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#610: Designing Escape Rooms with Laura E Hall

January 9, 2018by kentbye

laura-e-hallThe Immersive Design Summit brought together over 150 of the top experiential designers from around the world, mostly from the performance community of immersive theater productions and escape rooms, but also with a small number of people focusing on VR/AR. The future of storytelling is going to be immersive and interactive, and immersive theater and escape rooms are pushing the boundaries of physical interaction and interactive storytelling with live actors. The genre of escape rooms probably has the most seamless translation for patterns that cross over between physical and virtualized environments. The most popular VR escape room is I Expect You To Die, which I covered previously in episodes #223 and #482.

Laura E Hall of 60 Minutes to Escape, presented her best practices for designing escape rooms and immersive environments at the Immersive Design Summit. I had a chance to talk with her about the unique affordances and differences between physical and digital escape rooms, as well as her broad range of experiential design inspirations ranging from multi-user dungeons, narrative-driven indie games, alternative reality games, immersive theater, and artist collective installations like Meow Wolf.

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Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So this past weekend was the first ever Immersive Design Summit in San Francisco, where they brought together about 150 of the world-leading immersive designers. These are primarily immersive theater and people who are creating experiences in physical reality. So it's probably about 90% immersive theater folks and about maybe 10% people that were looking at virtual and augmented reality. And so it was just an amazing weekend to see this larger trend that's happening outside of virtual reality of how people are wanting more and more immersive and interactive experiences. We all want to just kind of like shut off our phone and just kind of completely lose ourselves into an experience. And virtual reality is a great gateway, but that's very limited in terms of how much you can really stimulate all of your sensory experiences if you don't actually have the ability to touch other things and interact with other people in real time. You can go pretty far with virtual reality, but there's still quite a ways to go to get the full fidelity of emotional expression and just overcoming the uncanny valley when it comes to VR. And so I did seven interviews at the Immersive Design Summit, and I'm going to do about five this week, covering different dimensions of immersive theater and the lessons that can be learned for interactive storytelling, but also experiential design and the different translations and insights that both of these disciplines of immersive theater and virtual reality can kind of teach each other. So I'm going to start today with what I think is the genre that is probably the closest translation from physical reality to virtual reality, which is escape rooms. So Laura E. Hall is an escape room designer, game designer, a writer based out of Portland, Oregon, and she has 60 minutes to escape. And she gave a lecture at the Immersive Design Summit about some of the best practices for environmental design. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Laura happened at the Immersive Design Summit that was happening in San Francisco on Saturday, January 6th, 2017. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:02:21.558] Laura E Hall: I'm Laura E. Hall. I'm based in Portland, and I built Portland's first escape room in 2014. I also work in other sort of experiential stuff, installation-based things, and we're now working on a new experiential space also in Portland that will open hopefully at the end of this year.

[00:02:43.604] Kent Bye: Great. So we're here at the Immersive Design Summit, and you just gave a talk to all these world-leading immersive designers and talking specifically about escape rooms. And so what were some of the major points that you were trying to communicate in terms of some best practices when it comes to designing escape rooms?

[00:03:01.969] Laura E Hall: Also, I was paired with Jarrett and Jeff, who made The Nest, the experience in Los Angeles. And so we planned our talks together. We agreed that I would go pretty deep into theory of environmental narrative design, and that they would focus on a case study of their work, and that they would sort of cross-reference each other in the themes. So my talk was largely about attending to the human component of these. understanding the cognitive science of what's happening in players' or visitors' brains, which are overwhelmed, you know, they're in a flow state, they are working hard to make sense of what's going on, and then we're also asking them to hear a story or interact with something, and it's sort of against, actually, what the brain is naturally doing in that scenario. So the talk is about how to utilize the environment, the mechanics, the objects to communicate as much of that story as possible so that you don't have to say anything out loud.

[00:04:03.052] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I guess there's a lot of overlaps here in terms of, you know, some video game design where they're using the environment to be able to tell a story. And I think that immersive theater has that component too. But I see that there's this tension between linear stories, authored stories and agency of games where you're actually participating and interacting in some way. And so I guess in some ways through the escape room, we have the mental friction of trying to solve the puzzles, but at the same time, What is it about that where you're kind of almost, I don't know if it's a context switch where you're, you know, solving a puzzle and trying to figure something out and then you get kind of rewarded with the story element, but you create this, you know, back and forth dynamic, either that it's context switching explicitly, or if there's ways to kind of combine those at the same time.

