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Folklore Scotland. (2014) Argyll and Bute. Available at: https://folklorescotland.com/argyll-bute/ (Accessed: October 7th 2024).

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Folklore Scotland. (2014) Argyll and Bute. Available at: https://folklorescotland.com/argyll-bute/ (Accessed: October 7th 2024).

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Argyll & Bute Argyll & Bute has a fascinating and extensive folk history dating back well over a thousand years. While Argyll & Bute shares many of the highlands mystical creatures with plenty of fairies, elves and kelpies to be found strewn throughout its mythology there is one far more relatable being that the area […]

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Folklore Scotland.  (2014)  Bride, Angus and the Cailleach.  Available at: https://folklorescotland.com/angus-and-bride/  (Accessed: October 7th 2024)

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Folklore Scotland.  (2014)  Bride, Angus and the Cailleach.  Available at: https://folklorescotland.com/angus-and-bride/  (Accessed: October 7th 2024)

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Bride, Angus and the Cailleach And so winter gave way to spring, and then summer and autumn as Angus and Bride continued to rule, only for Beira to rise again to reign over winter. And so the seasons came to pass upon Scotland. Words by Taylor Petrie and Joanne FongIllustration by Linley Barba It is […]

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Folklore Scotland. (2014) The Banshee. Available at: https://folklorescotland.com/the-banshee/ (Accessed: October 7th 2014).

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Folklore Scotland. (2014) The Banshee. Available at: https://folklorescotland.com/the-banshee/ (Accessed: October 7th 2014).

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The Banshee Banshees exist primarily in Scottish and Irish folklore, but a counterpart can also be found in Welsh mythology – and they are women whose screams and cries are an omen of death. Seems simple, right? By Liana Paraschaki Few creatures from Celtic mythology have as prominent a place in pop culture and collective […]

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Madia, Joey. (2018) 7 Steps for Writing Escape Room Narratives (And How to Find Opportunities to Write Them). Available at: https://www.stage32.com/blog/7-steps-for-writing-escape-room-narratives-and-how-to-find-opportunities-to-write-them-1597 (Accessed: October 11th).

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Madia, Joey. (2018) 7 Steps for Writing Escape Room Narratives (And How to Find Opportunities to Write Them). Available at: https://www.stage32.com/blog/7-steps-for-writing-escape-room-narratives-and-how-to-find-opportunities-to-write-them-1597 (Accessed: October 11th).

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A screenwriter walks into an Escape Room...
But seriously... this is not a joke. It's an opportunity to hone your skills as a writer and get in on one of the fastest growing entertainment industries around.

A few years ago I was hired to write narratives for two new Escape Rooms. The organization had been successful at tourist-based entertainment programs for nearly two decades, and was looking to capitalize on the growing phenomenon that is the 60-minute Escape Room.

As a writer on the lookout for new and exciting opportunities to tell stories, you should be familiar with this wildly popular and always evolving pastime. In less than a decade, Escape Rooms have gone from players solving a series of puzzles in an hour or less to get out of a locked room, to Escape Room 2.0*:* Puzzles with action-driven story lines and complex characters that are both digitally integrated and played by on-site actors.

Always eager to write for new media, I set about some research. Here's what I found:

Only a decade old, there are more than 8,000 Escape Rooms in the world. Almost a third of them are in the United States. With some 2.0 Escape Rooms boasting million-dollar budgets and Escape Room aficionados now having played well over 100 rooms in their quest for the best, the stakes are high and the field more competitive.

Enter the writer, whose skills are just what these companies need to keep a 5-Star and ticket sales strong.

Story is story, by and large. Action is character and structure is fundamental. Show, don't tell. So what makes writing for Escape Rooms the unique challenge that it is?

Glad you asked.

The emphasis is on puzzles. The writer must ask themselves:

How do the puzzles fit into the story?

How can I tell a story that is deep, but not wide, because of the one-hour time frame?

Am I willing to write a story that delivers plot points in easily digestible bits that continually drive the action?

Solving these challenges not only makes for a 5-Star Escape Room experience, it makes you a better writer when it comes to mapping plot points and creating complex characters.

It's all about seamless integration of character, story, and puzzle. I bet that sounds at least a little familiar. So let's break it down.

1) Integrate Time Goals With the Narrative
Honoring the Escape Room 2.0 mantra of "total immersion," it's important to integrate the time factor in the narrative. Almost all Escape Rooms have a one-hour time limit, so that's the place to start. What story can you tell that culminates in the players reaching their objective in a hour?

For a gumshoe noir I wrote, I employed the "ticking time bomb" that drives hundreds of classic thrillers. If the players don't solve all of the puzzles in an hour, the bomb detonates, killing several hostages.

For a pirate adventure, I created high-stakes circumstances where the pirates defending a fort have only an hour's worth of powder and shot. After that, they'll be mercilessly slaughtered while the Royal Navy seizes a hidden object that is the players' primary target. Any kind of time-sensitive crisis will do. A compartment flooding, the full moon rising and unleashing monsters, may be even having one of the players ingesting a poison that takes 60 minutes to take effect. Make it mean something (raise the stakes), and the players will be hooked.

2) Create a Clean Narrative That Drives the Action Toward the Goals
Escape Room players are hyper-focused on achieving the goal of escaping the room, finding a key artifact, or solving a mystery/completing a required final action. So your storyline must be simple enough that this goal does not get lost in a mess of confusing narrative.

