Environmental Narrative: Telling Stories in Spaces Without Saying Anything Aloud

[Music] i'm laura hall i'm a game designer artist and writer i live in portland oregon and i make a lot of stuff right now my focus is escape rooms but i'm also really involved in like alternate reality games and art installation work these are some of the things that i've worked on recently the amazon echo escape at new york comic con there was a national tour of a resident evil game that i helped work on the silence in room 1258 was an installation piece in london in 2017 and the piece that we'll be discussing today mostly is spark of resistance which was the first ever escape room game that i made that one it was in portland it's not it doesn't exist anymore but that was a spy drama set in an alternate universe kind of cold war era dystopia and today i'm going to talk about the design principles of how i make deeply narrative and immersive escape rooms in particular the lessons i've learned

and the mistakes that i've made to learn those lessons and why those games work best when all of the work that goes into them is totally invisible to the player but to kick it off i want to define some stuff first and can i ask how many people have actually been to an escape room yes that's great that makes my job a lot easier um so like a quick overview you know they started out as these point-and-click flash games in the early double aughts someone pretty quickly had the idea to translate those into actual physical spaces but the earliest you're seeing those is around that time so this is actually still a pretty new genre even though it draws from things that have existed for hundreds of years when i'm talking about escape rooms then i'm referring to the specific physical space people buy tickets to visit it they may or may not be locked in it's usually like against fire code these days to actually lock the door so that's

fine there's generally an hour to play the puzzle sometimes it can be as little as 45 minutes sometimes up to 90. um and often you're not actually trying to escape anymore they're usually goal oriented but as an example more often than not you know that's it's defusing a bomb but it's a relatively new genre and it's part of what we refer to as immersive entertainment um so some definitions of that no proscenium which is an amazing resource for this kind of thing puts it at as an experience that physically and usually narratively places the audience in the same space where the action is occurring and sarah thatcher who works at disney and is amazing she defined it as something without a frame around it there's no proscenium no screen it's something that's happening in space that also encompasses things like

theater haunted houses theme parks live action role play installation work they draw upon a lot of principles that have crossover in user experience and video game level design and so while this presentation specifically deals with escape rooms there are lots of design principles that i think are and i wish were universally applicable these are some of the dimensions of immersion that you get either in a physical space or in interacting with the screen so you're enjoying your time there hopefully you're mentally engaged in the process you're feeling a sense of spatial presence whether that's in relation to a game controller or the environment around you and the ultimate goal is to feel transportation so you're immersed in a narrative to me that feeling of transportation is key to all of the work that we do and then this is a basic spectrum of where immersive works tend to fall it's developed by rachel pendergrass so is there a cohesive story or is the experience largely about

setting a mood um would the performance work if there was no audience participating or is it entirely reliant upon participation there's other questions about like people's ability to move through the space or whether they're stationary whether or not there is a fourth wall or they're able to engage directly with the the actors for example um or whether the narrative is set and it can be influenced by the people doing those interactions and you can see that escape rooms fall upon the audience dependent line and the atmospheric line so lots of theming and it can't take place without the people in it and then also i'm going to break down some of the elements of our game and like there may be other ways that you personally define these but when i'm speaking about it this is what i mean the narrative is the story told by the world uh the the set the objects everything is speaking to whatever the story is that you're inhabiting versus the story or the plot and that's the action that's playing out over the hour that people are inside the game

and then there's another layer which is the game flow that's the puzzles and interactions that people are progressing through that is driving them forward so when we set out to design these we're facing three challenges we want to tell a story that's entertaining while people are under a significant physical and mental stress we want to tell that story in a physical space in a cinematic way and we want to use puzzles and interactions thoughtfully to make it fun and reinforce the themes of whatever they're going through and so again i want to draw your attention to the the place where escape rooms fall on here because it is different to what my goals are my goal is to drive it fully into the narrative side i have never seen an escape room reviewed like a theater performance before and so that is what i'm working toward i want it to be taken seriously as art but because it is still emerging you know there are people who are trying to do that but but generally not so much with the story stuff

so our first challenge telling the story while people are under significant physical and mental stress when we think about these designs our first step is narrowing in on what's happening to people's brains in these spaces and cognitively there's a lot going on and this is really easy to see when people step inside a theater or a haunted house they both have visitors crossing a threshold into another world the lights go down the music starts people's hearts speed up a little their eyes are like adjusting to the light and they start darting around and they're keying into what's happening but that's actually the brain entering a kind of survival mode and once that switch has been flipped we're then asking people to solve puzzles or take information or interact with characters and it's it's a real challenge to communicate directly with the player's brain when it's in that state so i'd like to talk for a minute about what is happening to players mentally when they're in that escape room they're in survival mode they're excited