[00:04:48.398] Laura E Hall: Well, something that I always refer to is an amazing quote from Mike Selinker, which is, people solve puzzles because they like being in pain and then they like the opportunity of releasing themselves from that pain. So I kind of think of it in that way. But it's not that dissimilar to entering a theater or a haunted house. Haunted houses are obviously explicitly about like experiencing that catharsis and I think escape rooms offer the same that any sort of media does, which is like a chance to forget yourself for that set amount of time. I enjoy them because of that linear nature of them. The time constraint. lets you be concise. I do also design work that has no time constraint, it's entirely self-directed, which is something that you see reflected in video games. Her Story, the Sam Barlow thing, which was so interesting, offers you an in-game option of just concluding. Whenever you think you know the story to your satisfaction you can do a hundred percent of the game and it shows you that as well like the game tells you how much of the video stuff you've unlocked but you can quit if you want and it's Totally valid within the framework of that game So that's also the sort of stuff that I do in some of the more installation pieces like the silence in room 1258 which ran at now play this in London last year and It's really, to me, fundamentally about people in their own minds creating that mental model, right? It's like a super intensely personal experience. That's always sort of the fundamental thing that I'm aiming for.

[00:06:26.509] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that escape rooms, actually, as a genre, have a pretty good translation over to virtual reality where, you know, there's the, I expect you to die by Jesse Schell and his company. But I'm curious from your perspective, though, as you're designing some of these escape rooms, that I'm sure you have some sort of design framework where you have, like, trade-offs. where you're kind of trading between different things. So what are some of the trade-offs that you are constantly kind of trying to go between tuning and tweaking when you're designing something like an escape room?

[00:06:59.885] Laura E Hall: Yeah, I mean, the application of escape room stuff in VR is very real and immediate. VR lets you skip over a lot of the problems of designing something in a real world space, such as there's only so many padlocks in the world. There's only so many ways to lock a box. The technology for the sort of level of home electronics like with the sensors and the electromagnets is fairly advanced, but it's not the sorts of effects that you want to be doing with those things are sort of on an industrial scale to achieve the magic that you hope you're experiencing and conveying in those things. But really theme parks are kind of the only places that have the access to that level of tech. The most advanced escape rooms that I've seen are largely automated, right? They use sensors to tell how many people are actually in the room at the beginning and then the game adjusts to that number of people. There's not really a lot of story integration in those, but they're really fun games, right? VR obviously lets you do stuff that seems magical almost immediately, right? You can have any kind of key, any kind of lock. But the challenge conversely is like people don't necessarily inherently know how to interact with stuff, right? If there's a book on a table in a real-world situation, you know exactly what to do with it. That's not necessarily the case for VR where figuring out how the pages are turning and like how much stickiness there is and like are things moving around if you toss it, you know, do the pages flutter like there's a lot of difference there. And having things not in a real physical space means that you are doing things, maybe like tossing books around, just to see what the boundaries of that world are, right? Because you don't inherently know them.

[00:08:44.504] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I imagine that you've traveled around the country and seen quite a lot of different escape rooms that are out there. What are some of the things that most escape rooms get wrong? And what are the sort of antidotes to that?

[00:08:57.456] Laura E Hall: Hmm, I mean, so the thing about escape rooms is that basically anybody can build them, right? That's kind of why they're great. Anybody can get a bunch of stuff and like sort of put logs on things and put things in a room. The other side of that as well is like, even if the design of a room isn't that strong in terms of the puzzles or the story or whatever, people who go into them are still having fun because they're with their friends, you know, they're exploring, they're doing this thing and it's this time pressure. So, you know, you have to sort of decide at that point, like, how important is something like the story if nobody's going to pay attention to it, right? Or like, how important is it to make a solid game and puzzle experience if people are just going to have fun anyway? For me, obviously, those things are super important. But, you know, as an industry, it's not necessarily that big of a deal. We're just trying to do something different than largely what I have experienced. The narrative integration part, making things diegetic, making puzzle objects and the mechanics part of the story is sort of where the artistry comes in. And just as with video games or film, you know, there's different levels of that skill set that are going to get applied. But I will say it like I haven't really played an escape room that I didn't have fun in, you know, just really not a lot of them aim for a story and theming is like a big deal rather than a sort of like narrative or a character that you're interacting with. Mistakes though, I would say like for me anything that takes you out of the world that reminds you that it is just a game That's the stuff that gets me like laminated pieces of paper one of the jokes that I like to make is if you're gonna do whatever like a serial killer themed thing and you're like putting in a bunch of body parts and Like, if it's not a real human hand in that room, like, I'm gonna be looking at it kind of funny, right? Because, like, why is it there? What's the point of that? Unless it's supposed to be funny, right? That's not frightening.

[00:10:56.307] Kent Bye: It kind of breaks immersion.

[00:10:57.607] Laura E Hall: Yeah, exactly. It just really depends on what that person is trying to get out of it. But my fantasy version of anything is like, I'm alone in an amazing house reading someone else's letters, right? But the thing about a haunted house is it's just a house. There's not a framed picture of a ghost on the wall. It's just someone's home. So that, to me, is the level of difference of just the attention to detail that goes into them.

