Episode Transcript

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I'm Charlie Melcher, founder and director of The Future of StoryTelling, and I'm delighted to welcome you to the FoST Podcast. After two years of being pent up due to the pandemic, I was starved for immersive adventures. So, and perhaps somewhat ironically, when I got to San Francisco a few weeks ago, I decided to get locked inside a room at Palace Games with some of my FoST friends.

Charlie Melcher:

After successfully escaping the room, founder Christopher Alden gave us a behind the scenes tour. I couldn't believe how much technology was operating hidden beneath the surface. It was super impressive and made the room feel responsive, almost alive. I wanted to invite Chris onto the podcast to give you all a glimpse of the wizard behind the curtain. Chris Alden founded Palace Games in 2015 before he had ever done an escape room himself. Since then, his company has gone on to win more than 10 awards, including being ranked the fifth best escape room company in the world in 2021. It's my great pleasure to welcome Chris Alden onto the FoST Podcast. Chris, it's so delightful to have you on the FoST podcast. Welcome.

Chris Alden:

Hi Charlie. Thank you so much. I'm honored.

Charlie Melcher:

So I wanted to start by asking you, where did your love of escape rooms come from? What was your first inspiration and experience?

Chris Alden:

It's funny, because it's something that I had to look back on my life when I was in one of these sort of job transitions, where you think about what you're going to do next in your career. And I realized after a 20 year career that I'd never asked myself, it was part of that what do I really enjoy? And I went back, I went on a bike ride and I started to think about what was I passionate about in my life? And I started to trace back how much I'd always love games. I'd always loved making games, making mazes, inventing things. That's when it occurred to me that, geez, I'm going to start something, do something that I'm really passionate about. And that's where the passion came from. It came from a desire to make games more so than actually playing the games, if you will.

Charlie Melcher:

You enjoyed making games as a kid?

Chris Alden:

As a kid, I was always making mazes, puzzles, things along those lines. And the truth is that I hadn't actually played escape rooms before I built this escape room. I maybe had played one or two, but I actually made the decision to start an escape room before I'd ever played one.

Charlie Melcher:

And so this business now of escape rooms really evolved to just play into those childhood enthusiasm or passion you had for games. Do you think that's why many people come to escape rooms?

Chris Alden:

When I actually first contemplated designing escape rooms, I talked with someone who had done an escape room. This was early on, this would've been 2014, and he had done a mobile escape room as part of a promotion for a movie. And he had said to me, "I'd never experienced anything where almost universally everyone who played it liked it." It was broadly applicable. And if you think about our rooms, we have 13 year old birthday parties and 60 year old birthday parties. We've had Academy Award winning actresses and Nobel Prize winning scientists. We've had a huge range of people, runs the gamut. And so there's something really universally appealing about an escape room.

Charlie Melcher:

We had the pleasure of recently playing the attraction in one of your rooms, the most recent room, and a very disparate group of people in the room, and everybody pulled together, became a team. We sort of brought everyone's best strengths. Certain people were good at certain types of puzzles and others at other things. And I honestly don't think any of us alone would've been able to do it, but all of us together somehow the sum was greater than the parts. And we left with that incredible sense of accomplishment, team success. And certainly think that's a big, huge part of the draw, right? We missed that sense of being on a team with people today.

Chris Alden:

I think that's right. You're going to have four to eight people in the room. They're all going to be different. They may be different ages. They may have different areas of strengths and weaknesses. Some of them may be extroverts. Some of them may be introverts. Some of them may have been dragged there by, you know, you may have a teenager who's sulking. How do you engage a group like that together and keep their attention for in our case usually 90 minutes or more, and tap into all their strengths and weaknesses? That is a lot of what we think about in the design of the room.

Charlie Melcher:

Tell us about what is a classic escape room. I mean, what are the elements traditionally?

Chris Alden:

Escape rooms really started out as computer games. There was these video games called escape room games. You would click around and try to find keys. And then this group in Japan said, "Hey, I got a wacky idea. Let's create a physical version of that." And so the early escape rooms were really just puzzles. You had to get out of the room within a given period of time. Those can be a lot of fun for all the reasons we just talked about, that they're social. You have a shared set of objectives.

Chris Alden:

But over time it's evolved pretty significantly. We've added different types of technology. So it's not just paper puzzles. You've got audio, you might have video, you'll have lighting, mechanical things that will happen. And then now you've seen a lot of folks trying to play around much more with story. The early escape rooms really just had a setup, you're in prison and you need to get out within an hour before they execute you or whatever it may be. And it's sort of interesting, the moniker escape room, I think a lot of us feel like it no longer fits in a certain way, because it's not necessarily about escaping. And certainly most of them aren't about a single room. But we think of it's less escape as in prison, more escape as vacation. It's a way of getting away from the normal life and doing something interesting and fun.

Charlie Melcher:

I think you're right. Escape room is a misnomer. It's more now kind of story world that you're living in and getting to play a role in. And I wonder how important you think stories are to the evolution of escape rooms or what we formally know as the escape room?

Chris Alden:

Well, what's interesting about the escape room industry is that I think there's a great diversity of creators and innovators that are doing a whole bunch of different types of rooms and experiences. And escape room experiences can be very kinetic and be very light on the story. And I think that is a wonderful direction for rooms to go. Some of our rooms definitely lean more in that direction. So I hesitate to say in general this is where it all should go. But for us personally, we are interested in doing stories, because we think that can be fun and engaging, that can really enhance to the sense of a mission and of a quest and to the profoundness and the artistry of the experience.