Don't use subplots or unnecessary characters. Again go deep but not wide. Although some Escape Rooms use dead ends or puzzles intended to mislead, don't rely on tricks. A clean, clear story adds to the tension, excitement, and immersion, delivering the plot points in easily digestible beats that drive the action and players toward their goal.

3) Create "Hooks" to Hang the Puzzles
Ideally, the puzzles and stories are developed together. They are initial meetings centered on a genre or theme that allows the narrative "hooks" (plot points tying directly to a puzzle or puzzles) to organically emerge.

In the Escape Rooms I work on, give-and-take is essential. I love it when the designers come to me with a puzzle they just have to use, challenging me with how to incorporate it in the developing narrative. Strong plot points full of emotional possibilities will also suggest the types of puzzles that best suit the situation, especially for veteran designers with the goal of creating something new.

Working back and forth with puzzle designers is ideal, but some of them are purists who want it to be all about the puzzles. Sometimes the game designer has puzzles already made that were left over from previous rooms or purchased on clearance, and it's your job to design a story around them.

If the puzzles are already decided, study them closely, asking yourself:

How do they work?

What situations do they inspire?

How can your story make the puzzles more fun, important, and challenging?

What mysteries can solving these puzzles illuminate?

The answers will indicate just where your hooks should be.

4) Immerse the Players in the Narrative
Find as many ways as you can to immerse the players in the story beyond solving the puzzles and either escaping the room or accomplishing another goal.

The best way to do this is through character. Non-player characters (NPCs) are your best asset. If the narrative for has the budget for at least one, take advantage of it. Ideally, once check-in and housekeeping are complete, the NPC should take lead for the players' experience prior to, during (delivering clues as a game-master does), and after the game. This allows for an immersive and inviting (or foreboding, depending on the genre) theatrical experience.

With a strong NPC, a little imagination, and a genre-matching waiting room, players are immersed before they ever start the game.

If there isn't a budget for NPCs but you want your players invested in the outcome beyond the bragging rights that come with the winners' photo on social media, incorporate complex, compelling characters. Have those complex characters communicate their wants and needs through the puzzles and any audio or written messages integrated into the experience.

In the gumshoe noir, the players unlock audio and written messages from the missing gumshoe that they are helping to solve the case. His encouragement and requests for help drive the players on.

In that same room, the antagonist, a "madman" who planted a bomb on a ship where he keeps three youths hostage, also communicates with the players. The madman relates his story of past betrayal and the unjust death of his son through a phone call, scribblings on the walls, and various letters and documents the players find as they play.

Creating a complex antagonist gave us an opportunity to be innovative and create three different endings. The players can:
(1) Help the antagonist by detonating the bomb.
(2) Dismantle the bomb but allow him to escape.
(3) Dismantle the bomb and have him arrested.

5) Set Up Circumstances That Produce Emotions
As with all good storytelling, you want to write for lots of emotional notes. Even an R-rated adult horror room with lots of jump scares and splatter opportunities shouldn't be just scary. Building complexity into the characters is the surest way to evoke empathy.

But be cautious. Pitting players against one another or providing poor clues or misinformation in order to make them jealous or frustrated makes for a lousy experience and worse reviews.

Create plot points that vary the mood and set up moral dilemmas or other decision points for the players outside their primary goal. For example, evoking sympathy for the madman in the third act of the game as the detonator is winding up and heart-pounding music is pumping through the sound system, is the kind of experience that stays with players long after they leave.

6) Integrate Historic and Geographic Context
My experience with writing narratives for Escape Rooms has been in a tourist area with a rich maritime history where geography informs narrative. Knowing the area and history very well, I used that to my advantage in my pitch.

The Golden Age of Piracy, a narrative I wrote, stars the infamous Blackbeard who was active in the area where the Escape Room was built.

The gumshoe noir centers on the U-boat attacks on the Outer Banks of North Carolina during World War II.

Historical tourism is at an all-time high, so this is a top-shelf marketing strategy. We get players that wouldn't normally try an Escape Room just so they can learn more about the area. Historic and geographic context also provides a doorway to deep immersion and a unified and life-like production. Given the popularity of period films and television series, this is an invaluable skill for you to have.

7) How to Get Hired to Write for Escape Rooms
If you haven't written for escape rooms before but you think you'd like to, there are opportunities around you that you might not be aware of. Here's what I recommend if you want to get hired to write for Escape Rooms:

First, find Escape Rooms in your area. With over 8,000 up and running, and more opening every day, there should be at least one nearby.

Before you enter, do a little research on the area so you can start developing pitch ideas connected to local and regional history.

Play their Rooms, keeping in mind the seven steps above. What are they doing well? What do they lack? How can you give them something they don't already have?

After you play, talk with the manager. Some rooms are designed in-house and others are created by large companies and sold as packages. If it's the former, set up a meeting and make your pitch as you would for any writing project. If it's the latter, get the name of the company and do some research on what they already offer and send them a pitch with their next great idea.

Writing Escape Room narratives will not only improve your own screenwriting skills, but will also give you a unique writing edge for your portfolio.

Now, as we were saying in the beginning: A screenwriter walks into an Escape Room...

Joey Media spent 25 years in the theatre as a playwright, actor, director, and teacher.
Today is is focused on screenwriting, developing an audio drama series,
writing story lines for immersive theatre-based Escape Rooms, and creating Historical
Education programming with a focus on the Golden Age of Piracy and the life of Che Guevara.
Joey is the Artistic Director ofSeven Stories Theatre Company and Creative director of
New Mystics Enterprises, a multimedia production company. He is also the author of two
novels and 17 produced plays.
Like this blog post? Please share it on social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, email etc) by using social media buttons at the top of the blog. Or post to your personal blog and anywhere else you feel appropriate. Thank you.
As always, we welcome thoughts and remarks on ANY of the content above in the Comments section below...

