Imaginary Worlds - Unlocking the Door Between Escape Rooms and Immersive Theater

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

I used to think escape rooms were gimmicky activities where everyone scrambled to solve puzzles while I stood around feeling useless. On the other hand, I love immersive theater, where an interactive play unfolds as you walk through a space. I thought they were very different types of live entertainment. Not anymore. I talk with David and Lisa Spira from the site Escape Room Artist and podcast Reality Escape Pod about how escape rooms are becoming emotionally resonant, sophisticated theatrical works. We go through the haunted escape room Ghost Light at MyssTic Rooms, and I talk with their co-founder and artistic director Gara Roda. Haley E.R. and J. Cameron Cooper of Strange Bird Immersive discuss the innovative ways they designed The Man From Beyond, their Houdini-themed séance escape room. Plus, Victor van Doorn and Francine Boon of the company Sherlocked explore how far they can go in creating a sense of authenticity from the feel of the props to the actors who won’t admit you’re entering an escape room. This episode is sponsored by ShipStation and Hims Go to shipstation.com and use the code IMAGINARY to sign up for your free 60-day trial. Start your free online visit with Hims at hims.com/imaginary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection, free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH-balancing minerals and crafted with skin-conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. but this gym has options like trainers, fitness pros, spotters to back me up. That's Crypto on Kraken. Powerful crypto tools backed by 24-7 support and multi-layered security.

Go to kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Non-investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. I recently went with a group of people to the New Amsterdam Theatre.

It's one of the oldest theatres in New York. And we were welcomed by Gera Roda. Welcome to the New Amsterdam Theatre. And congratulations, you've all been hired as new stage managers. A stage manager oversees the day-to-day of the theater, and one of their most important jobs is to turn on the ghost light every single night. A ghost light is a single light bulb

that is left burning on stage at night, and it is done like that, they say, so that spirits can perform, and they leave us alone during the day. Now here, at the New Amsterdam Theater, we have quite a few spirits, so please make sure to turn this light on before we close the theater for the night in one hour. Understood? Okay, as you can probably tell,

I did not actually get a job as a stage manager. We also were not at a Broadway theatre. We were in Brooklyn at an escape room. The escape room company is called Mystic Rooms. It's run by Gara and her husband Moritz. And the game we're playing is called Ghost Light. If you've never been to an escape room, it is what it sounds like. A room, or a series of rooms, that you have to escape from. You need to solve a series of puzzles to unlock the doors within a limited amount of time. The puzzles are usually three-dimensional props built into the sets. In this case, they recreated the dressing room, backstage, and stage of a Broadway theater. We had to arrange everything in a way that would please the ghost.

And you do not want to displease a ghost. And we did it all with seconds to spare. Congratulations! Yeah! Congratulations! our group included my wife my assistant producer and two experts in the field lisa and david spira they run a website a, and a conference about escape rooms. We've played about 1,200 escape rooms at this point. Our mission is to help people find the games that they're going to love.

Right now, they have a different mission, which is to show me that escape rooms can be works of art. I had done three escape rooms before the pandemic, and I did not enjoy any of them. No offense to the friends and family who brought me to those escape rooms. I enjoyed the time we spent together before and after the escape room, but during the game, I felt useless. Everybody was frantically solving puzzles, and I couldn't solve anything. It also didn't help that those escape rooms were run by bored employees who were like, defuse the bombs or the world's gonna blow up. You have one hour. Go. But the game we played, Ghost Light, was different. Gaara and her staff were totally engaged. The sets and props felt authentic, And I cared about the character of the ghost.

I actually felt a sense of responsibility, like I wanted to arrange things to make her happy. And I didn't feel useless. I actually figured out two of the puzzles. Gaara says that was by design. When we design, what we try to do is think about the theme that we want, the storyline that we want. what we try to do is think about the theme that we want, the storyline that we want. Inside this story and this theme, we think about objects and things that could happen, and then we build the puzzles around that.

