Lessons from Escape Rooms: Designing for the Real World and VR

[Music] hello uh I I'm going to talk to you today about um escape room designs and how that applies to the world of v um but before we get into that uh I'm going to show you one of my favorite videos from the [Music] internet [Laughter] and I I just love this video so much because to me um it's a really great example of Pure Play you know that dog

is thinking of nothing except how good it feels to roll down that hill and how quickly it can get back up there to do it again uh and the reason that I think that's so cool um as an example of play is that humans get to feel that way too when we are engaging in play it's kind of a magical feeling right and humans love magic uh another dimension of fun that also feels like creating and experiencing magic comes from storytelling um storytelling lets you get carried away you can forget yourself become a different person in a different place it excites you it makes you feel things in short stories transport people and we're inevitably going to tell stories using whatever technology we have on hand to do it as much as popular media though likes to warn us against a future where we're all in cubicles operating little digital effect similes of ourselves the truth is that aside of effect of our relationship

with screen based entertainment is that the value of in-person experience begins to rise and that's something you can see in the increasing popularity of board games people who are returning to like RPGs as a way to spend time with their friends um and and media that reflects that with podcast of uh dungeons dragons games and so on but really this is nothing new people always have and always will crave experiences no matter where they're coming from right because you want to feel that sense of magic Transportation connection with other people it's all of the things that make our experience as human beings pleasureable as video game designers and filmmakers we're very familiar with the mental side of that right the language and mechanics that go into constructing stories for people to consume um there's another field as well known as experience design that focuses on designing for the physical real world side of things um which includes theme parks haunted houses immersive theater

and most recently Escape rooms uh there are all disciplines that explore the use of space human agency uh the interaction between viewer and story they're all things where people are physically moving through a space and being uh told A Narrative of some kind and absorbing information as they do so uh here you can see um some of the best examples in that field uh the the kind of noted best dark ride is at Tokyo Disney um the the best in my opinion immersive theater performance is sleep no more in New York and then that's my escape room on the side I'm just I'm teasing VR though has the potential oops excuse me to contribute uh to combine both of those worlds and we're really just at the start of understanding where that can go uh even more exciting we can use VR to make a new language that takes into account the physical body the cognitive processes of the brain and the new methods of design that must emerge

when we begin to take um take into account the human subconscious when that is working we can make magic happen for people and people will always and have always wanted that thing I'm I'm Laura Hall uh I live in Portland Oregon and I currently design escape room games uh you might have guessed from the session title um but before that I was really really interested in alternate reality games um known as A's uh those are sort of interactive real-time stories that played out online they usually involved a lot of puzzles you would interact with characters there's like a whole writing team behind the scenes and so it was all happening in real time you'd send an email to a character one would come back and and the story would end up changing around you as the characters interacted with the players um so it was this really cool ephemeral thing happening as well even before that I was really interested in muds multi-user dungeons which are just like multiplayer text

based adventure games um the one that I played was very interested in facilitating culture and politics and so it ended up being for me as a a high schooler basically like a foure long real-time interactive novel where all of my friends also hung out so now you know those those have sort of phased out um and I'm I'm now interested in escape room games and immersive theater and so on but I like to think about what it was that Drew me to all of these experiences because to me they actually um clearly share a lot of the same DNA uh and it's that magic stuff that I was talking about the the transportation the sense of connection with other people the ability to sort of forget yourself and become truly immersed in some other world uh and right now you know I'm again I'm super interested in Escape rooms but I'm also really really thinking about VR because I think that the same sort of appeal is there um it has really incredible

potential to speak to those same fundamental desires all of those games that I used to play also shared another thing in common which was puzzles um puzzles are fun and they're challenging sometimes it's just as much about you versus the puzzle as it is you versus your own cleverness um I love this quote 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 so that's kind of incorporating all of these things that I really think are relevant to space show design it's the physical it's the cognitive uh and and it's you know the player sense of agency within that context and puzzles and games really do have a long history together um escape room games are a very specific type of puzzle meets environment but puzzles can be almost anything uh it could be falling blocks it could be logic puzzles obstacle courses Plumbing

uh and if you want to look at it a little more abstractly lots of games use mechanics of withholding or gaing information or access asking players to work toward opening up whatever that Avenue is um could be a symbol AS collecting objects for Quest to unlock a dungeon door it can be much much more elaborate but that's I mean that's a puzzle in in a way um so long story short puzzles are a very useful technique for moving people forward in gameplay in the 90s uh we kind of entered a golden age of puzzles and games as as technology was really um available to facilitate these sort of things uh including Mist secret of Monkey Island return to Zork um and if you're familiar with any of those you'll know that the puzzles in those tend to have like a fairly distinctive flavor of the era I guess it um often means trying to pair every object together to see what works um it's not always necessarily with like a real world logic uh which you know might tell you what to