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7 Steps for Writing Escape Room Narratives (And How to Find Opportunities to Write Them)

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A screenwriter walks into an Escape Room... But seriously... this is not a joke. It's an opportunity to hone your skills as a writer and get in on one of the fastest growing entertainment industries around.

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Blessinger, J.L. and Bottum, J. (2018)  The American Circus in All Its Glory. Humanities, October. Available from: https://www.neh.gov/article/american-circus-all-its-glory  (Accessed: October 12th)

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Blessinger, J.L. and Bottum, J. (2018)  The American Circus in All Its Glory. Humanities, October. Available from: https://www.neh.gov/article/american-circus-all-its-glory  (Accessed: October 12th)

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The National Endowment for the Humanities

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The day before the circus opens, the company manager would gather the whole crew-roustabouts and elephant handlers, clowns and acrobats, tightrope walkers and jugglers-to help raise the canvas roof to the peaks on its poles, wafting above the fairgrounds the largest single piece of cloth most people would see in their lives. And early the next day, the crew would gather again to create the compound odor of the circus. The caramel smell of sugar burning on the cotton-candy machines and the faint reek of animal manure. Wood shavings and hot peanuts. Old dust shaken out of faded tents. The greasepaint and the popcorn. The sweaty hint of a ginned-up excitement, or maybe a tamped-down despair. Something, anyway, outside the ordinary and mundane. Something wonderfully unlikely and maybe disturbingly uncanny.

A circus, in truth, is redolent: a must of scents unlike any other. The question, of course, is, Redolent of what? And the answer seems to be: redolent only of other circuses. For Americans over, say, age 40, it's hard to recall one's first visit to the circus. They all blend together, one actual circus with another, and the sum mixing with circuses in movies and television shows and novels. The daring young men on the flying trapeze, the sad-faced clowns, the high-wire walkers, the tamers of wild beasts, even the besequined girls on horses, plumes on both their heads: They all seem to have been around forever.

As it happens, that's wrong. The circus as we know it, as we picture its essential form, turns out to be a fairly recent thing. Popular myth typically traces the modern circus back to the ancient Romans, but as noted in The Circus, a fascinating new PBS documentary from American Experience, the American form was something surprisingly new in the world.

The most obvious roots lie in European displays of horsemanship. The rings of the traditional American three-ring circus, for example, derive from the equestrian rings that ensured good visibility for the audience and generated the centrifugal force needed to push riders against their mounts while they performed. The first European circuses were run by the teachers of schools of horsemanship, who eventually found they could make more money entertaining crowds in the afternoons than they could by charging students in the mornings.

Their hippodromes grew grander and grander until they rivaled the greatest opera houses. By 1844 the Cirque Olympique in Paris was home to both the circus and the national opera. The British equestrian Philip Astley is often named as the father of the modern circus, and, by the late 1700s, his Royal Amphitheatre in London boasted four stories of gallery seating, with a main floor that could accommodate operas, plays, and circus shows. Jane Austen mentions Astley's in her 1815 Emma, and Charles Dickens records a visit in his 1841 Old Curiosity Shop: "Dear, dear, what a place it looked, that Astley's; with all the paint, gilding, and looking-glass; the vague smell of horses suggestive of coming wonders; the curtain that hid such gorgeous mysteries; the clean white sawdust. . . . What a glow was that, which burst upon them all, when that long, clear, brilliant row of lights came slowly up. . . . Well might Barbara feel doubtful whether to laugh or cry, in her flutter of delight."

It was Charles Hughes, one of Astley's employees, who would leave to found the Hughes Royal Circus, Astley's main rival. And John Bill Ricketts, one of Hughes's employees, would in turn flee to Philadelphia in the 1790s to start up the first large-scale American circus.

Over the following decades, as the wagon trails and canals reached westward, circus tents rather than permanent structures came to define the American extravaganza. Performers on tour from Europe found few cities large enough to sustain expansive opera houses, but they quickly learned that there was money to be made performing brief shows to crowds of farmers at dozens of little burgs. And once the railroads began racing across the continent, the circuses leapt aboard, moving their menageries into stock cars and rolling their wagons up on flatcars. Eventually, with the development of the big-top tents and company-owned trains, American showmen created the circus as it would be known for more than a century.

It's here, within the American tradition, that PBS's The Circus chooses mostly to begin the story. The documentary's stage was set by the success of Michael Gracey's 2017 film The Greatest Showman-a musical about P. T. Barnum's vain-glorious successes and eventual repentance. As The Circus shows, his real character was something more peculiar. Something much less palatable to modern taste.

In fact, peculiarity seems to define nearly everyone who helped create the American circus-not just Barnum, whom the documentary features prominently, but also his once famous rival Adam Forepaugh, and the Ringling Brothers, and even Barnum's eventual business partner, James Anthony Bailey. The Circus pre sents a compelling case that the interplay of these entrepreneurs shaped what Americans still picture when the word circus is spoken.

Thus, the indomitable and self-promoting Barnum, thriving despite numerous business catastrophes, was always seeking to outdo the pugilistic Forepaugh. And Barnum's greatest success in that regard came when, in his seventies, he recognized the organizational talent of the decades-younger Bailey, secretly partnering with him while publicly proclaiming their implacable rivalry-a quintessential Barnum move.