And I feel like a lot of escape rooms build the puzzles, and then they kind of throw them in a room and hope for the best, you know, and give you a faint storyline. Our escape room expert, David Spira, says that it's not my imagination that there are a lot of bad escape rooms out there. And he attributes it to an article in Market Watch from 2015. The title of the article was, quote, the unbelievably lucrative business of escape rooms. The earliest escape room owners, their story all looked very similar. They basically had $10,000, a dream, and some moxie, and they made a ton of money. By the time that article came out, by the time people were even asking them questions about this,

the boom time where you could go and spend next to nothing and make everything, that had already long passed. The level of skill that was needed, even by late 2015, was much, much higher. The level of competition was already much higher. Unfortunately, this article and the kind of thinking that went into it led to a lot of folks who shouldn't have started an escape room business to get into the business. And David and Lisa told me there is now a thriving culture of sophisticated escape rooms around the world. Escape rooms today are a lot like music scenes were before the internet,

where you would have pockets around the world of people exploring different genres, different techniques, different instruments, where you will have in Athens, Greece, a robust horror scene that's playing with scale and performers and really, in some cases, acrobatics. If you were to go to the Netherlands, you'll find a very thoughtful and very different approach to horror. There's more psychological horror there. In Los Angeles, the escape rooms are much more story and actor centric and typically not as hard and also don't require as big a group. You can go with a really small team. And in Northern California, we found the games to

be more puzzly and usually require larger groups because there's a lot of different things to solve and to accomplish. Fitting the stereotypes of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. In a lot of ways, yeah. And then similarly in Boston, you'll find some really wonderful games that have more thoughtful puzzle design and some really great tech, which is also kind of reflecting a lot of the culture you'll find there. Some companies pour a ton of money into sets and props to really wow you. Other escape rooms lean heavily into their site-specific locations, like there's an escape room at a castle in Toronto. into their site-specific locations, like there's an escape room at a castle in Toronto.

I was fascinated to learn about an escape room experience called Wild Heart Ranch. It's in the town of Joshua Tree in the California desert. There are two cabins that you can book on Airbnb, and it feels like you're staying in somebody's homes. But the whole complex is designed to be a giant puzzle. There's no pressure to solve the puzzles because you don't have to escape from these rooms. You're free to explore and discover. When you come in, you start to see that there's a story here.

Nobody has to solve it. It's a vacation rental. But you want to because you're like, who are these characters and what are they doing? And it really pulls on the culture of the area. The characters feel like they belong in the desert. It's a family story. The themes make a lot of sense. It has some wow moments where you open and uncover unlikely spaces as you follow their story.

spaces as you follow their story. David and Lisa brought me to the escape room Ghost Light because they said that Mystic is one of the best companies in New York. And New York City games are also defying other locations. Yeah, New York games are categorically smaller games because real estate is what it is. The games here are more intimate because of that. One of the things that the creators at Mystic do really well to make their games feel bigger because real estate is what it is. The games here are more intimate because of that. One of the things that the creators at Mystic do really well to make their games feel bigger when the space is quite small is they use lighting and sound design really well to highlight the important things and direct your attention and make the space feel a lot more alive.

Doshlight is my, it's my baby. Again, that is Gar Rota from Mystic. She told me that she had always wanted to make an escape room set backstage at a theater. I know a lot about theater history. And there's this story about Olive Thomas, who's a Ziegfeld Folly. The Follies, the Ziegfeld Follies were considered to be the beginning of Broadway in as we know it now. And she died in mysterious circumstances. She poisoned herself. Some people say it was suicide. Some people say she was murdered. Some people say it was a mistake. And since since that happened, a lot of people and I mean, a lot claim to have seen a woman in a green dress at the New Amsterdam Theater, where Aladdin is playing now. You see, I had no idea this was based on a real story.

That's fascinating. Yeah. They actually have a picture of Olive at every entrance of the New Amsterdam Theater, and every member of the staff has to say goodbye, hello, Olive, and goodbye, Olive, when they come in and out of the theater. And that's actually how we began the game, saying hello and goodbye to a picture of the real Olive Thomas. But the game that we played was different

from how it was originally conceived. So it started being a lot more immersive. We opened just before a pandemic, and our idea was that there would be actors welcoming the groups and delivering a speech and then it would be kind of like an immersive experience. The thing that made us stop is that COVID came and we had to do a wellness check before every single game and it was just very weird to do it in costume. So were they playing characters like were they playing ushers or who were they playing?