do with what other thing which can make it hard to guess but it ends up being funny as a result of the sort of absurdity of it then in the late n uh late double ODS you started to see a new sort of puzzle game emerge um as flash started proliferating around the web um the one shown here is uh the first or maybe the most famous like digital Escape the room game of that time it's called Crimson room um by Toshi mitsu Takagi from 2004 uh locked rooms as as puzzle sort of scenarios have always existed in like detective stories right it's impossible Mysteries based on who had or didn't have access to that space um but these games actually place you in the room itself rather than on the outside looking in and trying to deduce what was going on uh in Crimson room you can see you click around you turn over the edges of pillows you shake the Curve curtains um in a sequence that eventually allows

you to escape from that locked room and there's you know a few in this series um and many imitators then somebody had the very brilliant idea of actually building one of these in real life um and that's when escape games began uh to come onto the scene as you might imagine from seeing that flash version uh escape room games are real life games which players are locked inside a room um and that's almost the only sort of constraint that there is it can be anything beyond that you know generally they have to investigate poke around uncover Clues solve puzzles sometimes even physically escape from restraints um usually while racing against a clock they started out in Europe and Asia um scrap entertainment which has a huge Branch here and is really fun uh they opened in Japan though in um the sort of mid double ODS and then in the US in 2012 um and as I said these have a lot in common design- wise with theater haunted houses museums theme parks there

are established best practices that we can see there um as well as in things like video game level design anything where you're moving people forward in a narrative directing their attention um one distinguishing factor for escape room games is the use of puzzles of course but but also specifically the time constraint uh in a in a haunted house your experience is usually very brief because they're trying to move people through while balancing um the number of people that are actually in that space at one time it's supposed to never you're never supposed to have the line of sight of another Patron um and theme parks obviously are very tightly timed but you are not aware of the time constraint yourself these real world builds are physical manifestations um of what had previously been 2D in the in the case of these suddenly new escape room games um and the challenge that escape room designers face is often in translating puzzles and components that had been entirely digital into the physical Physical Realm also for an audience that

was probably more used to those digital versions than the now physical ones so I want to talk to you about puzzles for a minute before we get deeper into stuff so that you sort of understand the fundamental building blocks of what that experience is like uh ideally a well-designed physical puzzle is a combination of bodily interaction with whatever the puzzle object is there's the cognitive Challenge and there's also the subconscious design cues of the object itself that tell you how to work on it how to solve it how to interact with it um so to understand how to design one I'd like to show you first how players approach solving them um puzzle solving is an exercise in observation first and foremost you have to assess exactly what information you have at any given time how it might work together with other pieces of info you've uncovered and and continue from there um this is a clip of Curtis Chen puzzle designer founder of puzzled pint which is an awesome monthly puzzle solving event uh that's in a lot of cities all around the world now it's from a talk about how to solve any

puzzle in under 47 minutes um and so for for context players were given an envelope that contained a huge pile of postage stamps and that was it there was no instructions there's no guidelines no labeling of any kind uh the players of this game knew that it would be self-contained all the information they needed would be in or on those stamps somehow um so here is how an experienced Puzzler uh would approach that challenge we have 44 stamps in 16 different denominations from half a cent up to 29 cents and they're all cancelled with a postmark so let's start by grouping them by denominations by the set value and one thing we notice is that no group has any more than four stamps in it now the next thing if you look at the designs every design tells you what year the stamp was issued in it's either an anniversary of something or commemorative or an Olympics so we can order the stamps within each group now some of them don't have years but that's

actually not going to matter as we'll see in just a few seconds so let's this is just a last few groups and let's take a closer look at those top two rows the 15 and 20 cent stamps now they've been ordered so we've used some of the information already so what's left well we got the postmarks and there are two different kinds of postmarks here there the circular ones and then the wavy lines so we have circles and lines dots and dashes Morse code Morse code right that's so cool like you would have no idea just looking at that thing on the left that that was actually an act true message which was the thing that's revealed on the right so that solution when it was translated um gave those puzzlers the next location to go uh to pick up the next puzzle in that challenge and that's a pretty great example of steps that a player should be going through um how they're mentally and physically engaging with the game pieces in order to solve it um you

assess you organize you look for patterns determine what information has or has not been used and then assess again and then as well a good puzzle tells you inherently in its design how it should be solved um I should also note that puzzle difficulty is adjusted upward or downward by how much information is given to the player at one time this is a very difficult puzzle because there's no context there's no instructions whatsoever but you could make it a little bit more easy by I don't know grouping them already into small small groups or or uh providing some sort of uh instruction as to the order um it's just a matter of nudging people as much as they need to based on their ability um so knowing that's how a player approaches the solve uh I'll show you how one is constructed um I'll walk you through a puzzle I designed for an athletic shoe company uh the puzzles for this needed to be physical to incorporate um teamwork and cooperation to speak to the