That partnership, Barnum and Bailey's, ruled the American circuit until Bailey's death in 1906, when the business was acquired by Ringling Brothers. The behemoth combination, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, lasted until its closing in 2017, done in by the long decline of ticket sales.

Of course, that leaves the question of why ticket sales declined. The circus was always a bifurcated place-family entertainment seasoned with a smidgen of the forbidden and the aberrant. There was a vicarious suggestion of impending disaster, with the Flying Wallendas' building human pyramids in the air. A titillating hint of the flesh, with women in tights parading in the center ring and peepshows tucked away in a corner of the fairway. A touch of the grotesque, a splash of the garish, a hint of the criminal.

Part of P. T. Barnum's genius was to sand off some of the rougher edges. Seeking to improve the reputation of circuses, he promoted his menageries and grotesqueries as educational opportunities. He lined up ministers to praise the circus as wholesome entertainment rather than immoral indulgence and idleness. He advertised his hiring of Pinkerton detectives to assure circus-goers that they would not be pickpocketed

But the other part of P. T. Barnum's genius was not to sand off too much. He still made a fortune from the dwarfism of Tom Thumb. He still had bearded ladies and conjoined twins. He kept the danger of trapeze artists working without a net and animal tamers with wild beasts. Through all his innovations, he preserved something of the strangeness of the circus, something of the alien and the exotic.

His successors tended to do less well. Through the twentieth century, accelerating into the twenty-first, every change brought about a normalizing of the circus, cutting into its uncanny core. Disneyland was built on this model, of course: opening in 1955 as, essentially, the old experience of the fairground and amusement park with all the seediness purged. But, as Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey discovered, Disney always proved best at doing Disneyland. The circus without its dodgy elements is no longer a circus.

Even while the circus owners were trimming the circus to accommodate what they thought were changes in the culture, the culture was changing faster still. With OSHA laws and mandatory liability insurance, the culture demanded safety in a show whose business was the unsafe. With the sexual revolution and the rise of easy pornography, women in tights on horses ceased to seem transgressive. With the shrinking of the world, African animals no longer appeared exotic. With the information economy of the Internet, P. T. Barnum's brand of outrageous hoaxes was too easily debunked. With the rise of animal rights activism, the parades of elephants and caged cats were increasingly banned.

The circus in its heyday showed a little of the fantastical to ordinary people. Small wonder that sideshows prospered, however outlandish and exploitative the claims shouted by P. T. Barnum's barkers: A real unicorn! Siamese twins! Jo Jo the Dog-Face Boy! He walks, he talks, he crawls on his belly like a reptile! If such elements appear in modern circuses-from the acrobatics of the Cirque du Soleil to the hokeyness of the Shrine Circus-the references are firmly ironic, aware that their audience is in on the joke.

Just a few decades ago, moviegoers still routinely clapped at the end of films. Today, ringmasters routinely have to badger audiences to applaud the circus stars-each of whom, as live performers, needs the energy of a reactive audience. So, as modern viewers withdraw, performance takes on a kind of heartache, like a failed romantic gesture. The fire swallower now somehow more desperate and less daring. The spandex-clad woman rotating inside the gyroscope the object only of a quiescent lust.

It wasn't always so, and in the long decades of the decline, we've lost something that the circus once provided-some integration of the unlikely and uncanny. For all of P. T. Barnum's braggadocio, the truth is that just a little twist could make it all seem wicked. The notion of evil clowns, for example, has become a modern meme. The presentation of circuses in movies has often been dark-even as far back as Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 classic The Greatest Show on Earth, with Jimmy Stewart playing a criminal using his greasepaint to hide from the law.

Circus tunes were always peculiar. The one piece most associated with the center ring, Julius Fučík's 1897 Entrance of the Gladiators, opens with a tumble of chromatic scales. But almost any oom-pah-pah waltz melody can be made to sound like an ominous circus, if layered with a few chromatic runs, stacked with tritones, transposed to a minor key, or played on something spooky like a child's music box.

Think, for a moment, of how circuses used to be. Each summer, eye doctors and dentists, and the old farmers at church, would cheerfully distribute tickets to children as the circus drew near. And something in their enthusiasm was contagious. The air seemed charged, the entire town electric, as though set in a kind of time outside of time. Townsfolk would make unnecessary detours to drive by the fairgrounds, watching the circus trucks unload. We could see the tension being cranked into the guy wires, a worker testing the cable with a calloused thumb and sending out a metallic thrum, as though to say: The circus! The circus is here! The circus has come to town!

And then the tattered, patched tents, faded from years of hard sun. A diesel generator rattling behind the stands. A grim woman selling lipstick-red candy apples, her face like a half-remembered photo on a post office wall. A large fan by an open tent flap to fight the swelter, only adding noise without moving air. The lions panting in a cage near one of the side rings. A clown directing five dogs so old that the audience would wince each time a dog leapt through a hoop.

The familiar had not gone away, exactly. In the summer heat, people would fan themselves with anything handy: a paper popcorn tub torn open, a folded church bulletin scrounged from a purse, even ticket stubs splayed like playing cards. But the unfamiliar had also taken hold, like the ordinary-looking woman in the side ring who suddenly proved a contortionist, wrapping her legs behind her head. The high-wire act held us rapt as the performers risked their falls. A small protest would escape the crowd as the lion tamer put his head in the mouth of a beast. The clowns didn't make us laugh, exactly, but they made us smile. A plumed woman posing on the back of a prancing horse. The ringmaster in his top hat and red coat, white jodhpurs and black boots, directing our eyes to each new act with a flick of his baton.