The idea the first idea for Ghostlight was that Olive Thomas would welcome you and usher you inside. And then after the game, you would be welcomed by another person, a game master that would be like, what did you like? How did you come in? And that was the first idea. So you're going to pull a sixth sense, basically. And we think that Olive is a real person. And at the end, it's just like, you weren't talking to anybody. Correct. That was the first idea. So you're going to pull a sixth sense, basically, and we think that Olive is a real person. And at the end, it's just like, you weren't talking to anybody. Correct. That was the first idea. Wow. Did you ever put that into practice? No, no. We opened Ghost Light in February 2020. So it was there was no time. As many longtime listeners know, I love immersive theater. Immersive theater is not like regular theater, where you're sitting in a seat and watching a show unfold on stage.

In immersive theater, you move through a space, and the show unfolds around you as you walk from room to room. I also love LARPing, which is like a combination of role-playing games and improv. I've done multiple episodes about both types of theatrical arts. I thought they were in a totally different category from escape rooms. Not anymore. There's a new generation of escape rooms combining elements of immersive theater and LARPing, but you can't easily blend them together. The players who come to an escape room have very different expectations of what's going to happen and what their role is going to be than LARPing or immersive theater. So we're going to focus in on two escape room companies that are incorporating actors into

their games to the point where the players might be wondering, is this real or a game? Running a business can feel like being in an escape room. You're going from one challenge to the next, racking your brain to figure out solutions that you know are right there in front of you. And if you've got a lot of work to do with shipping, you might feel trapped without the time to focus on the stuff you really enjoy. ShipStation can be like a cheat code that helps you breeze through an escape room in record time. ShipStation integrates whatever you sell online and streamlines your workflow so your business can grow even when you're on summer vacation. Over 130,000 companies have grown their e-commerce businesses with

ShipStation. Their dashboard makes managing orders, label printing, and customer service feel easy. And you can import orders from anywhere that you sell online, whether it's Amazon, Etsy, eBay, TikTok, Shopify, or Squarespace. And you can save thousands on shipping costs with discounts of up to 89% on UPS, DHL Express, and USPS rates. Work less and ship more with ShipStation, the innovative tool that helps you

turn your shipping challenges into opportunities for growth. Go to ShipStation.com, use the code imaginary to sign up for your free 60-day trial. That's ShipStation.com, code imaginary. imaginary. The two companies that I'm going to focus on are Sherlocked and Strange Bird Immersive. Sherlocked has three escape rooms in Amsterdam. There's the Alchemist, where you have been summoned to the laboratory of an alchemist to help them complete a ritual. There's The Architect, which takes place in the office of a fictional Dutch architect who may have been part of a secret organization.

And finally, there's The Vault, which is like experiencing a heist movie in real time. Strange Bird Immersive has one game in Houston. It's called The Man from Beyond, and it takes place during a seance. They're developing a second game, which is more science fiction, and they're aiming to open it at the end of this year. These two companies are over 5,000 miles apart, but they have a lot of similarities. First of all, they're both run by couples. I actually know a few other companies that are run by couples,

including Mystic in New York. I asked Francine Boone and Victor Van Dorn from the company Sherlocked how the business fits into their relationship. When you're a couple, it's very easy to then check in with each other and say, hey, I have this idea. Can I do it now? And then you have some, we have some strict rules about after working hours, we check in, can I have a question about work? And then the other person says yes or no. And also the working hours,

like our escape rooms are operational seven days a week. The latest slot we have is at 12 o'clock in the night. Also there, if you're not in the same business, that can be quite challenging if you have these fluctuating hours.