brand messaging and also ideally to utilize uh physical components of the shoes and other exercise equipment so for context of this one there were a variety of puzzle types in the room that players uh had never encountered before um some of them required physical tasks some were connecting the dots some needed them to use their phone to look up information on the internet uh somewhere based on visual perspective so there's meant to be a sort of balance of skills being used because this was for a party that people had been invited to without being told what they were going to encounter when they arrived probably also none of them had done a puzzle room before uh this you know that that just not really the audience um so they needed to be simple enough that they didn't require a ton of instruction but also still be fun uh and that's that's a kind of tough challenge um the way that I approach that solution incidentally is by making it a speedrun challenge rather than a countdown clock

um so for this puzzle players encountered a huge peg board with colored pegs um they get these stretchy resistance bands from a different puzzle in that room some are already arranged on the board itself when they first encounter it uh and and to make it clear um the color of the Bands matches the color of the pegs also in the room are these two boxes uh buttons they all have a variety of words written on them which inside the room looks like this pegboard on the left the buttons are on on the right to either side of the door the solution for that puzzle is to get the keyword from that pegboard which is on one button box uh and a keyword from another puzzle which is on the other button box pushing both buttons at once requires coordinating with your team and that's what opens the final door it's the last step so as I said when players encounter that board uh you can kind of see there it already has some shapes of the letters on it and that's because if we didn't provide any information at all it would look like this colored pegs only no context whatsoever

and impossible to actually solve because there's no true letter shapes in there and technically that's not exactly true because you can sort of make out the shape of a y on the end uh the solution word for this by the way is energy um there's only one button on any of those boxes that ends in a y so if you are really really stuck and also really really observant you could maybe make that connection but that's not fun so here's the arrangement that people actually encountered when they came into the room for the first time uh it's suggestive of some of the more complicated letters like the r but if you're in a hurry not paying super close attention it's not very revealing and this is a different example of how the board could have been arranged to make it a degree of difficulty further uh because the r here is arranged on the yellow pegs using a yellow band you're telling them in the design to match colors but by putting wrong color bands on pegs like the I and

the T you're throwing them off in a pretty serious way uh to arrange it in this way suggest an alternate six-letter word which may you know maybe it's Spirit or something like that but you're priming them from the beginning to see only that one word uh even if they remove them it would be really pretty difficult to sort of circle back and come to the correct solution so since this room was built for people who had never encountered a puzzle room before and again who came to that event really not knowing what they were about to get themselves into uh it couldn't have this many layers of encoding because in that context it wouldn't be fun but in a different room situation I think I would really enjoy inflicting this on some players um so that's just one thing to keep in mind uh if you know if you're introducing puzzles or anything like that into your game design keep in mind what the player knows what's reasonable for them to know that stamps puzzle for example requires you to be able to recognize Mor's code uh I wouldn't expect somebody off the street to be able to just just like make that leap but for the people who enjoy playing

those sort of lengthy games like that's a pretty straightforward and almost basic level solve um part part of this though is an inherent understanding of how interactions with the objects are supposed to work like in Monkey Island it's pretty hilarious to try x with Y until you finally figure out how everything fits together and it makes sense with the comedic tone but in a situation where you're racing against a clock suddenly being stumped in that way is much less appealing in our escape room we always tell people that having fun is the goal nothing in there is meant to thwart you or prove somehow that you're bad at puzzles um because to me it's very very important to always be building an experience that lets people challenge themselves first and foremost but there's actually a very long way to go before we reach that point in any design physical or digital uh when we're designing any kind of experience there are a lot of questions we have to ask ourselves up front uh one of which is what are we actually asking the player to do because in a real life

space it's not quite as simple as run through this level because they might literally be running um and in a real life Escape the Room game you're usually standing the whole time so there's actually a major physical demand when you're in a real space and the same applies to VR room scale VR in particular um but you may be asking people to stand Crouch crawl wave their arms around um even just standing for an hour is really pretty tiring especially if you're giving a talk while you're doing it um but in Escape rooms we have to be really mindful of the physical strain on the player uh we often will put a chair in there in case people need to rest so this is the first lesson for VR as well even though we're working within a world that has infinite design possibilities when that headset is on there are true limitations to the physical realities of what we can ask the human body to perform uh the movie Minority Report is one of the best and most obvious

examples of this um there's tons of writing about the way that it's like poorly ergonomically designed uh and bad bad UI um but in in the film Tom Cruz needs to comb through lots of evidence of a crime so he throws it up onto a huge transparent screen he controls it with a series of complicated hand gestures uh and it looks like he's conducting an orchestra while he's doing it it's really very beautiful but it's not real uh and frankly should never be real um on that movie Set you know he it was rumored that he had to constantly rest between takes um and if a man is professionally fit as Tom Cruz gets tired doing that there's really no hope for the rest of us um that fatigued condition of interacting with a screen that's in front of you is known as gorilla arm by the way um it's why you generally only encounter vertical touch screens without like a physical support like a table for interactions that are shortterm like a map at an airport or at an