Through it all, the strange compound scent of a circus would waft, reminding us of something not quite present-
superimposing on this circus all the circuses that have ever been.

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The day before the circus opens, the company manager would gather the whole crew-roustabouts and elephant handlers, clowns and acrobats, tightrope walkers and jugglers-to help raise the canvas roof to the peaks on its poles, wafting above the fairgrounds the largest single piece of cloth most people would see in their lives.

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Chamberlain, L. (2019) Tarot for Beginners: A guide to Pyschic Tarot Reading, Real Tarot Card Meanings, and Simple Tarot Spreads, 2nd Edn.  United Kingdom: Chamberlain Publications

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Chamberlain, L. (2019) Tarot for Beginners: A guide to Pyschic Tarot Reading, Real Tarot Card Meanings, and Simple Tarot Spreads, 2nd Edn.  United Kingdom: Chamberlain Publications

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Jayanti, A. (2001) Tarot for Dummies. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons

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Jayanti, A. (2001) Tarot for Dummies. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons

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Place, R. M. (2005) The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination.  London, England: Penguin Publications

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Place, R. M. (2005) The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination.  London, England: Penguin Publications

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Ward, S. (2014). Beneath the Big Top: A Social History of the Circus in Britain. England: Pen and Sword Books.

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Ward, S. (2014). Beneath the Big Top: A Social History of the Circus in Britain. England: Pen and Sword Books.

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The V&A holds in its collection a large number of objects that reveal the fascinating history of the circus.

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Research on the Escape Room Industry and Immersive Theatre

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Research on the Escape Room Industry and Immersive Theatre

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Applying Dramatic Structure to Escape Room Game Narratives

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Escape Room (ER) games deliver greater immersion than a videogame, and more agency than a theatrical play, yet the narrative told in many ERs is little more than a cliched action movie plot. Can ERs use classical dramatic structure to tell better stories?

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Gabelmann, Holly J., "Together Here: Immersive Theatre, Audience, and Space" (2019). Human Communication and Theatre Theses. 3.

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Gabelmann, Holly J., "Together Here: Immersive Theatre, Audience, and Space" (2019). Human Communication and Theatre Theses. 3.

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Jennings, R. (2024)  How to Build Scotland's Best Escape Room for Less than £2K.  Available at: https://www.caseclosededinburgh.co.uk/blog/lowbudgetescaperooms  (Accessed: 19th November 2024)

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Jennings, R. (2024)  How to Build Scotland's Best Escape Room for Less than £2K.  Available at: https://www.caseclosededinburgh.co.uk/blog/lowbudgetescaperooms  (Accessed: 19th November 2024)

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How to Build Scotland’s Best Escape Room for Less than £2k — Case Closed Edinburgh - Voted Scotland’s Best Escape Room 2024

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We built the Murder of Max Sinclair, voted Scotland’s best escape room, on a tiny budget. Here’s how we did it.

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Jennings, R. (2024) Radio Nowhere Development Diary.  Available at: https://www.caseclosededinburgh.co.uk/blog/radionowheredevelopmentdiary  (Accessed: November 16th).

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Jennings, R. (2024) Radio Nowhere Development Diary.  Available at: https://www.caseclosededinburgh.co.uk/blog/radionowheredevelopmentdiary  (Accessed: November 16th).

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Radio Nowhere Development Diary — Case Closed Edinburgh - Voted Scotland’s Best Escape Room 2024

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A walk through of the development process for the new Radio Nowhere Escape Room, by Case Closed.

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Jennings, R. (2024) Radio Nowhere's Three Design Pillars.  Available at: https://www.caseclosededinburgh.co.uk/blog/radionowheredesign  (Accessed: 19th November 2024)

# data[].attributes.subject
Jennings, R. (2024) Radio Nowhere's Three Design Pillars.  Available at: https://www.caseclosededinburgh.co.uk/blog/radionowheredesign  (Accessed: 19th November 2024)

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April 2023 - Ronan Jennings This article was originally going to be a quick run through of the development process, a discussion of our main design pillars, and some of the challenges we faced, but it ended up being far longer than intended. So I've put the actual run through of the development process in another article, and here I'll just focus on the key parts of our design, and how we made it all work. The design of our rooms isn't a straightforward one. It's all in flux throughout the whole process, as we come up with new ideas for gameplay or story moments. Some of the main mechanics are based on thoughts we only had half way through development. But it was important that we didn't lose track of our original vision of the game, or let the miasma of creation prioritise innovation over making a satisfying experience. So we had a discussion early on about what the core of the game was, what defined it, and what we needed to hit. No matter what twists and turns the game took, we had to deliver on these three things:

Feeling Like a Detective

One of the main things people say after they play the Murder of Max Sinclair is that they really "felt like a detective". That was great, and was something we wanted to expand on with Radio Nowhere.

The first thing you do in the game is assemble a list of suspects. You create a list of people in the opening chapter of the game, and one of those people is the killer. You're guided through the process of narrowing the list down and gathering more information as the game goes on, but savvy players can start putting together pretty compelling theories from the moment they enter the room, some of which turn out to be totally right.

The design approach here became to - at every step of the game - give the players WAY too much information. They need to assemble 4 suspects, but there's 8 names being thrown around. They need to find one suspicious thing about each character, but there's a dozen different unusual things going on. And it's up to the players to cut through all that noise and recognise what information is useful. Rather than handing them the important information, they get to be the ones to have the "Aha!" moment, and make a connection that their teammates haven't seen. A true detective moment, instead of just playing out the set piece that we've prepared for them.