And I think being a couple really helps with that as well and i think it's just a very joyful kind of work when it's fun you know running a company can also be intense having a team makes also that everyone's problems end up being your problem but that's kind of the bargain but everyone's successes always also end up yeah success success. Exactly. It goes both ways. Yeah. Haley and Cameron Cooper run Strange Bird Immersive in Houston. Their inspiration came from a trip to New York. They went to immersive theater shows like Sleep No More and Then She Fell, which I covered on my podcast in 2016. And they were mesmerized by that type of theater. And while they're in New York,

they decided to check out an escape room. They had never done one before. And we went and we played it and it was extraordinarily broken, extraordinarily cheap. It was absolute chaos. It was, there was a zombie in the room that you were trying to like run away from.

So that meant that like all the puzzles were very much like being jammed on and because people were in a frenzy, right? We left that experience and we said, that was not very good, but we loved it. And we said, well, what if, you know, this was elevated and brought in with more storytelling elements, higher production values? And we thought that that would be a really phenomenal way to open up a company. Victor and Francine also got into the business for similar reasons. It was an art form that wasn't really taking itself seriously, I think. And they were feeling disillusioned by a lot of the escape rooms in the Netherlands. There is a pattern there that there's very high production value, good showmanship, I

would say, a desire for spectacle, or at least a proclivity towards it by the makers. And on the slightly negative side, there is a bit of a morbid fascination with some horror stories and corrupt priests, pedophile priests. All kinds of dead babies. It's like there's a tendency for horror and for scaring people. Jump scares. As you can hear, we don't like that very much. So we also think it's an easy way to get an emotional response is to make something scary, to just take away a person's safety. We don't like that. Playing with fear in itself is not a bad thing. I just really like it

when creators use it not as a trope or a gimmick, but as an intrinsic part of an experience. Along similar lines, Haley Cooper was annoyed by how many escape rooms in the U.S. were relying on action movie cliches. I don't think it's very believable to say the end of the world. It's not meaningful to say the world is going to end because I can't actually believe that. If you put the stakes in me, you know, like say you're playing a horror themed room or something like that. And the goal is to escape, you know, the evil inside of this game. I can't believe that either. If you put stakes in other characters inside of these games, well, they're fictional characters who live inside of this world. So whatever is happening to them, I can easily believe could come if I do not act.

So Haley and her husband Cameron wanted to design an immersive escape room where the stakes could feel smaller but more compelling. And they decided there needed to be a singular character who was the author of these puzzles. You know, we talked about brainstorming different ideas. One of the ideas was a magician. A magician keeps many different secrets. A magician is involved in all sorts of curious things. Another thing that we came up with was a ghost. Ghosts can do any kind of metaphysical things that you set up in your world. And then Cameron said, what if it's a magician ghost? What if we do both? And eventually I had a thought about a book I read as a child and how Harry Houdini died having promised his wife that

if it were possible to contact her from the afterlife, they were very interested in the possibility of spiritualism. However, very skeptical. But he never found anyone because he could see through all the tricks. But they always had this idea and they would hold yearly seances where she would try to contact him. And of course he never, he never showed up. And I always thought that that was very sad. As soon as I told this to Haley, she said, that's it. I want to tell that story. It is ultimately a seance room about a ghost. So we get into some, some themes. I don't want to spoil too much, you know, um, but we are, we do have a bit of a reputation

as the escape room that makes you cry. You know, it is, it is based on Harry's promise to his wife and we work with that. I think it's maybe also because we really take it seriously and it's, it's very easy in this industry to have your tongue in your cheek. I think when it is as real as possible and we go to a certain emotional place, people can follow us. To combine immersive theater with escape rooms, they decided to structure the experience like a video game. In a lot of video games, there are two modes, gameplay and cutscenes. When you're in gameplay mode, you're moving a character through a space, solving puzzles or trying to achieve something physical.

