Good Job, Brain! - Bonus Episode: Escape Rooms with Laura E. Hall!

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

Ah hah! We trapped Laura E. Hall (author of Planning Your Escape, puzzle maker, and escape room designer) into a bonus interview with Chris! Can she escape before Chris starts overloading her with Fleetwood Mac facts? We are delighted to debut our first ever one-on-one interview special with Laura, a bona fide expert and pioneer in the field of escape room and immersive experience design. Laura shares some history, behind-the-scenes accounts, and stories about seeing way too many butts. And remember, the real prize is the friendships we made along the way, so Laura discusses ways for people to best come together and work together without ruining relationships! Good Job, Brain is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. For advertising inquiries, please contact [e-mail]! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello to all you excellent, erudite, educated, eggheads, eager and excited to escape on Wii. Welcome to Good Job Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. I am your constantly curious. co-host, Chris, and today you're listening to a very special bonus episode. This is being released at the same time as your regular episode of Good Job Brain, and this special bonus is all about escape rooms. And that is why we have brought on a special guest for you. She's a writer, an artist, a professional puzzle maker, and she designs and runs escape rooms and other types of

immersive environments as well. And she is Laura E. Hall. Hi. Hello, Laura. Hall. We are bringing you on now. We're doing this now because you have just released a brand new book. Can you tell us about that? Yeah. So the book is called Planning Your Escape, Subtitle, Strategy Secrets to Make You an Escape Room Superstar. Yeah, the book is basically an introduction to the history of escape rooms. It kind of goes through the whole genre and history of immersive and talks about like why people play and what compels us to come together in sort of real life spaces and that kind of stuff. And then it also is a primer, if you've never played an escape room before, that teaches you, like, how to solve puzzles and how

to recognize codes and the kind of things to expect when you're going into a room for the first time. So there's a little something for everybody in it. So before we get two into things, and I want to come back to the book in a little bit. This is a little bit of surprise for you. We always kick off episodes of Good Job Brain with a general trivia segment, which is called Pop Quiz Hot Shot. Oh, boy. And since I'm the only one here and I have the random trivial pursuit card, Laura, you are the contestant. How are you feeling today as far as answering some trivial pursuit questions? Let's give it a shot. Let's do it. So do you do, I mean, do a lot of trivia, have you done pub trivia, things like that? I do, yeah. I do crosswords a lot of the time.

I switch. I think there's a little bit of overlap in the need for general knowledge with that. yeah, as long as it's not a sports question. That is something I'm trying to beef up on. I never know it. So we have, yes. So that was one of the things. So when, when Karen, who's the host of Good Job Brain, when she and I started our Pub trivia team, we did pretty good, except whenever there was a sports round, we would always put up a zero, just a zero. As we sort of secretly started building this, this, this team. The first person that we added was Colin, who was another co-host a good job brain and he was karen's co-worker at the time and he was a sports guy so we're like you need a sports guy get on the team and we went from zeros to tens we went from

zeros to tens every round because he really knew his sports stuff so you do so you're right it's it's you either sports person or you're not a sports person and you got a bone up on it yeah i don't think there's any sports questions here so you're you're in good shape so here we go for your blue Wedge. Which airport's international code is

CDG? Oh no. CDG pass. I don't know. I'm going to help you get there. This is,

it's named after a person. Oh, Charles de Gaul. Yes. So, yes, that's it. Charles de Gaul. Great. Or Paris.

Paris Charles de Gaul. Yeah. So, there you go. Pink Wedge, which star of the 2015 film, Burt, played a similar bad boy chef 10 years earlier on the TV show Kitchen Confidential. That's fictional?

Yeah, sorry. So it's a weird question. This is how it's phrased, but you're right. It's a weird question because Kitchen Confidential was the book that became a series by Anthony Bord. Oh, gosh, I have no idea. Yeah. So it's Bradley Cooper. Oh, okay.

I know, right? See, we're learning stuff. I am learning. Yeah, I didn't know that. I do, this is all, I'm filing this away, so. Bradley Cooper, Rocket Raccoon played, played Anthony Bourdain. Okay, okay, yellow wedge. Who, this, I'm sorry, who was, who was Ross Perrault's running mate in the 1992 presidential election?

Oh, shoot. Right? It's not Dan Quayle. It's not Dan Quayle. I know that from Animaniacs, I'm not going to lie. Of course, of course. This is, this is, this is tough. And I vaguely, I vaguely sort of remember this from 92 when I was 12 years old.

