Category: Immersive Writing

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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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Iterating Interactions

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

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

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

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

iterating puzzles

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

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

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

We never stop iterating our puzzles.

interactions are puzzles

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

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

Vivian Mae’s Secrets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then we opened to general audiences.

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

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

Why it didn’t work

I have some theories.

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

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

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

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

EASIER ENGAGEMENTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empower your performers

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

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

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

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

Note how you never leave the cycle.
The right questions

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

“Can you keep a secret?”

Brittney Jones as Madame Daphne

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

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

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

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

The comedians disappeared.

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

Simple change, big impact.

Iteration is life

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

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

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

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

You need to have a company culture of iteration.

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

Immersive artists at work.
Bonus photos

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

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

Zoom magic is a bit of a mess!

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Bookends & Bottlenecks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE ACTOR VS THE PADLOCK: AND THE PADLOCK WINS

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

In the typical escape room, the adventure is…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s define our terms.

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

Bookends support the whole experience.

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

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

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

Bookends Can be longer

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bottlenecks must be shorter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We got it wrong, we learned

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

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

Photo of the player who keeps playing.

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

Beyond Escape Rooms

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

More

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

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

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

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

An immersive theatre sandwich…?

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

That’s a pretty sweet game you got there.

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

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Do’s and Don’ts of Virtual Experiences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DON’T UNDERSELL IT

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

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

DO DELIVER PRODUCTION VALUES

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

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

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

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

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

Device party! Invite the whole neighborhood!

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

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

DO INVEST IN EQUIPMENT

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

DO CREATE FOR THE MEDIUM

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

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

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

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

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

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

DON’T PRETEND RECORDED VIDEO IS LIVE

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

DO JUSTIFY LIVE ENGAGEMENT

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

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

DON’T MUTE EVERYBODY, DO USE SPOTLIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

DON’T UNDERSCORE YOUR VIDEO

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

DO LOOK INTO THE CAMERA

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

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

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

DOn’T USE PAUSES

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

DON’T FORGET TO BETA TEST

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

DO GET CREATIVE

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

Let’s give them something new!

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Bandersnatch and the challenges of choice

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

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

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

Ready? Let’s go.

What do i want?

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

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

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

Reality or fiction?

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

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

Actors love drama.

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

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

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

BLACK HAT OR WHITE HAT?

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

HBO’s Westworld taking the hats metaphor literally

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Story-litE

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

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

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

Clear choices

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

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

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

Choices that matter

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

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

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

Scaling choice

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

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

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

It’s called Twelve ANGRY Men, after all.

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

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

Play IT again?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not a fan.

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

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

the hard problems of choice

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

If you’re designing with choice…

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

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

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

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On-theme vs. Immersive Design

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

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

At the top is true enlightenment.

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

CASE STUDY

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

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

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

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

Winning team photo (U-505 successfully captured)

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

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

Note how essential the character becomes to the immersive challenge.

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

It’s a high bar.

Just what are escape rooms selling?

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

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

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

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

How to achieve immersive props and puzzle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immersive props in immersive theatre

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

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

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

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