Escape Rooms and the Power of Inner Stories

If you have not be living under a rock for the last few years you have at least heard about Escape Rooms. They typically work as follow: a group of people enters a physical room and they have a limited amount of time to solve puzzles and manage to escape the room. 
    
Escape rooms have traditionally had fairly poor stories, based on a handful of slightly antiquated tropes: Bank Heist, Hoodini, Sherlock Holmes, Haunted Houses, etc… But somehow they have been increasingly popular in the last few years, so the question is why? What makes Escape Rooms so attractive? 

To answer this, we need to ask ourselves: what is the story actually told?  I believe the real story, the one that matters, the one that makes people keep coming back is not the one drafted in the room. It is the narrative that the players are creating together trying to solve the room. 

Let see the difference: 

Here is a typical Escape Room Story (which I think can be found in about a hundred rooms across the States): 

Sherlock Holmes is trapped by Moriarty in a distant, unknown location. He needs you to find a necklace hidden in his office to save the day and also himself while you are at it. He left clues and cryptic instructions in his office for you, his trusted “lieutenants”, to find the necklace.  As you enter the office, you look around and see a locked desk, a bookshelf with 3 books on it and a bizarre looking clock. So you come in, solve the puzzles, find the necklace and save the day. 

Now this is what an inner story of a player would look like:

You solve that clock puzzle quickly, but then there is Steven, your childhood friend. Lovable guy but he is a bit of a bully and as usual he pushes the group to do thing his own way. You hate when he does that, so with Jenny, your girlfriend, you start your own little investigation on the side. Somehow that doesn’t go as planned, the discussion turns sour and you start arguing pretty badly, names are called, old grudges resurface… and when you think your couple is about to end, you hear a click and you realize that you miraculously solved the puzzle by fidgeting with it! Great.  At this point, time is running out though, Steven had made a bit of progress elsewhere but it is not looking good. Then something happens: 5 minutes before the end, Bob, bob the dreamer you call him, who hasn’t spoken a word during this whole time and was just looking around, chimed in and give you the final solution! It’s a miracle. You grab the necklace and sprint out of the room as the clock runs out and save the day!


So you can see that your personal story isn’t really about Sherlock Holmes, it is about you and your friends. It is filled with personal emotions and at the end you learned a little bit more about yourself and the people around you. 

And yes, that inner story is still fairly simple, but what is important is to see the perception shift; how suddenly you are not too concerned on how Sherlock can communicate with you while being held prisoner but more about how to create interesting dynamics between the players. 

Our first reflex when designing an Interactive Experience is to turn toward the storytelling tools we know: Books, Theatre, Movies, etc… but when doing that, the linear structure and projection based storytelling (the fact that I’m telling the story of somebody else for you to project into) are colliding with the core of this new medium which by essence put the players at the center of the experience. 

Instead we should focus on players inner stories:

• How do we create environments that do not force an external story but foster inner ones?
• How do we validate and reward players with bold inner story choices?
• How do we make people learn a bit better about themselves and about the people around them?

By accepting that real-life interactive experiences such as escape rooms are part of a new emerging medium and that by essence that medium creates different stories with a different language then instead of seeing the medium as a limitation one might be able to catch a glimpse at the vast ocean of extraordinary opportunities lying in front of us.  

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