This is difficult. Because information that isn't useful is a red herring, and red herrings are rarely fun. So if we're filling the game with extraneous info, we had to make sure that everything was useful in some way or another.

A poster for a band might not be relevant to you right now, but it lets you know the lead singer's name, and tells you that he owned a guitar. An incorrect ID card found on the body might feel like it's throwing you off, until you realise its true owner might be a suspect, and now you have all their details.

A key part of this is to put multiple solutions to each problem in the mix, so you're not relying on players finding the exact needles in the haystack that you're hoping for. We ask players to find one suspicious thing about each of their potential suspects, but each character might actually have multiple suspicious things to find. Someone might have been spotted at the scene, and also have a registered firearm. They might own a bloody jacket that was found discarded nearby, and also have sent the victim a threatening text. But because we're only asking players to find one of these things for each person, they can explore the room however they like, sure to discover something useful no matter what.

We also gave players a place to start by giving them 'Paramedic Notes', and a set of items found on the body, with each item being a lead they can follow to a different suspect. Dumping players in the sea of information without a starting point might have been completely overwhelming, but by saying "Hey, maybe look at this first", we can get the ball rolling and the cogs in their brains turning, while still letting them have the moments of revelation themselves.

Even towards the end of the game, we never hand the players the (metaphorical) smoking gun. We say that the killer needs a Means, a Motive, and an Opportunity, and eventually invite the players to make their case against a specific individual. They might not know for sure, but they can gather their evidence, discuss what they know, and submit their theories. Much more satisfying than unlocking a box with the killer's name inside.

Next up is Player Agency. Because one thing that almost all escape rooms are lacking is some element of genuine choice. Some games might have a fun bit at the end where you choose to be good or bad, triggering a different voiceover for the finale, but they almost never have choices that truly affect the game.

With Radio Nowhere, we wanted to let the players feel like they were the ones driving the investigation forward, rather than following the trail we'd left for them. The above points about feeling like a detective tie into this: leaving multiple plot threads and points of suspicion for players to find means that players are never punished for tackling the case in a way that's different to what we planned. You're rewarded no matter the approach you take, or whichever parts of the case grab your attention.

But the biggest part of this is The Choice.

The video game Pentiment is an incredible game by the people who made Fallout: New Vegas, all about solving a murder in mediaeval Bavaria. But differently to most detective games, you don't have unlimited time to dig into every possible suspect and put together a perfect, watertight case. Instead, every conversation you have causes time to pass, and you only have a couple days until you'll be asked for your verdict. You might spend all afternoon talking to a suspect, only to realise they had a perfect alibi all along. It's stressful, but it makes the stakes feel real. You're not solving a puzzle; you're interacting with real people, and your decisions have consequences. You'll need to trust your instincts, work with incomplete information, and follow the leads you think are most important.

We wanted to capture this feeling with Radio Nowhere. Once you've assembled your four suspects, you're asked which two of them you want to prioritise. You get to read one last statement from all four of them about the murder, but then you have to make your choice.  Choose to investigate someone, and you're given the key to their personal staff locker, containing more information about them, and a puzzle to find out the truth of whether or not they were involved in the murder.

If a group is moving quicker than expected, we'll let them choose a third locker after they've done their first two, but 90% of teams will only ever see two of the suspects. Players are given a choice, they have to make it, and the next half hour of the game changes dramatically based on their choices. The difficult thing here was to make sure that there were no wrong answers. If you pick the real killer then you'll find some pretty damning evidence, but what if you don't? What if you pick two people that had nothing to do with the crime? We had to make sure the contents of each locker reveals the secrets of the person you've chosen (usually giving them an alibi), while also giving another hint in the direction of the true killer, letting you have just enough information that you can piece the truth together with any combination of suspects.

Our third pillar was ensuring there was a consistent sense of PLAY. Most escape rooms have a huge focus on time limits and leaderboards, which always feels like a shame. All this effort has been put into building a world and a narrative, so how come we're usually encouraged to blast through it as quickly as possible, and punished for taking the time to soak in the details?

With Radio Nowhere, we took the exact opposite approach. We want you to mess about, immerse yourself, and have a good time.

There's a lot of little ways we applied this, like a puzzle that requires the players to wear cool sunglasses, or asking them to pick their own DJ names before the game begins, but the big one is in the name of the game: The Radio Station. What started as a joke idea turned into a core part of the game, where there is an almost fully functioning radio station for the players to run. They can play music, talk into the microphone, and entertain their listeners. We added a "live listener count" that goes up and down depending on how much of a show they're putting on. If players are having a lot of fun with it then we'll send over some fan mail, or phone them up and request a song, dropping some hints about the murder along the way.

We never want people to feel like they're paying attention to the "wrong" part of the game, so slipping in plot details and character information into these calls and fan letters is important. Players can make progress in the mystery because they're messing about on the microphone, not in spite of it. Encouraging these playful moments is important, both by giving the players the toys to mess around with, but also by celebrating their actions every time they choose to play in the space. Working on a puzzle has a clear benefit, but a player might feel like they've wasted time by hosting an impromptu interview segment. So every time a player makes that choice, the listener count immediately goes up, and a message from their "producer" will compliment their hosting skills. Calls from fans will directly reference the things players have said on air, and gives opinions on the exact songs they've played. There aren't actually thousands of people listening to their broadcast, but the GM is listening, and being an attentive and receptive audience is important to encourage our players to put on a show.