I was like, oh, yeah, okay, sure. I feel like I'm just on the generational edge of not having the actual memory of it. Who was his one name? It's so it is Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale. Did not know that one. I hadn't thought about that since 1992 either. All right, let's go with Purple Wedge. Which eccentric poet friend of Shelley would not allow any of his new.

numerous romantic conquests to eat in front of him. That's got to be Byron. Bingo. Lord Byron. Great. Yes, would not allow any of his numerous romantic conquests to eat in front of him, but he made an exception for champagne and lobster, saying they were the only becoming foods.

Okay. How about that? All right, Lord Byron. Green wedge, how about this? The cacao tree, whose botanical name translates to Food of the Gods, produces a bean used to make what? Chocolate? Yes.

Coco or chocolate. A little bit of extra trivia in here. The beans from a single tree produce less than a pound of chocolate a year. And finally, orange wedge. What signature piece of clothing by a Diane von Furstenberg celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2014? 40th anniversary in 2014? 40th anniversary, signature piece of clothing by Diane von Furstenberg. The rap dress.

The rap dress. I did know that one. Yep. All right. Nice job on that one. Woo! Fantastic. All right.

Well, excellent job on that one. Very good job to your brain. So let's, okay. So let's get into it. We've got you here. Describe an escape room. How would you describe an escape room to somebody? Sure.

An escape room is usually a physical space that you enter into. Usually on a team, there's like a timer, going that's that's sort of one of the constraints it's it's often an hour sometimes a little bit more or less depending on the size everything in the room is a clue or a puzzle to be solved with the eventual end goal of reaching the end of the puzzle which used to be would literally escape the room like there's like a key to the door now nowadays that has evolved beyond that so there's more like you're completing a bank heist or you're freeing somebody from prison or they you know there's some sort of like other diffuse the bomb style end goal. That's, that's the basic form of them,

typically. You have your escape room company, which is, that's in Portland, Oregon, right? Meridian Adventure Company is the name of it? Yeah, Meridian Adventure Co is our company here in Portland. Yeah. As we're recording this, we are still in COVID times. You've not been running any escape room. We actually do have an online game that we just launched called the Traveler's Guide to Little Soderberg. There's a couple of different types of digital escape rooms, if you're looking to play one. One of them is called an avatar game. I have this physical room. I'm placing a person in it.

And you're controlling them like a first person video game, essentially. You say, oh, pick that thing up over there. Hey, can you please look at this? And, you know, so you're controlling the avatar. But it's played by a person. That one, yeah, that style is. And then there's also just straight virtual, which is the kind that we have. You basically are on a video call with your friends.

It's all through our system. So it's not like on Zoom or something. but you are in a hosted session and then you go through a series of sort of puzzle adventures through the internet and it's all, yeah, contained in the computer screen. It seems like that would be a really fun and popular activity for people to be able to see their friends, you know, when they can't see them physically as well, right? Yeah, and that's one of the tips too is like the room escape artist folks were talking to me about this and they recommend that you not play these games with your regular group. because you can kind of see them any time. Like these games are really good for like if your family lives across the country or like your old school friends or people that you would like to hang out with and spend time with

but aren't necessarily, it doesn't have to be a replacement for the in-person stuff. It can supplement it. Yeah. The book planning your escape, as you've said, is kind of split into two halves. The first half is like this very detailed history of immersive entertainment. And it really goes, it goes back a long way, doesn't it? I tie it back to like ancient history, right? I use an example of a game that was found in the Mahenjo-Daro archaeological site.

I'm sure you will have seen this because it's like super common, but it's one of those, it's like a round maze with marbles in it, and you roll it around and you try and get it into the center. It's a dexterity puzzle. But they found those in the ancient Indus Valley. There's tons of board games from Egypt and stuff, and it's just really interesting to me to look at, the ways that human behavior is really not all that different.

