Notes on "Planning Your Escape" (L.E. Hall)
The current project, which I spoke about yesterday, incorporates some ideas for Escape Rooms, so I’m looking at books about that entertainment medium.
Planning Your Escape, which was published in 2021, is one of the few comprehensive books on the subject that I can find. Written by one the first escape room designers in America, this book is part history of the medium, part strategy guide for approaching a room.
Ultimately this book was not helpful and I’m confused as to the target audience: the second part (strategy guide,) covers a lot of basic things; things I would expect anyone who has done more than two rooms to know, and the first part (history) is an odd choice for a book that targets newbies.
I don’t have any strong take-aways from this book, unfortunately, but it is well-written and interesting if its subject matter is at your level.
Chapters 1-5 "A Theory of Fun"
I bought myself time yesterday by writing notes on a book I already read, a trick I think I will use often this month, so this is two days worth of reading A Theory of Fun Towards Game Design.
The idea of this book is asking “What is fun” for the purpose of making more fun games.
The big idea is that fun is generated by the brain learning new patterns and that boredom can set in when the pattern is fully learned. He defines a good game (which he believes is synonymous with fun) as one that ends before a player has fully learned everything it has to teach.
In the chapters I read he goes on to talk about how games model reality (in some way,) and frequently the skills they teach are antiquated for a modern audience (most games are war games, that isn’t as useful today as more social or cooperative games would be,) and that a fruitful area of game design would be to find ways to model skills useful for our modern society (Escape Rooms, I think are a good evolution in this direction since they are about teaching communication and teamwork above most else.)
What This Means For My Project
Although I was cagey in the last post as I relate what I learned from these readings it will be necessary to understand why I’m looking into these things, so in as simple a way I can put it:
I want to make a live theatrical show that emulates the experience of an audience watching someone play video games: in other words I want a live experience that’s similar to an online game streamer/sports experience. I think that’s an interesting evolution of where entertainment is currently and that finding a way to do it live would be interesting.
I’ve settled on this taking the form of an improvised show where the performer/improviser is put into a set and explores the story through environmental storytelling. Put another way: the audience is going to watch someone solve an escape room, but our method isn’t a series of puzzles, but a series of story beats the performer can find and react to.
Reading what I have of “A Theory of Fun” I found the most applicable information to be in how the author discusses story. He says that what stories do and what games do don’t interact, so many stories are, in effect, pasted onto games. This doesn’t mean that they’re not resonant or not good, but as he says it “Stories are a side attraction to the game”.
With this in mind I need to create two things at once that work with each other, but are separate processes:
The performer is playing a game of discovery, that game needs to have easily digestible rules and reward the player, like any other game would.
The audience (who are not players) need to watch an engaging story unfold.
The game the performer is playing needs to encourage role playing so that the audience can connect with the performer.
That will be the major challenge I need to beat if I want this to be an actual show instead of a more conventional immersive theater experience. To put it another way again: I need to create an immersive theater piece which is enjoyable to watch other people go through.
Notes on Immersive Storytelling for Real and Imagined Worlds (Margaret Kerrison)
The month of January was spent primarily reading a play every day, for at least the first part of February I’m going to shift focus and look at many of the educational books I have stacked up to read, things that I hope will help how I approach and create creative works. Due to the larger nature of these books I will likely cover chapters at a time instead of the whole book. That’s not true today though.
For the last year I’ve been slowly developing a semi-immersive theater production, something I’m not fully ready to divulge, but it involves game design and so I’m trying to read a lot of books about that.
I started with Immersive Storytelling for Real and Imagined Worlds which I think is the first book of its kind. Written by a former imagineer, this book wants to explore the basic principles behind creating immersive work. While she primarily focuses on theme parks there is a lot of usable information, and she hits on many of the non-theme park luminaries in the genre (Meow Wolf, Odyssey Works, etc.)
The Key Idea I pulled from this is to Start with Wish-fulfillment. If you are asking people to wrap themselves in a new world you need to give them a reason why. What do they gain, what need are you fulfilling in them. For theme parks it’s often excitement, adventure, the promise of a life too amazing to be your own. With IP work it can be as simple to live in the world of the characters you love for a little while.