ATM uh in my own case when the valve lab stuff came out I spent a really really long time um playing the archery and spaceship arcade games they're super fun but when I came out of those sessions my arms really hurt because I was having so much fun in it that I really didn't actually know that I was doing like hours worth of arm exercise um I forgot the demands on my own body and it was only after when I emerged uh and taking off the headset that I was reminded of that in a very real way but I actually think that's kind of cool too um something really special happens to people's bodies when they set foot into an escape room or any other physical kind of build uh it's something that you see in other fields of experience design especially haunted houses and immersive theater the lights are dark players go into it not knowing what to what to expect uh in that situation you're kind of entering survival mode like your heartbeat increases your adrenaline Rises and your

F Focus gets very very narrow um along with the selective attention that comes with that and and you're essentially entering into what we call the Flow State um in a non-game context in uh inducing the flow state from scratch like when you sit down at your desk and try and make yourself be creative is really really difficult um and it's the same for professional athletes it requires a lot of skill and training and showing up at the same time every day and a lot of drudgery to be able to get to that point where as soon as you can you need to call upon it you can um most people you know don't have that sort of patience and training uh it's it's actually very difficult so as any creative person knows sometimes it just doesn't happen being able to induce that feeling for novices through environment and gameplay I think in a way is a gift to them uh but there's another side to this as well um emergency responders will will work in pairs when they're in the field because it's very very easy for

everything around them to sort of fall away completely as they're working uh which can put them in danger like they might not notice a building about to fall on them they just you know they're so intensely focused on dealing with whatever is at hand that they can't concentrate on that so you always have a second pair of eyes or sometimes they'll work themselves into a state of exhaustion because they don't notice the time is passing so that's known as time dilation and it's also a super real and potentially dangerous problem for VR experience as well uh this is a quote from the voices of VR podcast by Kent by which is awesome and I highly recommend everybody listen to um I've had some really weird experiences where I've gone into VR and thought I played for 3 hours then came out and realized I had been in there for 12 hours I've had that happen a couple of times uh that person who's speaking is is a member of the VR Community he's an early adopter of Technology he

understands the tech and the design of it and even for somebody like that he can lose time in such a significant way which actually is a little scary uh he he specifically mentions that it's a tower defense game which is designed to keep you playing um so perhaps not the best match for that medium for this exact reason um in escape room games and and all of these other sort of experiences you have a timer or you're entering into the experience knowing how long you'll be there but in VR headsets you often have no external cues to indicate how much time is passing so we really need to be good stewards of the Flow State uh when we're working to deliberately induce it in people through our design however that narrowed Focus From The Flow State can be useful and positive when it comes to design as well uh other elements of the human brain are less about the responsibility that you have for the Player's body their physical needs their limitations and more about manipulating them for fun that's your fun and theirs as well uh so

I want to talk for a minute about what's happening to players mentally when they're in an escape room they know they're uh we know they're in Survival Mode they're excited we've used lighting cues and design to sort of bring them into that flow state so what does it mean to design for that state of their brain uh I'm going to show you a video it's very important that you follow the instructions on the screen carefully maybe this is an awareness test how many passes does the team in white make go the answer is 30

but did you see the moonwalking bear go uh so that's more generally known as The Invisible Gorilla EXP experiment um and it's a very good example of how brains and bodies do really weird things in concert when you're in a stressful situation like being asked to concentrate on something specifically and it's that survival mode thing um you see this play out in Escape rooms all the time in ours we have a hint screen uh that has a siren that blares anytime we send a message through it's very very loud uh it's it's like pretty prominently placed in the room and you would think it would be very hard to miss but it really people miss it all the time they're so deeply engrossed in

whatever is going on that there's somebody sitting behind the scenes jamming a button constantly until somebody sort of sticks their head up and turns over to look at it uh another funny lizard brain survival mode thing uh is that we love to look for patterns um so does this sink look worried to you yeah me too um also playing is something known as The Hider simile illusion which is a demonstration of how people will come up for narrative for something simply because it's so easy to read into it yeah oh no uh the long story short is that we love to read too much into things that I think that circles in trouble um so basically in situations like this we're so focused on stuff that we're actually very distracted we're processing so much information so quickly that we're seeing things that aren't there which is actually really

exhausting uh not physically but in your mind um it's a real thing called brain fatigue we only have so much processing power in there before we need to sort of recharge our batteries uh that power is being spent very very quickly when you're throwing a lot of stuff at people or asking them to engage as deeply as you do in in puzzle situations um it's also why when you're purchasing a car you're sometimes given lots and lots and lots of customization options right up front the stuff that's expensive by default comes later in that process when you're too tired to fight it off anymore so yeah what's happening inside people's brains they're deeply focused to the exclusion of other information they're quickly searching and processing to try and make connections and they're getting mentally exhausted by what they're seeing and doing but most importantly they're probably not noticing that that's happening luckily for all of us there's a huge world of design principles and best practices uh to help us deal with these quirks of the brain they also help us to answer another