you know we've used lighting cues and design to bring them into a flow state and so i want to show you a video it's really important that you follow the instructions on the screen very carefully this is an awareness test how many passes does the team in white make the answer is 13. but did you see the moonwalking bear

so that's more generally known as the invisible gorilla experiment it's a great example of how the brain and the body are doing weird things in concert when they're in stressful situations and when you're asking people to focus on particular things and you see that play out in escape rooms all the time in our original room we had a klaxon that blared any time we were delivering a hint to people and people would be standing right next to it and this i mean this is a loud collection and they would totally miss it because they were so deeply engrossed in whatever they were interacting with and that's something that we just have to keep in mind for basically every single part of the story that we're trying to convey another funny kind of lizard brain survival mode thing is that we love to look for patterns and stuff um like does the sink look worried to you you know in an escape room you can see how that becomes a problem if you need people to find only the specific patterns that you want them to find

so this is what's happening in people's brains they're deeply focused to the exclusion of most other information they're quickly searching and processing to try and make connections between the game elements and they're getting mentally and physically exhausted about what they're seeing and doing ignoring the physical element is something that you also see a lot but people become so wrapped up in these games that they forget that they're standing on a hard cold concrete floor for an hour and afterwards they're like why do my legs hurt so much well we know why so the lessons for that are to eliminate red herrings and extra junk wherever possible to be mindful of how players are able to take in information and really to lean on the world building understanding that i think is respecting the player we also avoid putting in text unless it's absolutely vital because again they really will not absorb it they will process it as quickly as they can for puzzle elements and then it gets thrown to the side so it's a really poor way to

to deliver any kind of story um since this is part of the narrative summit i'm not going to get too deep into how we go into the world building but this is like a summary you know there's a huge difference between what the player actually sees and processes and what we need to know in order to make a world that feels cohesive um honestly that could be like a whole day-long summit in itself but so spark of resistance you know it's a spy drama but in it from another perspective the players are terrorists instead of freedom fighters we chose to set our story in an impressive world full of censorship and we knew what we wanted to say about that which guided everything that we put into it but from a player perspective you're just kind of going on a fun adventure so in spark of resistance that game um this this is the the lesson in action um players are told that they're secret agents who have been activated to investigate the office of a spy who is deep under cover

that person had missed a check-in and we you know we assume the worst like they've just disappeared we need these players to go in and figure out what's happened so this is how it plays out their first puzzle leads to a tape recorder which says if you're listening to this i'm in big trouble then the players send a key card through a built-in message tube system and in the game flow that is the first time that that character which is not a real person but that's the first time they become aware of the players in that space in the game world and the spy then sends them back a note which is written on another puzzle and they use that information to distract a security guard and it displays a video of the spy evading the guard based on the information they've just sent this by then speaks directly to the players via a camera and it's a betrayal so from that point on the players are on their own they have to complete the mission and save themselves each of the puzzles moves them forward in the task of investigating the office and helping the spy each one grants them slightly more knowledge about the

dystopian world via an increasing amount of security clearance and access to information and this is all done with like two lines of dialogue a short video and that handwritten message which you can see so for each of those moments we boil the plot and narrative stuff down to its very most essential message because we knew that people would not be able to process anything more than that the environment the object design and the puzzle mechanics carry the burden of the rest so our second challenge is telling an engaging story in a physical space in a cinematic way knowing that players are not going to take in that info how do we turn well you can imagine the big scroll from star wars how do we turn a huge wall of text into the single evocative image which is what kicks off a new hope it's a tiny starship flying against a huge inky black sky and then a massive star destroyer you know you don't need or really remember

that text because you know exactly what the dynamic is from the first image that you're presented with show don't tell right in my experience when you show up in an escape room it's all about that sense of anticipation you don't really know what's about to happen because you want to avoid spoilers for yourself you probably don't know what it looks like inside because places generally don't place photographs of their rooms online you may be a little excited maybe a little bit scared so you show up and then the first thing that happens is that you're handed a letter or you get a really long speech about the world and what you're supposed to be doing in it and it's just a hype killer and so nobody remembers any of the story that is presented in those moments but thankfully we don't have to reinvent the wheel there's best practices for moving people through physical spaces from larp to theater to theme parks they've also undergone the stress test that escape rooms as an industry have not you know they're putting thousands and thousands of people through these spaces every day so if we look to them for the best