We want and need the same kind of things. And playfulness is a huge part of that. In the book, though, I draw a line between that and the game Pigs and Clover, which came out in the 1800s. And it was like a legitimate viral craze. But it's the exact same thing. It was like a little cardboard circle that you roll a little marble around in

and try and get it into the center. But it was like super, super popular at that time. And I just, in the book, I make the argument that as technology advances, people use that to get together and party, basically, just have lots of fun. And inevitably, gameplay is happening at that time. But it's also a way for people to find that their power is in groups, right? So there's like a lot of political organization that happens around that. So I just thought that was really like an interesting thread that goes through it. The other flip side of that is that the thing that is pretty consistently developing

those advances is the military. So gameplay in the military is pretty inextricable. And so that's sort of the gist of the historical stuff. That makes it sound maybe a little more dry. But the kind of thing is like

anytime you build like a road, somebody puts an amusement park at the end of it essentially. So that's what the history stuff goes through. And just the idea that like escape rooms are this very novel 21st century sort of form of entertainment that we only started hearing about over the last five, six years or so, but they, they have these actually very ancient roots.

They didn't just sort of come out of nowhere. Yeah, exactly. There's like Elizabethan LARP examples, you know, so people have always wanted to kind of like go into a cool environment and play around in it, you know? Yeah. And I mean, that's, that's really the, um, the, the, the, the, a lot of the appeal is sort of of going into that, you know, spending that hour, hour and a half, you know, in this carefully constructed space, um, that is full of mystery and, and entertainment. and is not real life, right? Yeah. I saw you give a speech about escape rooms at one point,

and one of the first things you noted was that if you see escape rooms on TV, generally what you've seen in an episode of a sitcom that were all the characters do in escape room is often quite different from what the real thing is in some very specific ways. And one of the things you said was very often what happens is the one character on the TV show ask another, an escape room, what's that? And the first thing out of their mouth is, well, they lock you in a room. Right. And then, but, but, but they don't in fact lock you in rooms. Yes. Yeah. So, this is one of the things, like, since I, I run escape rooms as well, like safety is 100% the actual priority. It's the number one thing. It's, it's supposed to be this way with any type of in person

entertainment. So, you know, safety at an amusement park or a haunted house or, but yeah, we're not allowed to actually lock the door for for fire safety reasons um but you want to still have the illusion of you know achieving something significant we sub we sub in other goals for that now we did we did use to lock the door though because before we sort of knew the rule i should say before we um knew better before it uh came to the attention maybe of a fire departments and things like that this was even a thing that they should be concerned about or talking to you guys about fire safety, right? Because it's so new. Right. Well, I mean, we always have worked really closely with the city because there's lots of rules and regulations. But when we first, I mean,

we were the first ones to ever talk about it with our city. We were the first ones here. And so in a lot of ways, it was like finding the right path together. Technology is a lot better now, too. So today we have staff like all of our doors are tied into the fire alarm system. So if the alarm goes off the doors pop open you know oh yeah so that's that's something that we are able to do now that we weren't able to do even like yeah five five six years ago so so what other stuff does uh does does tv get wrong about um about the actual escape room experience what were some things because i was going to say you've actually been blogging about this yes whenever a tv show does an escape room episode you actually review it and look at what they do and what do they get right what do they get

wrong. What are some egregious things that if people might have seen this on TV and you just want them to know that that would not fly in an actual escape room situation? I'd say like 99% of the stuff that's, because it's always a sitcom, you know, and they need to like ratchet up the tension or they use it to like highlight the sort of foibles of a character, right? And that usually means they're in horrifically dangerous situations and like just digging that all deeper. There's a show to broke girls and they go to one. I have never seen a room more dangerous than that. And like, I try to like keep a good sense of humor about these. What are, what are some of the things in this room that are like super dangerous? Do they like jump into the hole at some point? They literally

yeah. There's just a, so it's an Alice in Wonderland themed room. And so there's like a rabbit hole. But the hole it's not a part of the game. There's just a hole. And one of them falls through and finds themselves trapped underneath the stage set. They're like in the sort of crawl space of the of the game room and they've like injured their ankle and at the same time the game attendant has accidentally trapped them like locked them all in the room permanently he doesn't have the key to get out oh my gosh just safety nightmare so you've talked about um a little bit so far about um things that you would want people to know about you know an escape room that was run by you an escape room run by a professional group that that safety is very important you know what what else

would you want people to know if they were thinking about coming into a room that was run by you to kind of put their mind at ease or what questions people had? Yeah, well, so I would say it basically all comes down to kind of communication and advocating for yourself, right? Like if at any point you have a question about something, the people running the room should be willing to answer it. Some games begin with restraints, so like handcuffs or chains, but there should always be a way to free yourself, and you should always be allowed to not begin the game in that manner if you choose to. There's so much trust involved in this kind of thing. You're placing yourself into these scenarios where you're like in someone else's hands.