larger question which is what do we want people to feel for me it's very important that they feel enjoyment uh but also a sense of Engagement a mental immersion in whatever the experience is because my particular interest is in narrative stuff um I like for them to feel a spatial presence uh and and as well the Transportation uh the losing of oneself the sense of oneself your identity that's not necessarily inhabiting another character um but it can be and and something to keep in mind as well our brains are always searching for reasons to identify something as stranger out of place another survival mechanism uh so you have to play with the level of the suspension of disbelief that you're you're willing to provide and that people are willing to give to you um as well as speak to them unconsciously in how your environment is set up and how they're performing in it building real life stuff is actually really hard um but even though we're in instinctively searching for odd things out people fundamentally want to be

entertained so they're very very forgiving they want to be drawn into the illusion now this is a great quote from a theme park designer um discussing the suspension of disbelief that happens in a theater and it's because you're so familiar with the context uh when as soon as you walk in and you sit down you know what to expect and you sort of slip into that mode happens in a movie theater happens in a theater with actors uh we we are primed by the environment to know what to expect so in this context um understanding cognition and processing load guided us in our ours keep room design the first one that we made um about the environment and what was going to be placed in it with the ultimate goal of never breaking the Illusion for people uh World building dius and internal logic is a very good way to ground people when their cognition and physical capabilities are are being overloaded because you're relying on the players to build a mental model of the world as as reflected in this quote uh

you're providing as much indication of that world as possible externally and in your design um so what are they familiar with uh this is where looking to other media physical and otherwise that shares quality with Escape rooms comes into play um haunted houses theatrical design and so on but Cinema and television in particular have a language that we're all very familiar with the use of higher low camera angles to convey power or weakness for example um but the backgrounds of these uh dress by set decorators and production designers consistently convey specific Notions of time location space quality and character the way a person has folded their clothes neatly or kicked them under their bed like reveals a lot about that person um ideally nothing is placed in a movie frame by accident because people are absorbing it all all the time so I want to ask you what does an office look like when you say an office what does it what picture do you have in your mind right maybe fluorescent lights

messy desk filing cabinets May probably not too Pleasant um might be better designed you could have a cool desk a plant or like maybe dogs work in your office or hang out um but it's still a place where work is happening so there's a lot of utilitarian stuff going on like messes of cables like piled up mail inboxes that kind of stuff kind of stressful um offices and film and television are often the same the workers in the show the office have small beige desks that are cluttered uh to sort of convey how like dreary their jobs are and you can compare that to offices in films that we had looked at for design inspiration uh which represented some of the story themes we wanted to exemplify uh about paranoia and sort of dystopian uh environments um here we have Brazil which often has desks placed into massive massive group areas the open Office plan that we all dread uh but 10 times worse they have magnifying screens because their actual uh physical

technology is too small you can see here he's sharing a desk with somebody through the wall so they have this tug of war going um next is the lives of others which is about a stazzy officer who Eaves dropping on people um so you can see still like very utilitarian and minimalist but but quite stylized uh and then also an actual sty office um with a kind of light color palette in a a sort of surprising way from what my mental picture had been um So based on looking at those Inspirations this is what we sort of came out with Spar as Furnishings theatrical directed lighting propaganda posters um bonus ducts as a reference to Brazil um Banks of technology and we knew that these were the sort of things you would expect to find in an office of that type and use that expectation to deliberately evoke a sense of otherworldliness Oppression a distance in time with the use of like older technology maybe an economical spareness without ever explicitly stating anything about that

world in words um the color pellets of the films that were on the previous slide also dictated the choices that we made uh in in that and other sort of visual design we used mostly greens and yellows you can see a little bit of red here in the environment and in the poster but in the entire room there's only one object that's red which is indicative of a puzzle solution and by isolating it in that way it meant that the design intent was clear for the solution uh and we were kind of pleasantly validated by a film that came out after we had created our room called the double which is set in a similarly dystopian sort of world uh and used almost the exact same color as lighting of mood so that was nice uh one other thing that we adhered to for efficiency of communication was the diis of puzzles things that emerge from the world of the room uh without coming from the outside without indicating that they uh were created by somebody not within that world when the world has an internal logic like that um

objects and reasons for encoding emerge naturally from it and again good good puzzles tell you in their design how to solve themselves so it makes sense um I'll walk you through this one pretty quick in one of the puzzles you break into a locked bookshelf finding a set of books um what information do you have about them immediately they they were locked behind a sort of sensoring unit and on their covers it says they've been taken from the aroian library um but they all have titles you don't actually need to know the titles to solve the puzzle which you don't know at that time but if you look there're all books that are among the most frequently Bann books in our own society and have themes relating to the overarching themes of our room so maybe try ordering them alphabetically but that doesn't work however you start to see other details emerging you can look at the Dey decimal labels the little tabs on the side those are not in alphabetical order when the titles are aligned but you can see that they have the beginning and ends of a sentence so placing them in that order