[00:11:26.715] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I guess in your presentation here, you were listing off your big takeaways. What were some of your big lessons learned that you're sharing back with the community here?

[00:11:38.447] Laura E Hall: So the talk goes into how basically, you know, people are entering the survival mode, like when the lights go down and they've crossed the threshold, they've entered the world, they're really not capable of taking in that much information. And then the other thing is like the brain wants to find patterns. So any extraneous information is against the whole point of like working against a time, right? If you're in a place where there's no taking clock or whatever, it's fine to have tons and tons of stuff that you get to explore. But I feel like if you're asking somebody to work hard against an hour, you need to be respectful of their time and not waste it by throwing in a whole bunch of extra stuff. You know, the extra stuff could be tons of text, which people skim. They don't process any of it. They only get the relevant information out of it, maybe. So, like, why put that in? You know, that was the sort of gist of that talk. The main takeaways are just to, like, understand what is actually happening and to be respectful of that. And that could be knowing how people actually behave versus how you want them to behave and making adjustments based on that. It's not putting in things that are world-breaking, like a lot of escape rooms will stick a do not touch sign on something that's fragile. And I would take the thing out if it's too fragile to be handled because someone is going to handle it, right? Don't put a big red button in a room unless you actually want somebody to push it. And a lot of that is just revealed by watching people actually in the space. People are very, very clever at breaking things. And you really learn a lot from watching people and taking a step back. That's part of the inherent nature of puzzle design as well. Like you design something, you think you understand how people are going to play through it and locate the information and get through the solve. But then when you watch them, if you are capable of holding yourself back and not stepping in and being like, oh no, you do it this way or that way, you learn how to then make adjustments and communicate to them in the puzzle design. You know, and puzzle difficulty is adjustable by adding or subtracting information, basically. So, you know, it really just comes down to like actual real behavior, what's actually happening in the body, and being mindful of that.

[00:13:50.642] Kent Bye: Yeah, I've noticed that whenever I'm in a VR experience, I don't really want to be reading text. Not only because it's a little difficult to read, but also it kind of puts me into a different state of mind, where it really starts to put me into a mode of really thinking about things. And something like Sleep No More doesn't have any dialogue, and there's not a lot of words. And I really love that feeling of kind of like almost walking through a dream, where I can just allow my unconscious and subconscious processes to kind of get it. So how do you design for that? How do you design to kind of get away from relying upon text or words, but to be able to communicate things either symbolically or other ways that are just easier to consume that doesn't put people into that kind of, you know, left brain state of mind?

[00:14:34.301] Laura E Hall: I think a lot of experiential design is what you could call feelings first, right? You're trying to evoke a very specific experience. For me, it's almost always the feeling of reading someone else's letters, right? Again, that's the sort of like fantasy version of it. But maybe that is like you want them to feel like they're in an adventure. You want them to feel overwhelmed in their senses. Whatever the case is, it's usually I find that it begins there. I mean, I think a lot of it comes from drawing upon archetypes, and that's something that the talk kind of covers as well. The language of communicating these concepts exists in cinema and in books and in theater, so we would be foolish to not look at those and try and adapt the language that exists already and has for a really long time. In particular, visual stuff, television, cinema, set design. They're already experts at conveying complicated ideas and environments, so that's what I usually look for first.

[00:15:35.749] Kent Bye: It sounds like you're drawing upon set design in theater and cinema. How does that actually get translated? Maybe you could explain that a little bit more of how you translate an idea or concept into either physical architecture or set design. And I think of dance as a form of embodied communication that's sort of nonverbal. But what are these other ways or techniques and archetypes that you've kind of discovered?

[00:15:59.058] Laura E Hall: Well, I mean, you know, the size of a room matters. And that's something that is exciting about VR, too, because you're not limited to something that is the literal, actual size of the room. You could have somebody in a cathedral, for example, which evokes very particular feelings and emotions, whereas in real life, that's just plain not possible. So that's why I think you see in the escape rooms a lot of the time they're very small and close in, like the ceilings, I would adjust them to be a little bit lower than normal to deliberately make people uncomfortable on a level that they may not be consciously aware of. Tricks like that, you know, directed lighting and like A dark room covers a lot of ailments that are just sort of like a regular part of the real world. But that's part of the problem too is like when people see an electrical socket and they don't necessarily know the rules of that room yet, they might try and stick their finger in it. So there's sort of trade-offs in that way as well with real architecture.

[00:16:56.048] Kent Bye: What are some of the biggest open questions that are really driving your work forward?