When you complete a task, the game switches to cutscenes. Cutscenes are like computer animated scenes from a movie, starring the characters in the game. And in a cutscene, sometimes you have dialogue options. And the way you respond can change the direction of the story. That's how they approached making The Man from Beyond. I think we knew immediately that while you were in puzzle solving mode, the actor never stood a chance. mode, the actor never stood a chance. So we deliberately separated the phases of the experience such that you could enjoy the immersive theater without worrying about the puzzles,

and you could deal with the puzzles without worrying about the actor. But the puzzles are not separate from the experience as a whole. I like to think of puzzles as essentially the plot mechanism from which you, the protagonists, the players can act. We're going to talk more about the immersive theater elements, but I want to keep the focus on puzzles because that is the part

I found most challenging. Haley says a lot of bad escape rooms often rely on one type of puzzle and that rewards only certain types of players. So we created with the idea of giving a wide variety of people hero moments, like to be able to leave the room and say, this is the thing that I solved. That's when my skill set really came forward. You know, so somebody who is really interested in word analysis or literary technique, you know, there's a puzzle for them. For somebody who is really more mechanically inclined,

who really understands like how things work in 3D, we've got a puzzle for them. For people who are just kind of like wandering around the room, they're going to be like, hey guys, the lights just changed. What's up with that? Francine Boone says they take a similar approach when designing puzzles for their company in Amsterdam. So within one experience, there is something physical where you have to be physically savvy to solve something. But there's also logical puzzles. There's puzzles where you have to work together. And often, if we do our job well, there's also a puzzle that combine these different qualities of different people in order to together come to the right solution. And how we get there is by really testing, testing, testing everything.

But Francine and Victor had to learn the value of testing the hard way. So, for example, with our latest game, The Alchemist, we had our very first test paper prototypes of, I think, five different concepts that we thought would be interesting and that we thought would be really fun. And we created the mechanics around them, very rudimentary, and put them in a space and then allowed people to play with them. Of these five, only one made it in the eventual experience. And I think in this process, it's really important to test early and test ugly prototypes because then you're not as attached to them as you might be as a maker you can sometimes forget the whole frame of reference that you're bringing to the table and then you assume that things are more like more obvious than they actually turn out to be for other people our second experience, the immersive heist adventure, there are whole puzzles which we spent 10,000 euros on still physically in that building that we don't use because they were just

causing too much confusion. And then we actually didn't have that rule of testing before you're attached to something or testing an early ugly prototype of something. Wow. And yeah, wasted 10,000 euros there. But they're still dedicated to having a sense of authenticity, even if it comes at a cost. What we try to achieve is that people suspend their disbelief, that they come in and they let go of the fact that they're playing a game. They start to feel like the main character in a beautiful story where it's very important that they are there at this moment. To give you a concrete example, in our latest game, we made an alchemical library and there is a fireplace there. I think for a set design or

something, you would just make a fireplace out of wood because it will look real and it doesn't really matter. But now, because people will walk around it and they are able to touch it, we put a lot of time and effort into finding a really good front that is made out of marble. Because then as you walk by it and you put your hand on it, it feels cold. It makes sense in the environment. It makes sense that there's a fireplace there that's made of this material and therefore it doesn't get you out. And this is one of the things where if we wouldn't have done it, you would notice it immediately. But now that we have done it,

nobody cares. Nobody notices. To be fair, the players may not fully appreciate the marble fireplace because they're so focused on the game and their company uses lighting techniques to direct the player's attention when they're exploring the space. Cameron Cooper says they do the same thing with their escape room in Houston. If it's kind of dim and there's a light on this birdcage over here, there's a light on this table over here, that tells you subconsciously and maybe consciously if you're paying attention, these are the interesting points. For most people, this is kind of like grabbing control of their camera and saying, come look at this thing.

But designing for human behavior is a lot trickier, especially when actors get involved. In sci-fi fantasy, for some reason, a lot of the villains are bald. Lex Luthor, Bane, Kingpin, Bullseye, Thanos, Red Skull, Voldemort, Blofeld, Pinhead, Dr. Evil, Gru, the entire Harkonnen clan, and Dune. The list goes on. If you're losing your hair and you're not feeling confident about it, those guys are not helping. But you can fight back with HIMS. HIMS makes treating hair loss simple with doctor-trusted treatment options

and clinically proven ingredients that can regrow hair in as little as three to six months. They offer a wide variety of personalized treatment options so you can find what works best for you. The process is simple and 100% online. If prescribed, your treatment is sent directly to your doctor. Start your free online visit at hymns.com slash imaginary. That's H-I-M-S dot com slash imaginary

for your personalized hair loss treatment options. hymns.com slash imaginary for your personalized hair loss treatment options. Hymns.com slash imaginary. Results vary based on studies of topical and oral minoxidil. Prescription products require an online consultation with a healthcare provider who will determine if a prescription is appropriate. Restrictions apply. See website for full details and important safety information. Victor Van Dorn and Francine Boone draw on their different backgrounds to design games for their company, Sherlocked.