And so it's just good to remember like you also can advocate for yourself in that. Yeah. Great. Okay. So let's say that I've never done one before, but now I've decided having listened to this podcast or the first 20 minutes of it that I want to do an escape room. What are what are the tips? What are like the three, you know, big tips that you would give to complete total beginner? the first things that you would tell them about escape rooms.

Yeah. So I would say first tip is when you're looking for a game, you know, look at the scenarios and see kind of what sounds fun. But don't necessarily try the hardest thing at first, right? Like if you've really never done one before, you want to kind of work your way up to the most desirable stuff. So like it's totally fine to go play some as practice. If you're very used to puzzles,

you probably could start with an intermediate. one. But I mean, they're all going to be fun no matter what level, even if you find that it's a super easy game. Like, you're still going to have fun. The second tip actually probably applies to anybody, but like if you're going in a group, I would say talk about what you want to get out of the experience beforehand, right? Do you want to try and rush through stuff? Do you want to like kind of take your time and like focus on the fun, you know, fun versus competitive? And just like agree with each other, like make a pledge to each other to be nice, because these are kind of like high stress environments a lot of the time, right? Like the timer's ticking and maybe there's like a

siren going or, you know, not the fire alarm, but a in game kind of thing. And there's like a lot of pressure involved. So I actually think it's very important to agree to be nice to each other. There's strategies like always reflecting back what somebody said or, you know, somebody makes a suggestion and nobody else kind of acknowledges it. Like you can have pre-agreed that. you're going to say, oh, so-and-so said this, we should try it, that kind of thing. Number three is like, yeah, just try and have fun. Ultimately, you know, it's kind of a competition, but it's supposed to be a competition against your best self, right?

Like, you're not against your own team. You're not against the person who made the room. So, like, this is something, you know, in sort of competitive puzzling environments that comes up a lot, too. It's like, you really should be having fun. And if you're not having fun, there's ways to fix that. So, yeah, I actually try to have fun. Yep, yep, yep.

When my group of friends and I, like, did our first escape room, once we came out of it, that's when I think we started realizing a lot of the things that we needed to do to succeed because we had not done those things. And, you know, just in terms of like being very organized, go in and look around the room, talk to each other. Like, everybody shouldn't be going in silently sort of looking at everything around the room and just thinking about it to themselves, they should be calling stuff out.

So you have this perspective of you run escape rooms, which means that you will spend a day and watch six different teams of people, maybe cycle through the same room, you know, over and over and over. What are some common things that you see people do to ruin their chances of winning the game? Finding something and then not telling anybody about it,

I often see people open a drawer or a box, observe that there's something inside of it not say anything and then close it and then everybody else on the team has seen them searching it and thinks well they would have said something that they found it and so then they overlook that thing the entire rest of the game until they

are struggling and they're like well why what are we missing right and you have to kind of redirect them to that and yeah it's solved with communication I would say team dynamics often come up you know sometimes you'll get a team building group from a workplace or a family where one

person is sort of more dominant in their personality. They come in, they think that they know everything and everybody else is wrong. You're sort of listening to them making all of these declarations and directing people and they're very rarely correct, actually. And it just stymies the whole process. And again, this is why I feel like it's important to discuss how you're going to like tackle it beforehand. It's not fun to experience that or to watch it. And so, know, if you're really aiming to go in and be successful at solving, like discussing that type of scenario and how you would handle it and what you would do. Also, a great idea would be like, if you're going in with a team that if there's anybody on the team that you haven't played with

before or if you've had different levels of experience, don't just meet up with everybody five minutes before the escape room starts. Go get lunch before that and make a plan like, we're going to talk about what an escape room is, what we're going to do, talk about the, strategy before we go in and just get everybody on that same page before you start. Totally. Yeah. Mixed groups of experience levels are like a totally different thing too, right? Because do you want to spoil the experience for a first time player? Or like for me, I'll often sort of like hold back. If I wanted to just blast through a puzzle, like I could do it. But it's really a lot more fun to like step back, let somebody figure it out for themselves.

it's not that you're like withholding from yourself, you're sort of allowing them to have the full experience. But that also comes down. If I was with a totally experienced team, I would say, okay, there's a hidden door there. That latch is going to pop open. So we need to listen for that electromagnet releasing, that kind of thing. Do you brute force the last digit of a padlock? Right. Yeah. Yeah. The first three numbers, you can just figure out the last one by trying each iteration of it, right? And sometimes people get really upset. because it, you know, you're skipping over a step and it doesn't feel complete, right, even though the puzzle is, has been solved technically.