practices of how to convey story in those environments where people are moving through them quickly we can really learn a lot and i also have to call out environmental storytelling as like a legitimate meme at this point joking about the way that video games place little vignettes in into levels to tell you you know whatever has just happened but something's happened here um but the reason it's a joke is because it's so obvious right like ideally you're using the level layout and the affordances of all of the objects and interactions but being obvious in this manner stops the progression of the plot while you look at it and in an escape room where there's a ticking timer that's a huge problem because you're deliberately wasting the player's time so the lessons there use elements from architecture larp theater films to set the tone and the design for specific emotion and avoid and eliminate frictions that yank people out of immersion like when you think of what an office looks like to you you know it's probably like this

top photo it's messy there's fluorescent lights um you can see that reflected in media like uh office space or the office um but when you start looking at more stylized versions of offices in film uh also set in sort of dystopian era stuff you can see where our influences were taken from so our third challenge to use puzzles and interactions thoughtfully to make the game fun and reinforce the themes and i have to step back and talk about why we actually like puzzles because actually maybe we kind of don't people solve puzzles because they like pain they like being released from pain and they like most of all that they find within themselves the power to release themselves from their own pain um i love that quote but you know escape rooms are like a kind of funny niche right now and i think people self-select out of them a lot because they feel like it's going to be difficult but these are behaviors that we see in the real world all the time whether that's from video game grinding

and farming like those are terrible terms that's not fun as we would define it but but all the way up to marathoning and rock climbing that's the type four kinds of fun where it's not necessarily fun while you're doing it but you're kind of glad you did it what makes a good puzzle tells you how to solve it inherent in its design you don't have to have any kind of explanation you also don't need to rely upon outside knowledge like literature or film trivia and a good puzzle is also adjustable by adding or reducing the information in it like this puzzle is obvious what to do in this and this guy is really enjoying doing the obvious thing so the way to implement that is through the use of diegetic objects eliminating busy work only including puzzles that are going to propel the plot forward and elimination of friction and we'll discuss friction in a minute this is an example from spark of how these principles were put into action players were presented with a shelf of library books and

if you are familiar with how a library works you can guess that the syst the stickers on the side refer to the dewey decimal system of cataloging and putting them into order forms a sentence that directs you toward a page inside one of the books where you find a library checkout card that you overlay onto a page it's a really like solid design because you can solve the entire thing without any other elements if you know how the books work it's easy to do but actually the playerbase is now aging out of using libraries so it's maybe not a great puzzle anymore because it does require extra outside knowledge like typewriters vcrs and cassette tapes are the same um so everything i've described is about crafting an illusion for people they have the illusion of agency and they have this feeling that they're propelling them themselves through a very carefully crafted puzzle path but actually nothing that they do is

accidental every single thing that they maybe are we would consider like emergent play is something that we have planned for um because we very carefully avoided creating friction in the design people are totally immersed and everything is flowing easily they have no idea how much work has gone into making that experience fun because they have been totally transported and are able to live in that moment and i think that's something really special i i think that the greatest sin is promising to deliver that gift of transportation uh you know for an hour or however long you're engaging with the work um and then doing something that causes reality to come screeching back in like if you think about the pattern recognition with the face and the sink like it's natural human instinct to want to peek behind the curtain um so that's something that people players look for without even thinking and it's it's our job as entertainers to keep that curtain drawn um friction can come from a lot of places what and mostly it tends to do with

accessibility in escape room games um lots and lots of puzzles rely on color changes for example but that totally eliminates the experience of anybody who's colorblind or in any way site limited considering accessibility of motion of hearing and of movement is also a big one so experiences and games are a gift that designers can give to our players you know we've done a good job if we can help those players enter the magic circle and have fun in the worlds that we've built but if we can help them to not only experience the world in a new way to feel a bit of magic transportation and heroism and then carry that new way of experience in the world with them when they leave that is success to me so thank you

um we can take questions i guess at the mic we have 10 minutes yeah hi i was wondering if you have any best practices for developing narratives that adapt to different player skill levels like with the escape room right it could be like a room full of 12 year olds or a room full of 32 year olds sure um so the question is about adapting the game dynamically for the level of the skill of the players in it and that comes down to hinting generally um hinting is a very specific skill because you want to point people in the right direction but it's like having somebody scratch an itch for you like it just doesn't work they need to be able to scratch it themselves so it's just about providing enough information to set them on the right path um but also generally like 12 year olds are are sort of in a gray area for being