[00:17:01.093] Laura E Hall: For me, the idea of scale is the most interesting thing. You know, the experiences that I find myself the most excited by, things like Sleep No More, but also Meow Wolf, Crystal Maze, like those are all things that are having lots and lots of people moving around a space all together, interacting not with each other, but around each other, but it doesn't necessarily make their individual experiences less. It's actually like a major part of it. Meow Wolf in particular, they say things like they don't privilege one element of that visit over another. So it's people watching, it's playfulness, it's learning about the story, it's poking all the buttons, it's just sitting equally. All of those things are part of that. So the idea of scale to me is really the most important. In escape rooms, obviously, it's like a limited ticketed thing, right? They're generally whatever, six to 10 people. And it's so region locked as well, right? These things are not portable and to achieve the sort of level of immersion that I'm interested in, like it's really built out stuff. It's not portable in any way. So that's kind of the question. And you can look at things, haunted houses do it, right? But is it like an experience where they're putting whatever, 700 people through in an hour? And like, what does that experience do to you individually? Is that scary or is it just sort of like lizard brain scary? Like to me, actual fear and frightening things are the tension building and like the suspense and you know, like more Hitchcock type stuff over jump scares. True Dungeon, the Gen Con game, that's another great example of like a game at scale. They're putting tons and tons of people through in groups and like they're all really enjoying themselves. And it's all kind of the opposite of an escape room with the limited number of people that can do it at a time.

[00:18:51.898] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it seems like video games, as well as some of these more spatial puzzles get translated into VR, these more digital mediated technologies have the potential to be able to give access to some of these types of experiences more at scale. And so what are some of the other video games or VR experiences that you've seen that are really exploring some of these very similar concepts of either spatial storytelling that you've seen out there that give you inspiration?

[00:19:22.098] Laura E Hall: I mean, you know, it's going to be the main contenders, right? Like the Gone Home, Tacoma, Firewatch kind of stuff, which all have Portland ties, of course, which is great. What Remains of Edith Finch is also really wonderful. And those are all things that play on the specific medium of video games to like be able to explore those spaces. But, you know, it does draw you in in that same sense of transportation that you would get in a VR experience or in a real world one. And like that, I think is why I like them so much. It's the curation of that space that really is what is key in those in particular. VR experiences, that's a great question. Has there been anything that's come out recently, not that is, I'm not going to say like on the scale of those sort of video games, but that replicates just those feelings? Because the stuff that I like tends to be more meditation based or, you know, it's, you're just enjoying a beautiful forest and there's leaves blowing around, that kind of stuff. That's the sort of stuff that I find that I'm drawn to the most. I haven't really played a VR experience that I thought utilized the medium in that particular way. There's great games that do. Superhot, right, where your body is the mechanic. I don't really know that words exist to describe how that kind of interaction functions. Yeah, have there been any recently that you would say are kind of on par with that?

[00:20:43.604] Kent Bye: Well, there's some of that have come out that some people are reacting to in that way. I'd say perhaps something like Fallout 4 or some of these more open world games. But in terms of the indie game vibe that you're talking about, the Gone Home, Firewatch, and Tacoma, I don't think that there's been anything that's been quite on that same kind of emotional feeling. They've mostly been these open world exploration games. But the potential is there. It's just more of the people that have that design aesthetic that are really trying to cultivate that feeling and that emotion. The people that I think are doing that are still kind of either in the 2D realm or still maybe in immersive theater. But I expect that over time, as the medium starts to have more diversity and expands out in different ways, that they're going to see a lot more of that. what I see, part of the reason why I'm here at the Immersive Design Summit is because I see this kind of trajectory of both VR and immersive theater are on this collision course where there's gonna be kind of a back and forth of VR learning from immersive theater but also a lot of stuff both from VR and artificial intelligence kind of feeding into the immersive theater realm to be able to kind of create more sophisticated narratives maybe with drama managers and just sort of much more sophisticated interactive experiences and narratives but are physically co-located and can really Expand all the affordances of what happens when you have actual people together So I kind of see these cross pollinations happening, but you know, it's still early days and theoretically and philosophically It's possible. It's just no one has done it yet or they have I haven't seen it

