You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief, American Molinsky. I recently went with a group of people to the New Amsterdam Theater, it's one of the oldest theaters in New York, and we were welcomed by Gararota. Welcome to the New Amsterdam Theater, 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 that is left burning on stage at night, and it is done like that they say, so that spirits can perform, and they live as 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 theater. We were in Brooklyn at an escape room. The escape room company is called Mystic Rooms. It's run by Garar 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. Yeah! Yeah! Glad you missed your out with 44 seconds to spare. Yeah!
Our group included my wife, my assistant producer, and two experts in the field, Lisa and David Spira. They run a website, a podcast, and a conference about escape rooms. We've played about 1200 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 at Ghostlight was different.
Gara 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. Gara 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, 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 and 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 an 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.
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 to find 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 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? Ghostlight is my baby. Again, that is Gararota from Mystic. She told me that she had always wanted to make an escape room set backstage at the theater. I know a lot about the theater history and there's this story about Olive Thomas, who is a Zickville Folly. The Zickville Folly were considered to be the beginning of Broadway 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 that happened, a lot of people and I mean a lot claimed 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, 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 and cost him. So were they playing characters like were they playing ushers? Or who were they playing? The idea, the first idea for ghost light was that Olive Thomas would welcome you. And I'll show 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 six sense basically. And we think that all of 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 them into practice? No, no. We opened ghost light in February 2020. So 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.
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Go to shipstation.com, use the code imaginary, to sign up for your free 60-day trial. That's shipstation.com code 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've 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 the 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, you're very easy to then check in with each other and say, hey, I have this idea. Can you do it now?
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 a 12 o'clock in the night. Also there, if you're not in the same business, it 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 success is always also end up being your success. Exactly. Yeah, it works both ways. Ghostbill's ways, yeah. Haley and Cameron Cooper run Stranger 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 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 get the best of it. 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're feeling disillusioned by a lot of these escape rooms and the Netherlands. There is a pattern there that there's very high production value. Good showmanship, I would say. The desire for spectacle or at least a proclivity towards it by the makers.
And on the slightly negative side, there's a bit of a morbid fascination with some horror stories and corrupt priests, pedophile priests and like kinds of. Yeah, nasty stuff. That babies is like there's a tendency for horror and for scaring people. Yeah, and jump scares. And we're, 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 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 US were relying on action movie clichés. I don't think it's very believable to say the end of the world. It does not mean full 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 brainstorm 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 ghost can do it.
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 sayances 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 say on this room about a ghost. So we get into some some themes. I don't want to spoil too much, you know. But we are we do have a bit of 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 may be also because we really take it seriously. And it's it's very easy in this industry to have your tongue and 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. 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. Like I like to think of puzzles as essentially the plot mechanism from which you the protagonist, 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've 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 a hero moment. Like to be able to leave the room and say, this is the thing that I solved. That's when my skills really came forward.
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 to really understand like how things work in 3D, we 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 it takes 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 is 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 the things are more like more obvious than they actually turn out to be for other people are a second experience, the immersive highest adventure.
There are a 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, well, 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 outcome, a chemical 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 you it will look real and it doesn't really matter. Now because people will walk around and then 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 players 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 bird cage 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.
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Victor Van Dorn and Francine Boone draw on their different backgrounds to design games for their company Sherlock. 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, I will catch you up.
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. 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 and escape rooms have gotten a bad rap because a lot of escape room owners don't have a background in theater or film.
Because owners are coming from a wide variety of disciplines. Cameron and I are coming from the theatrical background. So 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. You can go through the man from beyond and maybe answer a yes or no question. And that's all you need to do.
And then 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 they're like jaws on the floor. And we call it like the smile conspiracy. You know, and you can just tell, OK, well, that's person that you're going to be investing in.
That probably explains why so many actors have taken me aside and immersive shows and done private scenes. I must have this big smile on my face that says, I am totally unbored 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 who are not used to interactive theater or he's like, yeah, skip the stick. I just want puzzles. And especially our more experienced game masters, they have a whole number of reactions or tools in the tool belt to play nicely with that or to decide who I'm going to kind of step out of character here and avoid a bad experience that way.
And 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 highest movie genre. If you show up at the door, then you say we're here to play the escape room, then a 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 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 black their way in, which is this like one of the classic heist tropes, of course, of being a bit of a smooth talker.
I actually had to look up black, it's British English for bluff. And there's an alternative ending to the game, which takes the commitment to realism and blacking even further. The failed state of the vault is more famous than the wind state because when you fail in the vault, you get caught by the security guard and you have to black your way past them too. And we're actually working on a more epic wind state at the moment because we want to equalize those two states.
And the man from beyond, Haley and Cameron also set the mood right away, the lighting is dim, the music is set for a saience 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 saience, which casts you immediately as not an escape room player. You are here for a saience. 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 Madame Daphne would ask the team, can you keep a secret? And undoubtedly we would get like that one person who is just like, actually, you know what?
I super can't keep a secret or like, excuse me 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. 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 pushed back 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 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 is 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 throughout 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 and might be useful later on, like that's just not a concept that people don't play that your 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 actor is playing Madam 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 being having their handheld, but they made that call based on that 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 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 Sherlock, they often come up with reasons within the context of the game by 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 or 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 Gararota, 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 say-ons, 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 world stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full length interviews of every guest and every episode.
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