able to enjoy most escape rooms and they they don't tend to have the level of concentration necessary so that's part of that is just only allowing a certain age group to participate in the in the first place so uh i wanted to talk about time limits and uh escape rooms in virtual reality i'm working on a virtual reality escapement game right now and uh having played other competiting or competing games in that space i actually personally feel like time limits don't make sense in that capacity because it's inherently extremely unfun to play through again failure doesn't feel good and because there aren't real people or a real space that you need to kick people out of that doesn't serve the player outside of creating that stress which may be worthwhile in and of itself so i kind of wanted your opinion on that sure um so in the games that we do actually this is kind of a secret but i would be absolutely happy if 100 of players got out there were three minutes left on the clock and they also felt like they were the only players to ever escape but that's again

that's crafting that illusion it's an entertainment component right i think that in vr in particular you have to watch out for the physical fatigue so having a timer in that situation might just be a way to make sure that people aren't experiencing time dilation and forgetting that time is passing um but you're i mean you're right like it could just be a totally untimed thing as long as there's enough structure to lead people through it thanks very much thank you hi um wonderful talk is there a resource for other disciplines we all we're all here to feed the narrative i'm an audio person so it's part of my responsibility to support the narrative is there a resource to learn better communication whether it's a book or online to learn more about the vocabulary yeah so no proscenium is an amazing website and newsletter

that is it's listing physical experiences generally and they have a corresponding group on facebook called everything immersive and it really is for everything immersive and i would recommend starting there we actually have started an immersive book club which we're running if you look at um immersive book dot club so that's that's one of our ways of attempting to like break out of the silo because yeah there's like best practices for ux and there's best practices for theater and then they don't ever really cross over um so that's that's something that i think is really important just as an industry and it's a new industry so cool thank you thanks you've made a lot of escape rooms do you have advice for people who are new to that uh how much work does it take and how do you start small so that you don't boil the ocean to to make escape rooms yeah oh man in 30 seconds sure um so first of all i would say escape rooms ultimately are a ticket selling business um the fun part of the doing the design is over very quickly um and there's a lot of real estate

stuff involved in them so i would keep that in mind before sort of venturing down that path but if you're really determined play testing is by far the most important thing and there is a skill that you have to develop in watching people try and fail to solve puzzles because if they're failing at it it's your fault as the designer and not really their fault as a player and so learning to be able to see that to hold yourself back from intervening and doing that is really the best lesson and i'd say play test like three to five times more than you're doing the design i think he was next sure um uh wonderful talk um you spoke about world building and we authors love love to world build and players never get it but sometimes players they will see this bits of lore and story and they'll just gloss over them and this can bore them and or disengage them and they in turn will disengage other players and it's sort of it's like a

negative feedback loop how do you how do you best determine like a dose of world building or story lower for players to avoid this i mean i think it depends on the type of player you're creating the lore for right because like i'm somebody who wants to dig really deep into all of the secrets of something so like i will read all of the material that a lot of people probably are just moving past so like if you're designing that thing for me having it there and then making it easy to pass by totally makes sense but if it's something that's meant to benefit all of the players i mean i would start asking like what is actually necessary if it is something the players are deciding is not important to the experience and it might either be conveyed better in some other manner or just taken out okay thank you so much i know it's in a sense almost the opposite of what you do but i'm particularly interested in meditative spaces and i could also see how it's very similar in in certain

ways i wondered if you had any thoughts about engaging design for meditative spaces you mean me do you remember the game mist yes i wouldn't be standing here if it wasn't for me wow okay i used to peel off on the side of that little island and just hang out with the dapple sun coming in and finally the game would just say are you gonna do anything you know not yeah so i would actually say like the the sort of opposite coin of the work that i make is um untimed like experience based stuff um the now play this thing that i highlighted at the beginning is um situated in a desk and it's supposed to be the experience of reading other people's letters and i consider that a game and it's something that you participate in you feel everything you're looking at it you're reading between the lines but you personally decide when that experience ends when you when you have enough information or when you're satisfied um it's something that her story used really well i think as well so there's definitely a place for it but yeah for me the opposite of the escape

