained the right to sue you despite having signed your waiver.

Here’s how to do a proper waiver…

Keep it as short as possible, so people will read it. If I have to scroll on the iPad, it’s too long. Bullet point the assumed risks in the experience and state that I waive your liability. That’s all you need.
Keep it as clear as possible, so people understand it. That means no legalese.
Provide one waiver per person. If there’s any sort of “line” at the waiver stations, then there’s social pressure to sign it without reading it. (That pretty much means if you’re doing iPad waivers, you need an iPad for every single person who arrives at a given time. Not very feasible). No “one waiver per team” on a clipboard that gets passed around, either.
In the state of Texas, no waiver for anyone under the age of 18, whether signed by a guardian or not, will hold up in court. Just FYI. That’s a good reason to have that age limit.

But ultimately, waivers are not about that day in court. They are about preventing that day in court. I think they are an important step in the immersive process: they create a transitional moment for the audience to pause, realize that they’re about to start behaving very differently, and acknowledge that they will face certain risks. It’s that reminder that YOU are ultimately responsible for YOUR safety.

I’m sure we could all use that reminder before Sleep No More. WHERE THE HELL IS THEIR WAIVER???

What about actor safety?

I’ve only talked about audience safety so far, but actor safety is an even harder issue.

Read this WSJ report, if you haven’t already:

“Audience Behavior Makes Immersive Theatre Highly Unpredictable” (Dec 2016) (follow this FB link to get around their paywall)

It’s important to keep some perspective here. After some 140+ shows, I have not one story fit for this article of an audience member who crossed the line. But we are talking about that 0.01% chance, and it never hurts to be prepared.

Good news is the experience does filter out the craziest of the public via paid tickets. People don’t usually drop $40-200 just to molest actors. But sometimes it was the friend’s idea to go, and you end up with an audience member who wants to break the world and so poses a risk to your actors.

Plan for that risk. That includes, but is not limited to…

Designing experiences that don’t prompt seriously inappropriate behaviors (care in particular should be taken with 1-on-1s)
Hiring actors who know how to handle themselves and have the instinct to stand their ground or fly, rather than fight back
Training actors in HOLD and other audience-control tactics
Having doors for 1-on-1s that can lock out audiences outside but never lock in those inside
Establishing escape routes when an interaction goes south
Establishing a safe-word to use if an actor needs assistance of a company member

Again, Black Masks can provide crucial assistance, as they can protect actors and audience alike. (The trouble is, of course, paying for your glorified security team.)

None of these are perfect remedies, however. We won’t have a perfectly safe immersive until all the world agrees that we be respectful of each other when we interact, whether inside an imaginary world or not.

THe Stakes

Please, please don’t forget about safety. All we need is one negligent audience member inside one negligent show to bring the entire genre crashing down.