[00:22:14.333] Laura E Hall: I also find it really exciting and I think that it is a natural next step for all of those to start meeting. You know, the idea that anybody anywhere can do it in particular is the most powerful for me and like I'm really excited to see what that might look like to have actors in there and you know part of the fun part of Sleep No More Well, I'll just grab a specific moment that I experienced. You know, you go into the space, you've got your mask on, and so you start to lean into this thing where you have no identity, right? You're just like this ghost floating around. And there's a scene that happens in the hospital with Lady Macbeth. She's been brought in by a nurse and the actress is nude and she gets put into a bathtub. Everyone's used to crowding around the actors, you know, this kind of happens like late into the narrative. And the nurse leaves and it's the scene where Lady Macbeth sees blood on her hands, you know, her guilt has become too overwhelming for her to deal with. So this nude woman is like looking at the blood that has appeared on her hands. And Sleep No More has characters that are supernatural, there's witches and goddesses, and then there's characters who are mundane. And the mundane ones will just brush by you, but the supernatural characters interact with you directly a lot of the time. They ask you to help them get dressed, or they take your hand, or they hand you an umbrella to hold while somebody else is doing something. And in that moment, Lady Macbeth suddenly can see you the way that the supernatural characters can. And so she looks around and for the first time begins making eye contact with everybody. And you suddenly look around and see the audience, you know, it's suddenly you're these creeps looking at this woman, you know, who's slowly going mad and she's super vulnerable and you're horrible, you know, ghost people who are just like, crowding around her, then the nurse comes back in, comforts her, and suddenly she can no longer see you. And so to me that was the most powerful of many powerful moments in that theater space. And that is the kind of thing that I would like to see happening in every medium. But it relies upon the physical presence of other people. the crowd itself, not even the actors, but just like the awareness of other people in that space was so much a part of the feeling of that moment. So that's what I'm longing for.

[00:24:29.398] Kent Bye: Yeah, the one game that has really been blowing up recently, and it's really more of a social VR experience, is VRChat. And part of what's happening is that you have Twitch streamers who used to be like first-person shooter Twitch streamers on like Overwatch, and they are now sort of going into VRChat, they're embodying anime characters, they're doing cosplay, but they're like role-playing, they're LARPing, they're... sort of having these what would normally be considered maybe an in real life streaming, an IRL stream on Twitch where they go out and kind of interact with people but this is within the context of a virtual world so there's a little bit more leeway for them to explore and experiment and do stuff that would perhaps normally get them arrested if they were to do the similar things within a real world but because it's a virtual world they can kind of you know play with people in that way but There's a couple things there. One is that the process of avatar creation and identity, like embodying a character, because VRChat allows you to upload whatever character that you want, you have the possibility to really customize your identity expression within that, and you're able to really jump into that character. But also because it's an open world, you know, because they have like Unity integration, you can upload your own worlds, you have this process of this sort of more open-ended explorations. Talking to Jesse Jodry back in like episode 318, talking about some of the group collaborative storytelling and explorations that were happening. So somebody had recreated Dante's Inferno and their conceptualization of that. And then they take them on a guided tour, and then as they're walking through these conceptualizations of hell, people are noticing different things about the environment, and they're sort of connecting to each other, and then the story emerges from the experiences of the collective going through this space and, you know, from the beginning to the end. And so there's stuff like that where I feel like because Twitch streamers that are normally playing a video game and sharing a dimension of the personality, they're kind of like getting rid of the video game part and just, you know, embodying a character and expressing their personality and perhaps in a way that's tapping deeper into their actual personality and being able to interact with other people. And they're having all these really surprising and delightful moments that are creating this sense of wonder and awe, but it's also these viral moments that get clipped and shared to livestreams fail. So I see that there's been this really interesting, you know, phenomena that's happening with VRChat where they're starting to tap into, like, what is the beginning of these interactive and immersive Stories that are starting with just you know one-off improv scenes that are very short and brief but that if there's some sort of structures that are built in to the world where people can go in there and start to play roles and Interact with each other in different ways then you can start to have like these more kind of emergent stories that are told you know as a group and a collective so I I see that that's on the trajectory and the fact that it's taken off on Twitch and you know getting tens of thousands of viewers and you know at some points being one of the top 10 of all the streaming games that are happening on Twitch. I kind of see that it's these personalities of Twitch that normally have people chatting to them but if you're actually able to go interact with them within a virtual world, it turns what used to be kind of stream sniping into like this adventure to see if you can find your favorite character and have sort of like a moment with them live on camera. But that it's sort of leading what I see is everybody kind of like, they'll have 20 people that embody a penguin characters and then they'll sort of go do these different raids and people who aren't even in VR are able to have access to these virtual worlds and be able to have an interactive experience with it and it's sort of driving both an experience of like the potential of the technology, like they'll say, hey, this will be way better if I have a VR headset on. So it'll drive that in terms of being more and more immersed. But it's also creating a context under which people are starting to explore these virtual immersive worlds. And it's at the very beginning, and I expect that people are going to want to have more of those, you know, deeper meaning and story attached to it.