reveals the code the jungle page 237 uh in in the actual puzzle room you turn to that page in the book uh and there's a marking on the page of sort of faint indentation um which is the place where you would put a library card with cutouts over the words this is spoilers as well in case you're ever planning to visit um but if you haven't found it already the you know in the jacket of the book is the library card all of the books have that pocket but only one is holding the card uh and knowing that it's a library book suggests the presence of that card um however actually this is kind of a funny thing um but it's becoming an issue because fewer and fewer people who are playing the room use the degree decimal system in libraries uh same goes for the typewriter and cassette tape player in the room the audience is totally aging out of it and and sometimes just straight up does not know how to use it um so yeah you put you put the card on there it aligns with a number solution um within that room there's only one place to enter a four-digit

number so you immediately know know where it goes um or in searching it becomes obvious as soon as you found the four-digit Hole uh this is also the first instance of censorship in that world that you encounter so in this one puzzle it set you up to understand the nature of the world why people might be paranoid enough to hide puzzles all around their propaganda office uh that kind of stuff the solution for this gives you access to another higher security level so you keep opening up deeper and deeper Secrets as you progress so as a player you're gaining dominance over that world and when it's done right you don't even question that this is the right and just arrangement of the world because you're the star of it so I I will say like one of the things that we really tried hard to do was make it so that people never had to read anything we did a lot of work setting up the world to make it feel like it had its own inherent logic so we never had to State any of that stuff in words we wanted to convey as much as possible without distracting people from the sense of presence in the room and

their urgency in working against the timer so that meant designing something cohesive with a complicated backstory that informed our design choices without actually putting that backstory in uh we made sure that all of the puzzles were moving the action forward and giving you a sense of progression because you are the hero and we designed character interactions to change the game state in very specific ways with minimal dialogue um that's because in these kind of situations people remember how they felt not words that they've heard and especially not words that they've read uh so interacting with a human makes it very much more real even more so because they're in that flow state where the efficiency of information becomes really important you're speaking directly to the brain by putting a human face on it we reduced um all of the character interaction to essentially one line every 15 minutes the entire hour that you're in there um and so I'll sort of talk through it uh when you first enter the room you know that you're you're investigating a character who's gone missing it's their office you've been sent in um as a secret agent they were

deep undercover uh working to sabotage propaganda from within so that's all the information that you're given uh as soon as you get in your first task uh unlocks an audio recording found in a lock desk drawer which teaches you maybe about the characters paranoia the technology that this world is using their possessions that are in their desk that kind of stuff then your first interaction with that character comes a few steps later you change the security level clearance on a key card which you send to a pre-arranged hiding spot that was indicated in that recording uh that alerts that character to your presence and I mean obviously this is not somebody reacting in real time it's all set up in advance um but story-wise they suddenly become aware that you're in their office and you're there to help them so they send back a handwritten note asking for your help escaping the building along with a coded puzzle that uses the typewriter uh that also teaches you more about technology about encode cting and spycraft that kind of thing um that puzzle gives you access to a security

system which you use to trace a guard's path through the space and this is told through video entering the solution sends the path to your the character that you're helping who uses that information to sneak out and avoid the guard you watch this is happening on a screen um that's totally silent but then at that point the character betrays you they're going to get themselves out of the building but you're on your own and so they tell you directly the first time that they're actually speaking came to you uh and this is is told via video with an audio recording that plays that they've left um an electromagnetic pulse device hidden in their office so now it's up to you to activate it escape the building and get out so with each step of the story your goals change you learn more about the world and the stakes are raised and that was done with really only a couple hundred written or spoken words so how does that affect us in VR in some cases it's the difference of what can be done only physically physically versus in a digital environment um padlocks are a fantastic

example of this uh these are things that are extremely limited by physical realities because there's really only so many types of padlocks in the world and a lot of them are very very easy to break um this one specifically is a sliding one uh and to reset it you have to click it twice so there's a a sort of debate that we had when we were trying to figure out whether to introduce this into our room um do you put something in there that tells people how to reset it for when they mess it up when they're actually like in the game playing it because that's a little weird right like if it's your own office you don't need instructions to open your own padlock or do you pull it out at the beginning say okay you're going to encounter this pad log here's how it operates hoping that they remember when they actually encounter it but removing the sort of moment of joy of realization when they figure out the sliding mechanism how it connects to the puzzle and so on because again the the the joy of the puzzle the difficulty of it is based on how much information you have about it to begin

with um so if you know that you're going to encounter this you're going to be looking for what it applies to um and of course in VR padlocks could be anything because it's magic uh but there's also a technological benefit to this um if you're letting people fill in the blanks uh design wise if you're making it so that it's not super complicated uh if you're using an emotional reaction to carry the weight of a story you don't have to make as much stuff um and in VR that means less stuff to model less environments to design so you can use these principles to make Dev time more efficient and a more positive experience for the people who are actually in there because they're not laid in with too much stuff um playing with inform with the imagination in this way is something you see a lot in blackbox theater for example um people really don't need a full set to enjoy what they're seeing or for it to be real to them uh there's a Nicole Kidman film called dogville where it's um set on a stage where houses the outlines are