He is a filmmaker and she is a sociologist. Francine says her goal is to help adults learn how to play together. I recently had a play test with 12-year-olds and I was so impressed with them because they followed instructions, they played together nicely. When one was lost, he just exclaimed, I'm lost. And then three others said, oh, we'll catch you up, come in, you know. And I was like, oh my God, adults cannot do this anymore. It's so interesting. If you tell them, make a group size of four, you get groups of one, two, three, seven people, never four. It's very interesting. And that's where we get to the immersive theater elements.

Now, I've mentioned before that I've always preferred immersive theater over escape rooms. My wife feels the opposite. She loves escape rooms. She's great at solving puzzles. And she often becomes the de facto team leader. But immersive theater freaks her out. She cringes at the thought of an actor taking her aside to perform a personal scene with her, which often happens in immersive shows. When Haley and Cameron Cooper designed The Man from Beyond, they were very aware of this issue. And Haley thinks actors in escape rooms have gotten a bad rap because a lot of escape room owners don't have a background in theater or film. You know, because like owners are coming from a wide different variety of disciplines. You know,

Cameron and I are coming from the theatrical background. So, you know, we audition people for our game and we rehearse them for our game. And here's the giant binder that you need to memorize. We do try to arrange our experience so that if you don't want to interact, you don't have to. Like you can go through the man from beyond and like maybe answer a yes or no question.

And that's all you need to do. And we train our actors to like sink their attention on the people who are giving them the eyes back, right? You know, because there's always somebody on the team that is just sitting there with like wide open eyes and their like jaws on the floor. And we call it like the smile conspiracy, you know? And you can just tell, okay, well,

that's the person that you're going to be investing in. That probably explains why so many actors have taken me aside in immersive shows and done private scenes. I must have this big smile on my face that says, I am totally on board with this thing you're doing. Francine and Victor take a similar approach in training their staff. I think 40% of the success of the experience lies in the hands of the host, the game master, who has a sense, what is the level of interaction and engagement I'm getting from this group? Because we do have a lot of also, for instance, typical escape room fans who are not used to interactive theater or who are like, yeah, yeah, yeah, skip the shtick, I just want puzzles. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, skip the shtick. I just want puzzles.

And especially our more experienced game masters, they have a whole number of reactions or tools in their tool belt to play nicely with that or to decide, okay, I'm going to kind of step out of character here and avoid a bad experience that way. Although in one of their games, which is called The Vault, the host commits to character right away

and they won't break character. The game is based on the heist movie genre. If you show up at the door and you say, we're here to play the escape room, then an art curator persona who opens the door says, sorry, that's next door.

You're in the wrong place. And then they're like, there is no next door what's going on this is the right address and then oh they ring the bell again and then hi we're here for the art gallery we have an appointment and then oh yes i see your name follow me or if the host is in a different mood i don't see you on the list and then they have to kind of blag their way in, which is just like one of the classic heist tropes, of course, of being a bit of a smooth talker. I actually had to look up blag.

It's British English for bluff. And there's an alternative ending to the game, which takes the commitment to realism and blagging even further. The fail state of the vault is more famous than the win state because when you fail in the vault, you get caught by the security guard and you have to blag your way past them too. And we're actually working on a more epic win state at the moment because we want to equalize those two states.

In The Man from Beyond, Haley and Cameron also set the mood right away. The lighting is dim, the music and Cameron also set the mood right away. The lighting is dim. The music is set for a seance. And you meet a character, a medium named Madame Daphne. And the very first thing she says when you open up the door is, are you here for the seance? Which casts you immediately as not an escape room player. You are here for a seance.