[00:28:19.455] Laura E Hall: That's so interesting. I haven't heard of that. I'll have to look at it. But it I mean, that's the kind of fundamental human truth of being on the internet, right? Like, I used to be super addicted to a mud and multi user dungeon RPG kind of game. It was very open world. Like it had economic and political systems and there were like culture wars that would happen But it was basically like an interactive novel. It's entirely text I should say text on a screen, but I would spend hours and hours and hours Interacting right and it's real people but they're inhabiting these characters, but you kind of know sometimes they're in character sometimes out of character and there's more a's that emerge from that and And that sort of thing was the same drive that led me to enjoy alternate reality games, right? Like, there's a team of writers behind the scenes, there's these players that come together, and it's usually in IRC, but sometimes and often in real life. coming together for these puzzle-solving moments that you can read about later, but you can only experience if you're actually there, right? And the team of writers behind the scenes is also responding in real time, changing the way that characters interact with you. In Perplex City, there was a character who was supposed to get killed, and the players were sort of told about it in advance, and they took action, right? They intervened, they emailed all these other characters to let them know what was going on, because naturally they wanted to like save this person's life and the team had this whole story plotted out for like this character being killed and they changed it because they were like now within the reality of this like fictional world the characters have succeeded in saving them and like the ephemerality of those things is like what has always drawn me into it and almost kind of whatever the medium happens to be. So that's really exciting. That's super cool.

[00:30:09.142] Kent Bye: It also reminds me of going up to Seattle to PAX to see how 240,000 tickets total sold out within a matter of minutes of people. You get this sense of these people who are gaming enthusiasts who are coming and they want to be immersed within the weekend of being able to just play all these games. And I saw that to just see the energy and excitement that's there. And I just see that there's all these movements towards these more and more immersive experiences that starting with VR and AR is maybe a gateway into these other more physical haptic and sensory experiences, but actually getting your hands within it and it activates different dimensions of your embodied cognition. You mentioned something earlier about the neuroscience and the science of what's actually happening in people's brains. What is it that you can share with me in terms of what's actually happening in people's brains as they're getting immersed within these worlds, and what's happening, and why is it so compelling?

[00:31:04.860] Laura E Hall: So I'm not, I mean, my background is not in science. And so I'm picking things up, you know, so I can't speak to it academically. But you know, it's just, it's the narrowing of focus that I find the most behaviorally interesting kind of thing. People really Want they long for that sense of transportation and you know your body and brain responds to those things as instantly as they can and yet your brain is always looking for ways to take you back out of that right and so like from a creator's perspective I'll circle back to the actual neuroscience stuff, but from a creator's perspective, they are placing themselves into your hands, right? And so you really need to care for them both physically and cognitively when they're experiencing this thing. Are you familiar with the DeJune Institute and the Latitude Society?

[00:31:53.678] Kent Bye: I just saw a brief mention of it, but I haven't been into it or seen it. Maybe you could describe it a little bit.

[00:31:58.607] Laura E Hall: Yeah, I can summarize. So Jejune Institute was something that ran in San Francisco for a long time. It was a thing where they had put up flyers around town to join this breatharianism group. And if you called the number or went to the website, it would lead you to an office. They'd hand you a key at the front desk, and you'd go and watch this video that was automatically playing. inducting you into this cult, basically. And then it sent you off on a sort of tour of like Chinatown and the financial district, but an area tour with a fictional layer over it. And there were multiple chapters. There was one that happened along Valencia, right by Dolores Park, with this like radio broadcast that ran, I think it was for three years, a pirate radio. And it was, you know, sort of scavenger hunt type stuff, but the world was so well wrought, like people got very, very invested in it. It was so cool. The Latitude Society was the organization that came after Dijun finished. in my opinion observing it seemed to take on all of the stuff of That made those people so excited right like the in-person gatherings the really like intense Ritualistic stuff and it basically was a secret society clubhouse Your intro to that was to be handed a blank white card with a stripe on it You would make an appointment and show up at this totally nondescript door swipe it and like you are looking at this yawning portal that leads down, and it was a slide, and so then you have to crawl in complete darkness. You emerged into this sort of hexagonal room lined with books, and you watch this little intro, and then, you know, it sort of led into the actual clubhouse space, which was real, and then another sort of little walking tour thing. So the latitude does not exist anymore, but people are carrying on the spirit. But that was the thing, when I was crawling in the dark, feeling these passages getting narrower and narrower on either side of me, I was thinking, I don't need to be afraid right now because someone has designed this. Like, I'm in someone's hands, they're not gonna crush me to death right now, because that's what your brain is telling you. And rightfully so, because it's actually really scary. I learned later there are people that are watching you via cameras, so if you do need to get out and be taken out of that experience, they're ready to do it. They check on you if you seem to be having trouble. But that feeling of being in somebody's hands and being aware of that was what allowed me to continue. And so that's how I approach things as a creator. People want these sort of fundamental things, you know, to like forget yourself for this amount of time. But in order to allow them to actually do that, there's so much work that goes into it. And sometimes it's like this, you know, this is something I've talked about in relationship to VR with time dilation. Like, it's not okay, ethically, it's not okay to design something that could, in theory, run for 10 hours without somebody noticing. Like, in an escape room, you're there for an hour, standing on a concrete floor, and because you've entered a flow state, you don't notice that time passing. And so, afterward, you're like, why is my body hurting so much? And so, it's just, it's things like that that I think are really important to be aware of at the most fundamental level, not even getting into issues of accessibility. Right? Like if you are doing something that requires people to stand for a full hour, what do you do for people who can't? Right? It's really, really limiting in that way. So anyway, that's why I think it's important to understand the cognitive process stuff, but it's, it's ultimately toward that end. Um, so yeah, I mean it's, it's the flow state communicating to people when their brains are just like really not ready to take in a ton of information and that sort of feelings first design. Like that's kind of the only way to do it.