So that's, that's always stuff to just discuss and agree on. Yeah, having the mixed experience group, I think it's more incumbent on the people with more experience to shepherd everybody and help everybody about what they're doing versus just doing stuff as quick as they can. Yep, totally. Because then you're leaving people out. And also you might, you still might lose because if you leave people mentally in the dust, then they're not able to help, you know, once the puzzle, you know, goes on.

Yeah, exactly. So we kind of, I also wanted to ask about, like, tips for, okay, you've done some escape rooms. You've won some escape rooms. What are like expert level tips? The other thing I wanted to mention is that, yeah, one of the things that you have to wonder when you go into an escape room with people, like, do you say that's a hidden door? Right. Or you could not say anything.

And when the hidden door opens, the people do realize that that was a hidden door behind a bookshelf, they have a very magical kind of experience. So that's a good thing to think about as well, too, like how much do you? So what other tips would you say would be good for like people who are not total beginners? How do you take it to the next level? Yeah. So for experts, I would say that's a huge one, right? How much of the magic are you going to try to preserve for yourselves and for each other? At a certain point, there's only so many ways to lock a box. Like I talk about that in the book. And so you start to really recognize the sort of familiar your patterns and stuff. That does make the really clever puzzles that much more enjoyable

because you can be just absolutely delighted by encountering something that's like fresh or new. Presumably, you have like a regular team if you're like doing tons of these. Mixing that up can be fun sometimes, right? Like a lot of people who travel around and play games in different escape rooms will contact local folks in the areas where they're traveling to. And so that's like just a kind of nice way to meet and hang out with different. people. I would also say some of the most fun that I've had in escape rooms was with my expert team. And we actually start playing games of our own almost. Oh yeah? Okay. So this is sort of outside of the bounds of the book maybe. But a couple of years ago, some friends and I went to

Kuala Lumpur because they just have tons and tons of rooms there. So it was a group of academics and game designers and curators. And we all went and played as many games as we could in a span of like 10 days. And this became a podcast series, right? Yes. Yeah. It's called every game in the city. It's the first season of that on the Idle Thumbs Network. Just the most fun that we had was in a room where we had name tags. It was a sort of classroom murder mystery. One group of our friends played it and they thought we can make a really cool game layer that sits on top of this. And so then when the second group came in, which I was a part of, they gave each of us secret powers. And it affected how we played the game.

And one of our friends was really into role playing. And so we just sort of made the game and the experience our own. Some of the powers that we were given were like, you can't touch anything with your hands. Or you can only respond to a direct question and not say any, you know, not offer any information, things like that. Right. You know, I'm not necessarily, like, recommending that for, like, everybody, but it's, it's really just about the kind of spirit of the team and, like, how you're approaching it. Like, you can play a terrible game, like a terrible quality game and still have an amazing time because you're hanging out with your friends. So that's, I, you know, it's really just about, like, finding that kind of dynamic amongst yourselves.

That's, I think, really the sweet spot for expert solving. Hints. Mm-hmm. My friend group and I, we played what is generally considered to be the first, I think, like escape room in the U.S., which was Escape the Room by Scrap in San Francisco. Yeah. And that was a real mess. Like, that room was a mess.

It must have had like 300 objects in the room that weren't part of the puzzles. Wow. And so it just sucked up a ton of time because rooms typically don't really do this anymore, right? I mean, they don't fill the rooms with tons of junk. And we got Steinmead, we lost because I think I may have told you this story before, we couldn't find an Allen wrench. And the Allen wrench was, you know those hotel ice buckets? You know how the hotel ice bucket has a lid on it? Yeah.

Well, if you were to take that lid and if you were to turn the knob on the lid, the lid would split into two pieces and open up the two pieces and the Allen wrench was masking tape. inside the lid. Oh, no. So it seemed like a solid object. It was one of one million solid objects in this room. And the important thing here is that, A, I'm still mad about it 10 years later, and B, there was no hint system at this point. Scrap, which was, you know, the company that innovated and brought escape rooms, you know,

from Japan to the U.S., they prided themselves on their extremely low solve rate. I mean, we'd get in there and like only 3% of teams have solved this puzzle. And it's like, wow, okay, well. But then there was no system where you could ask for him. But that's very different now. Rooms really are expecting players at this point to ask for hints, yeah? Yes, definitely. Yeah, I'll say one of the only rooms that I've ever failed was a scrap room.