taped out so it becomes this really interesting extra dimension of communication when you can see into the house next to you and people are pretending to not see the terrible things that are happening but everything is totally visible all at the same time of course that's done without ever instructing people on how that works people just get it so this is tapping directly into the imagination like we don't really need hyperrealism because we have that kind of of magic it's engaging directly with the Mind's Eye and so a lot of that comes down to reducing the already overloaded cognitive burden of the players by suggesting information and speaking to the subconscious rather than putting it all up in their faces so here's a question that I ask myself a lot uh does this matter and will people even notice if you're trying these kind of design techniques um I use this example because it's from args um there's always somebody behind the curtain in any sort of designed experience right sometimes people really

badly want to look behind that curtain it's kind of inevitable um but it's our job as entertainers to sort of try and prevent that from happening generally because it takes people out of that immersion when it's done right it's completely invisible to people and that's because it's working so that sometimes makes people believe that it's not important and it often makes people believe that it's easy but it really isn't um so why should we care why should we put in the effort for that uh VR has been around a long time but you know really only recently has the technology kind of caught up to our imaginations we have a really interesting opportunity to engage with the mind's eye in a language that actually doesn't exist yet which I think is super exciting uh anything that we make now is going to set the standard for everything that comes later so we need to be working to make the foundations of the kind of work we wish to see in the future right now there's a lot of VR stuff that speaks directly to the lizard brain stuff that plays on claustrophobia

the startle response your your sort of sense of vertigo and it's really fun to explore that um but it's resulting in an image of VR that looks to people on the outside of the industry kind of like this um one of the most common questions that we get for escape rooms and that I see with people interacting with VR is is it scary and being scary is fine I love scary scary is really fun um the middle middle gift is of uh Erica isi who has an awesome show called scared casts where she play scary games um so I'm sorry for using that gift as the as the example of people being scared in VR um but the human brain is such an amazing and complicated and beautiful thing and scary is such a small part of that we talk about VR as a medium of infinite possibility and when we do that we're talking about feeling and experiencing those infinite things speaking in the language of the brain is what gives us such an incredible

pallet so how do we best take care of the people inside our experiences uh how do we show them respect how do we transport them entertain them give them magic in a way that's never been experienced before uh these are the questions that it's our responsibility to find answers for and it's what we've been tasked with uh with the rise of Industrial Automation and self-driving cars we can expect increase Leisure Time and demand for entertainment uh the answers that we find for this right now that we prioritize and that we decide to pursue are what are going to influence future generations of makers uh so together let's work and make magic happen thank you yes I don't know if there's questions or if people just want to come and meet in the wrap-up Lounge across the way and

chat about this kind of stuff I'm can go over there oh I'll ask you a question or do you want to go first uh you can go first okay great hey so um what do you think about the intersection or the possible intersection of interactive theater like sleep no more and puzzle oriented uh things like Room Escape like you could make an argument that they would go together great or you could see them as being incompatible fundamental way and I'm curious what your Viewpoint is on that sure uh so the question is can can interactive theater like sleep no more integrate lessons from puzzle design or or maybe puzzle experiences um actually sleep no more tried an interactive sort of thing I think it was a collaboration with the MIT media lab or game lab I could be wrong um but they had a thing where the mask that you wear throughout the entire experience had an RFID unit in it that would interact with the environment um so as you move through the space which is totally open it takes place in a six-story warehouse um and there's no stage the entire space

is the stage the characters are continually present in that space um and the show Loops three times so you're following them around that whole time so there was a second layer with people who had those special masks um books would fly off the shelf and you could interact with a typewriter and stuff uh but it was a completely curated thing you were just following a set path um and I think that one of the main reasons they ended up not implementing it is because people wanted more agency within that um sleep no more the way that that set is designed uh everything in it is real so if there's like a jacket hanging up you can look in the pocket and there's like a letter in there that's from the world of MC Beth uh it's all real um which is really fun because if I like I'm an exploring type game player so I just want to poke around I want to look in every drawer like it takes me a really long time to play games like zmu because I want to look inside every cabinet um but I would find that frustrating because the story that they had chosen was about saving somebody who is not saved in the end and so like that was a

bad experience for people they wanted to have more choice so it's possible but maybe not in that context I was wondering if you had any insight on like bad escape room design because as I mean I play a lot of video games I sort of I think after playing 20 years of games you sort of know that things like responding enemies are typically not great uh but I was at an escape room in uh Wisconsin and there was a puzzle that dealt there basically there were these keys that were colored and they were laid out on the counter and basically like we could pick up and move these keys and we had forgotten what order they were originally in and then later on like 30 minutes later in the puzzle like right the the the timer was counting down it the final puzzle relied on those keys their original position and we ended up not being able to solve it so I was wondering if we thought that was bad design but I mean we're not but anyway I was just curious what you think about stuff like that no I I think that yeah that is that's poorly designed because you noticed it right you were frustrated by it um