Between phone calls and fan mail, the live listeners count, and a projector showing messages from the producer, there's a lot of points of interaction between the GM and the players. This means there's a lot of room for improv. Prompted to give an interview on air, a recent player claimed credit for writing Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, calling Andrew Lloyd Webber a fraud. We took this and ran with it, pumping up their listener numbers due to the scandal, giving them angry notes from the producer, and eventually making a phone call AS Andrew Lloyd Webber himself. The players demanded piles of money, and there were a few more twists and turns along the way. It was incredibly silly, and purely for the fun of it.

We're being caught off guard almost every day by players coming up with something new and unexpected. People aren't just solving puzzles, they're genuinely pretending to host a radio show. Fantastic.

Radio Nowhere is hugely experimental as a game. We originally just intended to dip our toes in the waters of experimentation, but getting carried away, we found ourselves pushing the boat out, diving right in, and probably even more water metaphors too. There were a few points where we took a step back and realised we'd gone too far, or lost sight of our original intentions, but having these three design pillars meant we never strayed too far from the path, and always knew how to get back on track. And when we were coming up with new ideas like the ones listed above, we were able to identify which pillar we wanted each idea to support, and give ourselves some guidelines going forward. Radio Nowhere could have been a mess, but by identifying what we were trying to achieve right at the beginning of the process, we made a hell of a game that does some crazy new things.

April 2023 - Ronan Jennings This article was originally going to be a quick run through of the development process, a discussion of our main design pillars, and some of the challenges we faced, but it ended up being far longer than intended. So I've put the actual run through of the development process in another article, and here I'll just focus on the key parts of our design, and how we made it all work. The design of our rooms isn't a straightforward one. It's all in flux throughout the whole process, as we come up with new ideas for gameplay or story moments. Some of the main mechanics are based on thoughts we only had half way through development. But it was important that we didn't lose track of our original vision of the game, or let the miasma of creation prioritise innovation over making a satisfying experience. So we had a discussion early on about what the core of the game was, what defined it, and what we needed to hit. No matter what twists and turns the game took, we had to deliver on these three things:

Feeling Like a Detective

One of the main things people say after they play the Murder of Max Sinclair is that they really "felt like a detective". That was great, and was something we wanted to expand on with Radio Nowhere.

The first thing you do in the game is assemble a list of suspects. You create a list of people in the opening chapter of the game, and one of those people is the killer. You're guided through the process of narrowing the list down and gathering more information as the game goes on, but savvy players can start putting together pretty compelling theories from the moment they enter the room, some of which turn out to be totally right.

The design approach here became to - at every step of the game - give the players WAY too much information. They need to assemble 4 suspects, but there's 8 names being thrown around. They need to find one suspicious thing about each character, but there's a dozen different unusual things going on. And it's up to the players to cut through all that noise and recognise what information is useful. Rather than handing them the important information, they get to be the ones to have the "Aha!" moment, and make a connection that their teammates haven't seen. A true detective moment, instead of just playing out the set piece that we've prepared for them.

This is difficult. Because information that isn't useful is a red herring, and red herrings are rarely fun. So if we're filling the game with extraneous info, we had to make sure that everything was useful in some way or another.

A poster for a band might not be relevant to you right now, but it lets you know the lead singer's name, and tells you that he owned a guitar. An incorrect ID card found on the body might feel like it's throwing you off, until you realise its true owner might be a suspect, and now you have all their details.

A key part of this is to put multiple solutions to each problem in the mix, so you're not relying on players finding the exact needles in the haystack that you're hoping for. We ask players to find one suspicious thing about each of their potential suspects, but each character might actually have multiple suspicious things to find. Someone might have been spotted at the scene, and also have a registered firearm. They might own a bloody jacket that was found discarded nearby, and also have sent the victim a threatening text. But because we're only asking players to find one of these things for each person, they can explore the room however they like, sure to discover something useful no matter what.

We also gave players a place to start by giving them 'Paramedic Notes', and a set of items found on the body, with each item being a lead they can follow to a different suspect. Dumping players in the sea of information without a starting point might have been completely overwhelming, but by saying "Hey, maybe look at this first", we can get the ball rolling and the cogs in their brains turning, while still letting them have the moments of revelation themselves.

Even towards the end of the game, we never hand the players the (metaphorical) smoking gun. We say that the killer needs a Means, a Motive, and an Opportunity, and eventually invite the players to make their case against a specific individual. They might not know for sure, but they can gather their evidence, discuss what they know, and submit their theories. Much more satisfying than unlocking a box with the killer's name inside.

Next up is Player Agency. Because one thing that almost all escape rooms are lacking is some element of genuine choice. Some games might have a fun bit at the end where you choose to be good or bad, triggering a different voiceover for the finale, but they almost never have choices that truly affect the game.

With Radio Nowhere, we wanted to let the players feel like they were the ones driving the investigation forward, rather than following the trail we'd left for them. The above points about feeling like a detective tie into this: leaving multiple plot threads and points of suspicion for players to find means that players are never punished for tackling the case in a way that's different to what we planned. You're rewarded no matter the approach you take, or whichever parts of the case grab your attention.

But the biggest part of this is The Choice.