And it was for a similar sort of twist reveal at the end that I am also still mad about it. Um, so I feel you. That's our podcast we're going to start. Still mad at the crap. I mean, I love their games, but yeah, hints really are actually designed to be taken. And I think that's probably something that's not that obvious if you haven't played a game before, right? Because in a lot of scenarios, hints are penalized, right? Like in a video game or something.

Yeah. You might lose points for it or something like that. Yeah. And we had had escape room experiences where I think, you know, sort of like in the sort of in the middle, it was like, oh, well, we'll give you a hint. then you didn't win. We're not going to put you on the wall of fame or we're going to add time. And if you take too many hints, you lose. So it was kind of like, well, then we're not going to take any hints at all out of kind of pride. But that's, but again, that's that's sort of not how it is now. Right. Exactly. But it's also like, again, what experience are you choosing

to have, right? It's fun to be on the leaderboard, but also it's fun to solve the game in a good feeling amount of time. Frustration isn't fun. This is one of the places where like my perspective of running the games, I think, helps a lot. Because for me, I want every puzzle to get solved. I want people to be able to have that feeling of triumph over that thing. And so hints often are not just like, yeah, here's the answer. It's like, try looking at that thing again or you're very close, keep going, right? I just want to like nudge people just enough so that their brain can make that connection.

So that's something that I recommend in the book. Like, if you are wondering, like, am I just wasting my time or am I even remotely close? You can ask for like a confirmation of that. You can say, am I on the right track? Or, you know, if you're entering a combination lock that just like won't go, you can say, like, can you confirm that the answer is correct? Just get a little bit more information that will help you on your way. Right. So not like solve this puzzle for me.

It doesn't have to be that. You know, you could ask for a hint in a way where maybe at the end, you don't even remember that you would. best for a hint at all. Exactly. So it's a time-based game. And so saving time is really kind of like the most important strategy. You know, if I'm like working on something for like five minutes or so or if I'm watching somebody work on something for five minutes, that's when I say, okay, I'm wanting a hint, but I will leave it for like one or one and a half more minutes. Most of the time people will get it. But if they're not, that's about the point where they're getting frustrated. And so that's when you really want to like make sure that you're on the right path or something because

yeah the time wasting part of it you know you don't want to be spending 10 15 minutes on something if you only have 60 minutes total you're probably going to have more fun if you took that hint got over it and then win exactly with having taken a hint yeah versus I burned 30 minutes on one puzzle and now we're getting booted out of the room we didn't even you know get very far it's like what what's going to be the better experience for you yeah now this is really important before you go into the room with that team, one of the things you've got to work out amongst yourselves is when do we ask for a hint? Who can't ask for a hint? Do you have to confirm to the rest of the room before you ask for a hint? That sort of a thing. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it's

helpful to get a read on the room. You can say, you know, two more minutes on this one and then I'm going to ask, right? So you can like put a timer on it, for example. You do get tunnel vision And sometimes when you're like, I feel it. I'm so close, right? That's also kind of on the game monitor, whoever is watching you to just confirm, like, just keep going or whatever, right? To not just sort of reveal it. They should be watching you and sort of crafting that to match your experience as well.

One of the things is so when we first started doing scrap rooms, the way that they did it is they sold you an individual ticket. Right. And they just combined you with random people and put you in the room. And that's just a recipe for disaster. nobody's not only can you not communicate with your team you're not on team with anybody it's just all different groups of people doing stuff and but very quickly the escape room business switched over from selling individual tickets to selling because at first when we would be like okay listen

we're buying out the room we're going to make sure that nobody is in that room that's not with us yeah and that very but that's now the standard now you just buy the room yes right but there are still some escape room situations where you might find yourself paired with randos right or you Or it might be, you might be with the family that's got the dad yelling at the kids. But then, and then it's you also, you know, standing on the outside of that. So have you ever, have you played games with strangers and had to come up with like, well, how do I on the fly work with people who I don't even know? Yes, definitely.