there's a certain level of frustration that can be expected in those environments uh which is fun but past a certain point it's no longer fun um and so actually I'll I'll share something that's just happened this week um I designed the Resident Evil room that's currently on tour uh in collaboration with im8 bit um so I was in Portland where the first one was and I worked really closely with getting that one set up but I have not been involved in the running of the other sites um another one that just launched in a different city I you know I I wasn't involved I wasn't there to say like fix this or fix this and on their opening night a lot of stuff was broken that's when all of the reviewers came through um yeah great right um but you know that's fair when the design when the environment doesn't speak to you when it's broken down that's the game that's the whole game and it becomes a bad game in that case uh and one of the things in there is exactly that same sort of stuff uh I'm assuming that nobody here uh is

going to go play but if you are cover your ears um one of the puzzles involves removing picture frames from a wall and there needed to be something in there that indicated which wall that had come from and so each of the walls has a different artistic theme oh yeah I see you covering sorry keep keep almost done yeah so when when you pulled that off if you weren't paying attention in that moment you can sort of match it back with the theme and I think even that as a sort of basic level is kind of essential hi thanks for the talk that was awesome um I am curious so I feel like when we're talking about taking care of our players in an experience like this that's very collaborative one of the ways that um it's easy to feel not taken care of maybe is is socially like that maybe your teammates are solving the puzzles and you're getting left behind and I'm wondering what your approach is to facilitating a good collabor ative experience in Escape rooms uh so the question is about um as a player you mean as as teammates

is that right yeah yeah so so as a team person as a player within it with other people like how can it be a good collaborative experience um because I do like competitive uh puzzle stuff for fun I've had a lot of like we training as a group um there's a lot of sort of natural inclinations that you have to learn to overcome uh like as an example um sometimes there will be like a Sudoku puzzle or something you only need to solve just a little bit of it in order to get the solution to get to the next thing your natural reaction to that is to want to solve the entire Sudoku right um but you don't need to so be to be able to sort of train yourself to skip over that is like a major part of it um and in that same way knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your other teammates is very important um often you need somebody to be able to step back and watch and see what's going on um to notice when something's been found on that other side that goes over there that kind of stuff uh we do a lot of corporate team building and it's extremely revealing about the sort of

places you would or would not want to work hey thanks for your talk um so you were talking about preparing the players for suspension of disbelief um and I noticed that sometimes um Escape rooms will use something like a pre- Spiel or a movie to set up the whole theming for that um I was wondering if you had any best practices for that in Escape rooms and how that might relate to a VR player who's going into a virtual experience for the first time sure uh so the question is sort of about priming people for the experience um with a video or whatever else um and I think it's it's going to be a little bit different for a physical thing versus a virtual one um best practices for escape rooms I again my preference is going to always be heavily on the narrative side so I don't want to just be told hey welcome to this place here's the deal like you know I want it to be in character revealing enough that it seems mysterious but

really intriguing you need to be given a sort of purpose or Mission um I think it's going to be very different in VR though because of directed attention it's kind of easier when you're not just sort of like standing shuffling around when there's like obvious cues that will draw you into stuff um but I I mean the setup should be the same like you should know where you are and what you're doing at least that kind of stuff yeah thanks um so I have a question that you you touch briefly on um immersive theater in addition to competitive Escape rooms um because you don't see this as much in the competitive thing but I'm wondering with the uh things like you know players getting into a flow State players getting into survival mode Etc um do you have any thoughts about how getting players to perform in like a roleplay capacity like if you know everyone goes into a room and you know you're Professor Plum you're Miss peacock Etc um how do players react to

that I guess so the question basically is how do you make people role play basically um I personally really don't enjoy role playing um I'm not a performer and this kind of stuff makes me feel really awkward uh so I try and avoid it at all cost generally but often in a group there will be somebody who is like all about that and so we just sort of like will push them forward into it if I know that that's what I'm going to engage in beforehand and I have some preparation that makes it much much easier for me um if you go over to SF Moma for the exhibition that they have right there uh there's a game running right now called bad news which is um you interacting with an actor who's improvising based on um characters in a town that you choose your sort of path through it um you you say I'm going to speak to this person the curtain comes back it's the actor they you know they they talk to you you get information from them the curtain closes so like that's about the right level of role play for me where I'm you

know I had to come up with like my occupation and and a sort of cover story but because I was being coached through it and because I knew what it was going in I was comfortable enough to at least do that level so I think it's just about preparation and part of that sorry just to clarify was that um you got there and then they had you come up with an occupation and things as part of the experience to Prime you uh so the the premise of it is that you're delivering the bad news of someone's death to somebody in the town um and that's all that I knew when I came in uh you're actually you're a morticians assistant or part of the city morg um and they said you're going to encounter a lot of people some of them might be reluctant to speak to you so what are you going to tell them and you know you kind of have to weave something together they suggested things too though because I was like you know I'm not that's not my thing so thank you thanks so I think that's all of the time for questions but I'm going to go over to the little wrap-up Lounge in case

anybody wants to chat further thank you so much for [Applause] coming