For my project I’m currently working on a more mundane wish, but one that I hope can be revelatory: Reconnecting with an Old Friend. I hope to bring out the joy and comfort that comes from resurrecting a relationship which has laid dormant for a little too long.
Kerrison provides another invaluable resource within this book: several detailed checklists and questions to ask yourself as you’re crafting story. I don’t have the book on me so I can’t recreate them, but she has adapted the scales of storytelling (who, what, where, when, and how) into a series of detailed and thought-provoking questions which I will probably print out and hang in my office somewhere.
Like so many surveys of art forms there is nothing tremendously new in this book, and it doesn’t help with the building of these experiences, only with the planning of them, but it is a useful resource to touch base with every so often.
Copenhagen (Michael Frayn)
A long time ago a friend told me that the key difference between Americans and Europeans was that Europeans didn’t assume they knew everything about themselves, that other people had a more privileged position from which to judge our character. That’s stuck with me for a long time and quite by accident has managed to be an important component of how I think about the world.
By the end of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen that is the answer we’re left with, that we need someone outside of us to interpret who we are and why we did what we did, and sometimes we need them to give us absolution and clarity and to insist when we are presented with seeing ourselves as lucky dopes or good martyrs, that we did good by choice instead of by accident.
The play presents a conversation out of time, a common trope in historical fiction that we’ve already seen this month in Photograph 51, among Heisenberg, Neils Bohr, and his wife Margrethe. Supposedly based on an actual meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr during the early days of WWII, with the two old friends on differing sides of the conflict, Frayn delicately twists the themes of this play into Heisenberg’s most well-known contribution: the uncertainty principle.
We cannot know how fast a particle is going and where it is at any one moment. This is because we cannot observe the particle directly and can only see byproducts of its movement, which necessarily disrupt the other measurement. So to, no one can know the thoughts of another person except by introducing something to change them.
Heisenberg works with the Nazi’s out of love for his homeland, but he isn’t depraved enough to give them an atomic weapon right? The Allied forces didn’t beat Germans to the bomb because they were better, but because Heisenberg was too noble to go down that path, or at least that’s what Heisenberg needs to believe of himself: that he is right both morally and scientifically.
It is a forgiveness that Bohr, and especially his wife, are not ready to give him. The first act simmers with barely disguised anger from the two Danes forced to live under German occupation while their “friend” hardly seems to care. The story drifts forward and backward through time as the three discuss physics and personalities, the love between two people, and the suffering behind different calls to duty.
I’m afraid I rushed the ending of this play. I surely missed something, my mind is slow and needs time to catch up to the intriguing puzzlebox Frayn made. I don’t know when, or if, I’ll ever return to it, but I hope someday I will. Copenhagen is minimalist theater at its best; not a spectacle for the senses, but a slow burn of tantalizing ideas carefully argued, brimming with humanity, which of course is the only thing that matters in the end.
This is a Test (Stephen Gregg)
Unlike many of my fellow theater lovers I was not a “theater kid” growing up. My community didn’t have local theater and none of my schools did until I got to college, so there are many common touchstones or archetypes that crop up in culture that I have no personal reference for.
So one type of play which I am familiar with, but have rarely, if ever, done is the “written for schools” variety. A form of theater for young audiences, it’s written to be digestible for school aged students, often with large casts that would be impractical outside of a student body, and frequently short to allow for easy rehearsal and performance within tough public school schedules.
This is a Test is one of those shows. It isn’t particularly challenging, it is particularly interesting, but it is clearly written, acceptably funny, and has just the barest amount of risque humor to get tittles out of the audience, but not cross any actual lines.
The show is essentially a half-hour “I didn’t study for the test dream”, Alan is taking a test which gains more control over his future as it continues, and his inability to answer any question grows more absurd as well. It’s cute, it works, it was published in 1988 which hurts some of the popular culture references, but not as many as you might think.
I don’t need this sort of show in my life, but it does its job well and if I accidentally find myself in a high school again I could do a lot worse for an evening than sink into This is a Test.