So I would say generally that has changed as the industry has evolved, just exactly what you described. Like at first, it was just about throughput. So it's like if we can just make a huge room and there's 10 people in there, we want to sell every single ticket for this slot and it's going to be kind of good luck to everybody in there. But most rooms probably are going to be private bookings now, especially post-pandemic or during pandemic or whatever. That's almost certainly going to be like an across-the-board change. That said, yeah, I've definitely been in situations where I'm. I'm like, we've kind of solved everything and we're just sort of like watching somebody that we don't really know, trying to do something. And I'd say the best situation for that or the best scenario that you can do is like just say, do you want to swap out or like can I have a look at it? Do not, which I've seen happen, go over and just take it out of their hands, you know? Oh, gosh. Yeah. I mean, you feel like you shouldn't have to remind people of that kind of thing, but then you see it happen and you're like, ah, yes. I

Okay. Yeah. Politeness. Yeah. Yep. It's the same kind of thing, though. I mean, like, most people who go are like, they want to get out too. They want to solve it too. So I think generally people are like pretty willing, even if it's like a little awkward at first to get into that flow. I'm going to call out one of my friends because we went into a room and there was like a music based. It was like a music based puzzle that was like it had like a maybe like a Glock and spiel or something like that. And immediately one of my friends is like, my husband has perfect pitch. So, you know, let him do this.

I'm like, there is no way on God's greener that this puzzle requires somebody with perfect pitch to come in and solve the puzzle. Like, it's got to be solvable by just regular people off the street without special knowledge. You might need to use the periodic table of elements, but you definitely don't have to memorize the periodic table of elements before you go into a room, right? Yeah, exactly. So that's the kind of situation where pattern recognition and like kind of knowing generally how things are encoded. comes into play because, yeah, rooms should not require external knowledge. Like, you don't need to know the works of Shakespeare. You shouldn't need to speak French.

Like, yeah, you don't have to read sheet music. But you will see that those are sort of the trappings that are hiding a level of encoding. I wish, right now I wish that Karen was here, the host, A Good Job, Brain, because she has a wonderful story that I'll just tell you in her absence that she did do a, and she was on vacation and she was in an escape room with strangers with a, with a family and they were like younger kid like teens so there was a cassette tape player in the room so they had no idea what that was and so she had to actually show them how to load a cassette into the cassette tape player so for them that was a puzzle and uh what ends up

happening is so it i think it was like an edie's themed um you know sort of room and uh she pops the cassette tape in closes it pushes play and immediately the cassette tape starts up and she hears the guitar riff like da-da-da-da-da-da-da and she and she yells at the teens quick dial the number 867-5309 on the telephone and if the teens weren't already confused now they are extremely what is this lady talking about how did she listen to three seconds of a guitar riff and tell us what telephone number to dial on the telephone the older people listening to this podcast understand the reference the teens look it up I guess all right the parents but yeah so that that had happened to her that that's an example of i think a wonderful magical thing happening yeah in an escape room do you have any you have a great story of like

something you did that you felt really great about yourself or it's just something wonderful that happened where oh gosh that's a great question so most of the time i now i'm just playing with my partner right like we we try and look to to player games even if it's like generally intended for a larger group just because it's fun yeah i can't think of any like particular individual moment, but like when he and I are like in that flow state together, because we can, we have like the shorthand of our relationship. We know each other's solving strengths and weaknesses and stuff. So we can just communicate like mind meld style. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a tricky question because a lot of the time when you play games,

like you kind of feel like, oh, I don't think I did anything. Not really, right? Oh, yeah. In truth, you totally did. You know, everybody's contributed to it. You know, so I'm like, You know what, honestly, if you were in, if you were in that room and you played well and you looked around and you found stuff and you helped everybody get everything together and you were pleasant and you didn't yell at anybody and you encouraged people and you were fun to be with, then you helped everybody solve all the puzzles because you created the environment in which they were going to thrive instead of doing what I do and create the environment in which everyone else to kill me again because I'm yelling and flustered so much. Well, I guess, you know, not everybody is going to have the aha moment of like the lock opens in your hand. Although I just thought of a story. We were playing a game where it was a multi-part room. So this was with a third person. So I was in the center.