[00:35:48.756] Kent Bye: Great. And for you, what do you personally want to experience either in a virtual reality or immersive experience?

[00:35:57.007] Laura E Hall: So I'd say it happens like once every five years, but there's something that I encounter that's just like a tug in the gut, right? Like I recognize it when I'm feeling it. And it used to be that mud that I was obsessed with. Ikea is the name of it. It's still running. Amazing. It was actually the first game ever that had like the equivalent of in-app purchases. Amazing. Then alternate reality games. The experience of being drawn into those is called rabbit holing, like Alice in Wonderland tumbling in this rabbit hole. So, you know, ready-made imagery. Sleep No More was the next one. And really, the most recent time that I experienced that was Meow Wolf, which I'm obviously obsessed with because it's amazing. But that is following a path of greater scale, greater intensity, more sensory experiences. I don't want to say less narrative, but it's less of a personal narrative, right? The mud stuff is like, obviously you're writing and generating so much material. And Meow Wolf, there is a story and a sort of narrative of that environment. But you can also just sort of step back and enjoy feeling and looking. I'm always on the hunt for that. And I really don't know what that is going to look like. I mean, I travel a lot. So I get, for example, the cathedral experience by being in an actual cathedral, right? So what I want is for VR to be able to deliver not just that, but like the story part, the embodiment, like the identity components that like are just not possible in like a DIY built space.

[00:37:29.911] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is kind of the ultimate potential of immersive experiences or VR and what it might be able to enable?

[00:37:41.380] Laura E Hall: Oh, it's a big question, isn't it? I mean, it's it's this full range, right? Like we are getting right now a lot of really serious, super dramatic stuff. And it's because it's really easy to communicate with the lizard brain, right? Sex and death. Very popular. Not bad. It's very fun stuff. But it's like, can we be more complex than that? And does that level of complexity mean we're talking like great American novel level of like detail? Maybe not. Maybe it's comedy. because comedy is really, really difficult and you basically don't see it in that many immersive experiences right now, especially escape rooms. Like that's something when I hear one is like really good at developing comedy, that's the one I want to go to because nobody is doing that. So it's really in any of these, the ability to start delivering more and more complex experiences, human experiences, but more complex ones.

[00:38:33.916] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?

[00:38:38.190] Laura E Hall: I'm just really excited about this stuff. And again, it's almost the medium obviously matters, but the fundamentals are transcending mediums. It's this human truth that I think is what people respond to. And I assume that's why you're here too, because there are VR people here, but it's not VR focused. And yet it's so, so relevant to this field. We're all in the same boat together, trying to row in the same direction. So yeah, I just find it really exciting.

[00:39:08.896] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Laura, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:39:11.297] Laura E Hall: Thanks. Thank you very much.