You have to say yes. And if you answer with a confused thing, then she's like, well, I was expecting somebody. I hope it's you. One of the things that we've been working on over the years is questions. How we frame the questions makes a great deal of difference in whether people respond successfully. One of the earliest iterations that we had was Madam Daphne would ask the team, can you keep a secret? And undoubtedly we would get like that one person who was just like, actually, you know what? I super can't keep a secret. Or like Susie over here, I'm so sorry. She's such a gossip. That's definitely not happening. And that was not the tone that we wanted, right? Like we have moments of levity, but not that moment. We wanted that moment for them to take it seriously, that they were about

to be entrusted with a secret that mattered. So we changed it. And now Madame Daphne says, I will need you to keep a secret. Will you do that for me? And all of a sudden now it's about personal relationship. And we never get pushback from people about that anymore. Everybody is like, oh, yes. Oh, yes. You know, because they already have a relationship with this character and don't want to disappoint her. Although that's not enough sometimes. We often like have a tool for handling smart asses where the first thing that we do is acknowledge what just said just got said as a character and get more vulnerable about it rather than being combative.

Or being robotic. Yeah. You plow on with the script because ultimately people who are trying to be snarky with actors are trying to get them to break. You know, it's a power play. Like they want to see the edge of the world and like prove that you are ultimately just an actor here. If you answer in character and take what they just said as a truth that is not helping you as a character get what you need, then that's like a sympathy card. And if all of that fails, they have to be nimble, break the rules, throw out the script. They once had a group of players that was unusual for them. It was a small group of women in their 80s.

We know at this point that if we have people coming through the door who are of the generation that did not grow up playing video games, the language of the gameplay is going to be challenging. Like you don't understand the concept of inventory. Like when you get something interesting,

it might be useful later on. That's just not a concept that people who don't play video games have. concept of inventory. Like when you get something interesting, it might be useful later on. Like that's just not a concept that people who don't play video games have. They were really engaged in the early opening act one, and then the game begins and they're completely at sea. They have no idea what's going on. Remember, their escape room is designed like a video game with two types of gameplay, puzzle solving, and the scenes with actors. They're not supposed to go together. But that day, the actress playing Madame Daphne decided, I'm going into the room and I'm going to help them

play because I can just tell that they would appreciate that help. Like there are many, many teams that would come through who would not appreciate having their hand held, but they made that call based on the team that they were hosting. And she played with them to get them to the end. And by the end, I mean, she was being embraced by everybody when they were leaving. Everybody was so fundamentally in that moved place that we aim for. And I've always been really proud of our cast who made that call. I don't think it's a coincidence that this renaissance of escape rooms

is happening at the same time that travel culture is rebounding from the pandemic. But social media is a big part of travel culture. You can't take pictures or film yourself in a lot of escape rooms. The organizers don't want you to look up solutions or post the reveals online. Victor says at Sherlocked, they often come up with reasons within the context of the game why the phones need to be turned off. But mostly, he just wants people to cut out the noise. We just wanted them to be in the adventure and not have any risk of any pings, notifications, things that would take them out of the magic circle and into the normal world. We're all just going through life in a little bit of a haze every single day, just keeps on passing. And it's very, very similar. Escape rooms,

well done, are a way to just kind of like shake yourself awake. Once you've escaped the escape room, you may not have pictures or videos of your experience, but you have memories. It could be the memory of feeling triumphant or a feeling of wonder. It's like an emotional souvenir and you have a key to unlock it anytime you need. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Gara Roda, David and Lisa Spira, Haley and Cameron Cooper,

Victor Van Dorn, and Francine Boone. If you liked this episode, you should check out my episodes on Immersive Theater, LARPing, and my episode

Talking to the Dead, where I went to a theatrical performance of a seance, and I delved into Harry Houdini's complicated relationship with spiritualism. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you like the show, give us a shout out on social media, or text the episode to a friend who you think might like it. The best way to support Imaginary Worlds is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you get either free Imaginary Worlds stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can also get access to an ad-free version of the show through Patreon, and you can buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts.

You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.