rooms is stuff that's entirely reading and is untimed and is like deeply personal and not team based so yeah there's definitely space for meditation just in your talk i'm excited to see more of your work thanks hi do you have any insights on how to make people not feel left out in some part of the games i always feel like that in escape room games every single player even on successful teams says something like that they say oh i i didn't do anything and like when you're watching through the cameras you're like no i saw when you picked up that thing and you made this connection um the way to do that i think is through a sort of debrief afterward which is something that larps really nail um it's something where you walk players through and then you specifically call out like you did this and you did this and you asked somebody you know what did you do that with this thing um there's also a thing from larp called froth which is a collective myth making that occurs when you're sort of uh when the players are telling the story so they're they're sort of world building after the fact

so just making room to encourage that i think would be really helpful with that feeling but everybody feels that way too so yeah yeah that that ties very much into my question because i usually have a similar feeling after doing a room escape game and i feel like man i'd really enjoy doing this with like one or maybe two other people instead of like five six seven eight and we're all just like looking at different corners and shouting at each other like did anyone find that combination yet and like oh it's the oh you solved that i didn't even see that part of the puzzle so yeah i'm just curious how you think about the numbers of people participating or how to design for puzzles solved by groups where you don't necessarily get to see the whole picture like sit down with the letter and put the narrative together in your head quietly in your own time um so that's kind of where the cinematic moment stuff comes in we usually try to have people branching off into different areas and spaces but when there's some sort of story thing that we need them to see we drive them together

that's something that you see in theater like sleep no more for example for the big major scenes all of the actors all converge physically on the same space and something plays out so you can choose to not participate in that but you're also like missing a huge part of it and so yeah it's just very tightly structured in that way to make sure that there is always something for people to do i'd say the sweet spot is generally eight people as well for an hour long game so thank you sure you had mentioned wanting escape rooms to be taken as seriously as theater and i'm trying to figure out the intersections between theater and gaming and uh one of the things that uh even something like sleep no more doesn't have that games have is a fail state which escape rooms have and so i was just wondering your thoughts as something that i've been trying to figure out myself of like how do you make a fail state still narratively satisfying i'm for our games we try and get everybody to at least a particular part in the story which i'd say is about at the 80 mark so they've seen everything there is to see

um in spark of resistance that's where the turn happens like they've been betrayed and they're tasked with setting off an emp device so whether they set that off or not is sort of beside the point they've already absorbed everything and it is really a lot of work to get players to that point if they're sort of not enjoying the rest of the game um but i would say uh check out strange bird immersive they're based in houston texas and they do a seance um theater experience that's sort of built around an escape room so it's a literal integration of theater into a game right so i think whether or not you succeed in that game sort of doesn't matter to the story that's on either end of it as well so that is a potential structure to look at awesome thank you so much sure hi um thank you for coming here i'm creating my own mixed reality game in immersive theater so i feel your talk is super helpful i wonder if you can talk a little bit about the strategies for how do we balance the players free will and the limitation or game rule set

because usually if a player wants to do things and the play the game designer doesn't intend to that will ruin or create distractions experience i mean that's part of what the play testing is that we do i would say in our rooms players never do anything that we do not want them to do even if they believe that they are secretly because at a certain point doing what they want to do in a physical room means they're going to get hurt it's probably different for for mixed reality i'm sure but i would say instead of trying to prevent them to do that to build space for that to happen um sort of a side note i took a trip to play escape rooms for a full week in malaysia and the address for that is up here it's every game in this city and in one of the games it was set in a classroom and we were each given name tags for each of the students and so the first group in our in our

cluster that went through it like role played as these characters that they were just making up then they created roles for the next group to take on with secret roles that we weren't allowed to communicate to the other players so like that emergent behavior that we came up with made that game something really really special so i think just like creating the opportunity for that and then not stepping on people when it's starting to happen as long as they're safe is probably a good way to approach it thank you hi so i am uh i'm a narrative designer i current i'm currently working on a couple of historical arg projects that are creating a story and a narrative game around real world artifacts and i'm wondering if you have any advice for creating this sort of narrative space when the boundary between what is part of the game and what isn't is not as clear as a room for alternate reality game stuff i think probably players are going to read 10 to 20 times more into it than you've

intended um which is kind of nice as the designer to like not have to do that work um so i would i would just say again it's all it comes down to play testing like you're always going to be surprised by what is emerging from that but if you practice enough in advance and i know that's really difficult for args and live events in particular um but the more that you can anticipate the better it's going to be on the other side but also maybe don't worry about it too much because they will come up with all sorts of like fun facts and connections then i would work those into the game in a way that feels rewarding as if you had been doing it on purpose the whole time thank you sure oh yeah thank you for the great talk i was oh sorry we there we have to wrap it up but i'm going to go to the lounge over there if you two want to follow me over and we can keep chatting cool things