[00:39:13.759] Kent Bye: So that was Laura E. Hall. She's an experiential designer and designs escape rooms in Portland, Oregon, with 60 Minutes to Escape. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, it was really interesting to see all the different things that Laura is thinking about when she's trying to design an experience and to really try to address the human component. As somebody who's going through one of these escape rooms, she's saying that they're feeling very overwhelmed, they get into these flow states, they're working with stuff that's really hard to make sense of. It's difficult for them to really receive a story, but at the same time, if there is story embedded with it, it just makes it so much more enriching, and for her, so much more emotionally rewarding. So, she gave this quote from Mike Selinker and Thomas Snyder's Puzzle Craft that says that people solve puzzles because they like pain, and they like being released from pain, and they like most of all that they find within themselves the power to release themselves from their own pain. And I think that's that sort of mental friction or artificially creating this tension that then is being released. And that's basically the process of storytelling. And in the context of an escape room, you're actually doing a lot of these physical mechanics in order to actually solve the puzzle and escape from the room. So at one point Laura asked me to refer to some of the either games or stories that were really exploring the unique affordances of VR and I wanted to expand on that a little bit here as I had a little more time to reflect on that and just give some shout outs to some experiences that I think are really worth checking out. In terms of the integration of games and story, I definitely check out Virtual Virtual Reality, which is an amazing interactive story where you sort of go deeper and deeper, incepted into different layers of virtual reality, which is an amazing and fun mechanic with great writing and storytelling. The Gallery, Call of the Starseed, and Heart of the Emberstone are both these great puzzle games, exploration, but also just really great story and kind of innovations of storytelling within VR. I'd say that Rick and Morty, virtual Rickality, is an amazing combination of agency and storytelling and doing fun mechanics but also finding interesting and new ways of telling stories within VR. And then there's also Lone Echo and Eclipse Edge of Light, I think are also worth checking out. In terms of just pure stories, not much game components at all, there's Pearl, Therangelica, Rose Colored, Melita, and Alteration. And I'm also about to go out to Sundance, and I'll be at Tribeca later this year. There's a lot of really amazing experiences that are much more installation-based, and some of them that will only be at festivals. The Marshmallow Laser Feast experiences have been amazing. The Void is great, as well as Within's The Life of Us. So I'm expecting to see a lot more really great, immersive installation pieces at these film festivals that may end up in museums or at places like IMAX VR. So the other thing that I was just really fascinated by from this interview is just kind of a survey of both a lot of the story games from the independent game scene but also these alternative reality games as well as these multi-user dungeons and a variety of different immersive theater experiences as well as Meow Wolf which is an art installation within Santa Fe where a bunch of artists were able to create art and an immersive experience and they've basically created it into the number one tourist destination in Santa Fe to go and have this whole immersive experience where you walk into this other world created by these artists and have as much time as you want to explore all the stories that are embedded within it. So one of the things that Laura is really looking for now is looking at how to take some of these immersive experiences and really start to translate them to operate at larger and larger scales. She cited a number of different experiences, such as Sleep No More, Meow Wolf, and Crystal Maze, where there's a bunch of people that are exploring the space together, but they're kind of independently acting on their own sort of journeys. But they're able to be co-located in the same place where they can have their own individual journey, but yet share it with other people. I found that within Sleep No More where there's a little bit of this like wisdom of the crowds phenomena where if there's like 50 people running after somebody that's running down the hallway, I know that's likely a major character within the story and that that's worth that many people paying attention to that that person's going to likely end up in a place that's going to be driving much more action. And so you get this kind of phenomena where you can have the ability to explore the space on your own, but also have some feedback of being together with other people. The other thing that came up a lot over the Immersive Design Summit weekend was the Jejuon Institute, which was this alternative reality game where you just kind of get immersed into this other world, where you're actually in reality, exploring around, but there's all these clues. So it's just this layering of story on top of physical reality. And they were doing this for a number of years with these alternative reality games, and I expect that with podcasts and audio as the ability to do some pretty amazing immersive experiences of just sort of guided tours and adding that layer of story. I know that Punchdrunk has done a number of experiences that were very audio driven in that way. And I'm curious to see how augmented reality in the future is able to kind of add that layer of meaning and story on top of physical reality and allow people to kind of create new context and meaning around the physical space. And that at the end of the day, it seems like, you know, all of these immersive experiences are trying to allow people to step back and perhaps escape the mundane aspects of their life and to be fully present about what's happening in front of them, where they can be fully engaged with their body and to make choices and to take action and expressing their agency. But that also the things that Laura is really interested in is how can she allow people to really feel and be emotionally present and to just sit back and observe and look at all the amazing things that are in life and having that sense of awe and wonder. And I think that's a common theme of a lot of these immersive theater experiences is that you get to experience things that are kind of taking you out of your normal routine of the daily grind that you have and that you're able to get in touch with a different quality of the moment and a different quality of your own presence that you're able to cultivate. And that, you know, right now we have a number of experiences that are really focused on both sex and death, is what Laura says, but that she's expecting and looking for over time that these media, both in virtual and augmented reality, as well as these immersive theater and escape rooms, that they're going to start to address the more complex, nuanced aspects of the human experience. And so that's really what she's looking forward to and whether that's comedy or around death and grieving or just other topics about the things that are happening in society. And that was another theme that I saw at the Immersive Design Summit was starting to think about how some of these experiences can start to address some of these larger social issues that are going on. And is this a way that we could, you know, have shared experiences with people where we could connect to them about these stories and then start to see past our labels and differences with each other and maybe connect to each other on a human level, at the story level, and be able to perhaps work together and collaborate to be able to solve a lot of the larger issues that we're facing today. So that's all that I have for today. I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast and this week I'm going to be doing about five podcasts with interviews that I did at the Immersive Design Summit because I do think that there is a lot of really amazing stuff about exploring the extent of human agency and interactive storytelling and immersive experiential design. So, spread your word, tell your friends I'll be doing this coverage this week, and consider becoming a donor. This is a listener-supported podcast, and I do rely upon your donations to allow me to go to these different conferences and do all these interviews and to bring you this coverage as to how this whole field of virtual and augmented reality as well as immersive experiential design is evolving. So, you can donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.

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#610: Designing Escape Rooms with Laura E Hall