My partner was in one room and our friend was in the other. And I just, I could see this was the final puzzle. And it had to do with like color combinations and flipping switches on the thing. And I was just like, we are. going to nail this, right? And so I was just like taking notes and working it out while everybody was sort of solving stuff. And so then when it all finally came together in the end, I was like, y'all, I got this. And we just, you know, we nailed it. But it was for like a really triumphant narrative moment too. And so like to be in that, like it was a magic themed room. That did actually

feel like we had like nailed the magical part of it. So that was pretty satisfying. Yeah. So we've talked about like common things teams do to hurt themselves. What's some of the craziest stuff that you've seen a team do in an escape room that you were just like, wow, I certainly didn't expect that they would bring in their own sledgehammer and start smashing down the walls, you know? Right. So I would say we playtest extensively specifically to try to prevent things like that from happening. We try to make all of the sort of mistakes like that up front so that we can basically completely close off all of those possible avenues for people. So I will share one of the stories from our playtest, which taught us quite a lot. We had a typewriter in the game, and we had a group of game designer friends coming in to test it.

And, you know, as game designers, there are people who want to explore and test what the boundaries of the game system are, right? Like, there's not necessarily any rule until the game pushes back on you. The other thing to know is that during a play test, we will let people fail. a lot further than we normally would in a game because we want to see the manner in which they're doing the thing, right? So they're in the room, they're playing around, and they say

oh my gosh, a typewriter, okay. Oh, geez. Take out the ink strip in it, the ink tape. And they're like, it's going to be printed on here. They'll have, you know, as if the character had typed whatever the message was and it will be imprinted on the ink,

the tape part. But they're holding it in their hands and unfurling it and they're getting ink here and ink here and ink here and we were like okay we actually have to intervene at this point because that was very much not the puzzle anytime you are being given a warning up front right like don't put your fingers in the sockets don't unscrew light but right there's a time it's not like it's not like wink wink nudge nudge don't stick a paperclip into the socket kind of thing it's like no no no really don't do it yeah there's a story behind the warning basically yes yes if you didn't mention this in the book, I wouldn't bring it up now, but you do mention wearing a comfortable clothing

to these because you may, I mean, even if it's not like athletic, even if you're not going to be jumping over, you know, laser beams and thinking like that, which I have been in escape rooms where they wanted us to jump over laser beams. And two of us were pregnant. And we didn't win that room. You know, even if you're not being asked to actually do sort of athletic or physical things, you might be standing on your tiptoes, looking around a corner, getting down onto the floor, looking underneath things. So you mentioned clothing and specifically called out. Make sure that your pants do not like ride down your butt when you crouch down. Yeah. I've seen a lot of butts in my time. Yeah. There's, yeah, that's very common. The tip for clothing in general, though,

is like the ideal state that you're in is a flow state right like you forget what you're doing and you kind of forget the needs of your body at that time the way that I kind of learned this personally was one time I was playing the game two rooms in a boom you stand on two sides of a room and like there's kind of a lot of moving around back and forth and stuff and we played game after game after game of this thing and it was on a concrete floor but we were like so swept up in it and it was so much fun and the next day I was like I cannot walk I it was like brutal and so that just was like a really a good reminder to myself like when people are in a game they're like standing up the whole hour or or hour plus even you know there's a lot of movement that not you shouldn't really be asked to like climb on furniture go up ladders or you know but there can be crawling there's crouching reaching that kind of stuff it's it's probably better to wear something that you can move in and yeah like do me a solid as the person watching and cover your butt. But, like, that would be...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you take anything away from this podcast, it is that Laura Hall has seen your butt and she didn't want to and she would rather not have. And so let's take some steps to make sure she doesn't have to see it anymore. That would be a kindness, definitely. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Uh, Laura, thank you so much for joining me on this very kind of experimental episode of

good job, brain. This is our first, like, one-on-one interview episode we talked to an expert. about something that they are an expert in, and I hope everybody loved it. I definitely really enjoyed this conversation. The book is called Planning Your Escape by, and your name on the front cover is L.E. Hall, like J.R.R. Tolkien. Yes, exactly. Yes. It's available now. It's the perfect holiday gift, I think, for the puzzle fan in your life, the escape room fan, or just buy it for yourself. Laura, where can people find you if they want to know more about all of your various endeavors? Yeah. So my personal website is laura e-hall.com. I'm also Laura.

E-Hall on Twitter. You can check out our escape room if you're ever in Portland or want to play our online game. That's meridianadventureco.com. And both of those sites link directly to places to purchase the book as well. Yeah. So, okay, that's our show. Thank you, Laura, for joining me. Thank you all for listening in. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, and all podcast apps and on our website good job brain.com we will see you next week bye

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