The video game Pentiment is an incredible game by the people who made Fallout: New Vegas, all about solving a murder in mediaeval Bavaria. But differently to most detective games, you don't have unlimited time to dig into every possible suspect and put together a perfect, watertight case. Instead, every conversation you have causes time to pass, and you only have a couple days until you'll be asked for your verdict. You might spend all afternoon talking to a suspect, only to realise they had a perfect alibi all along. It's stressful, but it makes the stakes feel real. You're not solving a puzzle; you're interacting with real people, and your decisions have consequences. You'll need to trust your instincts, work with incomplete information, and follow the leads you think are most important.

We wanted to capture this feeling with Radio Nowhere. Once you've assembled your four suspects, you're asked which two of them you want to prioritise. You get to read one last statement from all four of them about the murder, but then you have to make your choice.  Choose to investigate someone, and you're given the key to their personal staff locker, containing more information about them, and a puzzle to find out the truth of whether or not they were involved in the murder.

If a group is moving quicker than expected, we'll let them choose a third locker after they've done their first two, but 90% of teams will only ever see two of the suspects. Players are given a choice, they have to make it, and the next half hour of the game changes dramatically based on their choices. The difficult thing here was to make sure that there were no wrong answers. If you pick the real killer then you'll find some pretty damning evidence, but what if you don't? What if you pick two people that had nothing to do with the crime? We had to make sure the contents of each locker reveals the secrets of the person you've chosen (usually giving them an alibi), while also giving another hint in the direction of the true killer, letting you have just enough information that you can piece the truth together with any combination of suspects.

Our third pillar was ensuring there was a consistent sense of PLAY. Most escape rooms have a huge focus on time limits and leaderboards, which always feels like a shame. All this effort has been put into building a world and a narrative, so how come we're usually encouraged to blast through it as quickly as possible, and punished for taking the time to soak in the details?

With Radio Nowhere, we took the exact opposite approach. We want you to mess about, immerse yourself, and have a good time.

There's a lot of little ways we applied this, like a puzzle that requires the players to wear cool sunglasses, or asking them to pick their own DJ names before the game begins, but the big one is in the name of the game: The Radio Station. What started as a joke idea turned into a core part of the game, where there is an almost fully functioning radio station for the players to run. They can play music, talk into the microphone, and entertain their listeners. We added a "live listener count" that goes up and down depending on how much of a show they're putting on. If players are having a lot of fun with it then we'll send over some fan mail, or phone them up and request a song, dropping some hints about the murder along the way.

We never want people to feel like they're paying attention to the "wrong" part of the game, so slipping in plot details and character information into these calls and fan letters is important. Players can make progress in the mystery because they're messing about on the microphone, not in spite of it. Encouraging these playful moments is important, both by giving the players the toys to mess around with, but also by celebrating their actions every time they choose to play in the space. Working on a puzzle has a clear benefit, but a player might feel like they've wasted time by hosting an impromptu interview segment. So every time a player makes that choice, the listener count immediately goes up, and a message from their "producer" will compliment their hosting skills. Calls from fans will directly reference the things players have said on air, and gives opinions on the exact songs they've played. There aren't actually thousands of people listening to their broadcast, but the GM is listening, and being an attentive and receptive audience is important to encourage our players to put on a show.

Between phone calls and fan mail, the live listeners count, and a projector showing messages from the producer, there's a lot of points of interaction between the GM and the players. This means there's a lot of room for improv. Prompted to give an interview on air, a recent player claimed credit for writing Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, calling Andrew Lloyd Webber a fraud. We took this and ran with it, pumping up their listener numbers due to the scandal, giving them angry notes from the producer, and eventually making a phone call AS Andrew Lloyd Webber himself. The players demanded piles of money, and there were a few more twists and turns along the way. It was incredibly silly, and purely for the fun of it.

We're being caught off guard almost every day by players coming up with something new and unexpected. People aren't just solving puzzles, they're genuinely pretending to host a radio show. Fantastic.

Radio Nowhere is hugely experimental as a game. We originally just intended to dip our toes in the waters of experimentation, but getting carried away, we found ourselves pushing the boat out, diving right in, and probably even more water metaphors too. There were a few points where we took a step back and realised we'd gone too far, or lost sight of our original intentions, but having these three design pillars meant we never strayed too far from the path, and always knew how to get back on track. And when we were coming up with new ideas like the ones listed above, we were able to identify which pillar we wanted each idea to support, and give ourselves some guidelines going forward. Radio Nowhere could have been a mess, but by identifying what we were trying to achieve right at the beginning of the process, we made a hell of a game that does some crazy new things.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Radio Nowhere's Three Design Pillars - Case Closed Edinburgh - Voted Scotland's Best Escape Room 2024

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A look at the 3 main rules we followed for Radio Nowhere's design.

# data[].attributes.headline
Jennings, R. (2024) The problem with Escape Rooms Is That They Have Puzzles.  Available at:https://www.caseclosededinburgh.co.uk/blog/problemwithescaperooms (Accessed: November 16th 2024).

# data[].attributes.subject
Jennings, R. (2024) The problem with Escape Rooms Is That They Have Puzzles.  Available at:https://www.caseclosededinburgh.co.uk/blog/problemwithescaperooms (Accessed: November 16th 2024).

# data[].attributes.body
Jennings, Ronan (2014) The problem with Escape Rooms Is That They Have Puzzles. Available at: https://www.caseclosededinburgh.co.uk/blog/problemwithescaperooms (Accessed: November 16th 2024).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Problem with Escape Rooms is that they Have Puzzles — Case Closed Edinburgh - Voted Scotland’s Best Escape Room 2024

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Stop theming puzzle boxes and start gamifying adventures.