Chris Alden:

And there's a real challenge, I think in combining a story with the escape room experience, because that core escape room experience is you have sort of escape room brain. There's that fight or flight mentality where you've got to rush, you've got to move, you've got to solve. And that brain is not really conducive to also picking up on storylines and narrative and plot and certainly themes, and trying to weave those together can be a real challenge. And that's a challenge that we took with the attraction, was to try to balance those two, give them a sense of agency that they're on a journey, but also try to develop themes and story plot lines throughout.

Charlie Melcher:

I know that some of the more advanced games that are being developed in China, and apparently in China this is a much bigger market than it is here. I read that the revenue from escape rooms in China is larger than that of movie theaters now. But some of the more cutting edge ones, there are incorporating, yes, puzzle solving, but some cosplay costumes where people will dress or be given an option to choose a character and a costume. It's social. A group of people are coming together. And in addition to multiple rooms and dramatic sets and lighting, there's also the inclusion of actors. I keep thinking that this is a form that's in the process of being invented and evolving, and it's moving towards something that's closer to, or some new ground that touches on immersive theater, video games, the kind of agency and quests that people might have in those. And then something like a movie, where there's a narrative in characters. Would you agree? Is there kind of a new thing being invented around what was the classic escape room genre?

Chris Alden:

It's not necessarily new from our point of view, which is to say that for years there have been escape rooms that have had very much of a immersive theater component where you've got actors as a core component of the experience. Some of the best escape rooms in the country around the world have that. And we have not gone that direction in the sense that we don't have paid actors that are integral to the story. We will have a team that will help get people set up. We don't ask the players to pretend there's something else. Our personal style is not to ask you to pretend that you aren't who you are. We're trying to create an experience that is transformative to you as you the person that you are versus imagine I'm an astronaut or I'm a prisoner. I'm a pirate.

Chris Alden:

I want to create an experience that you don't have to pretend that you're something that you're not. Again, there's other rooms that take a very different approach. That you want to imagine you're something else and put on a costume and a little bit more of a cosplay element. And that's what I mean for the diversity. I think there's a lot of rooms that will try that direction. There's a lot of games that will stay away from that direction.

Charlie Melcher:

So Chris, tell us about the rooms that you've built at Palace Games.

Chris Alden:

Well, we've been fortunate enough to be able to work inside the Palace of Fine Arts, which is this magnificent historic building that was built in 1915 for something called the Panama Pacific International Exposition. Over 20 million people came to that event, which is a big number for 1915, but Harry Houdini came and Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell and Henry Ford and Charlie Chaplin and Helen Keller and Maria Montessori and Teddy Roosevelt.

Chris Alden:

So we first imagined, what if Harry Houdini, who was always building contraptions and devices to test his own skill of escaping, what if he instead decided to build a room to test the courage and skill of eight of these brilliant innovators, what would that look like? So that's the background of the Houdini room, is that set up. And then our Roosevelt room, we realized that Teddy Roosevelt was here in 1915, and what was on his mind, which is sort of interesting given what's going on in the world today, is that in 1915 was the second year of the First World War, but America was not in the war and started to have a debate as to whether they should, remain neutral or get actively involved.

Chris Alden:

The Roosevelt escape room sort of deals with those themes, and Roosevelt's desire to try to help the country prepare for war. We created the Edison room to imagine what room would Edison create to try to, as a test, to see who among the fairgoers would've been worthy of the secrets of his success. And that's the setup for the Edison room, which is a much more kinetic and physical and play based room.

Chris Alden:

And then we imagined these secret plans that were found when they broke ground to build the Panama Pacific International Exposition, and those plans were the blueprints for a machine. And these innovators collaborated on building this machine and didn't know really what it was. So they called it The Attraction. And they had a group play in 1915, but that group went into the machine and never came out. So they condemned it and shuttered it for all time, until Palace Games came along and refurbished it and offered it as a fun experience to our guests. So that's the setup for our four rooms.

Charlie Melcher:

Super fun. I've had the pleasure of doing two of them now. One of the things that I was really taken by, not only was there all of this history, but how physically interactive they were, how active and embodied they were. And it's certainly one of those things that we've talked about a number of times on this podcast, how important it is to have people be able to be physically engaged with their stories. And it's one of the reasons why I love escape rooms and have really enjoyed yours. How do you think about that in the design of your escape rooms?

Chris Alden:

There's a lot of programming that goes into our rooms, and we try to make it not feel that way, that you don't feel like you're playing a video game, but there is a lot of video game like development. And one of the things I think that we are one of the pioneers in is that escape rooms used to work that there was a time limit and you played the game and when you reached that time limit, that was it. Womp, womp, womp and you kind of walked out the room and your experience ended. I never liked excising the end of most people's experience. I think a great experience has a beginning, a middle and an end. And so when we try to figure out how do you do that? How do you give people beginning, middle and end when you have a fixed period of time, and not all teams are going to be able to do everything that they need to do to get to the end.

Chris Alden:

So our solution to that is to have an adaptive gameplay where if a team needs a little more help, they can get a little more help. If they're struggling with a particular puzzle or game play, it may be able to adapt. If they are running behind, we may bypass certain aspects of the game so that we know that they'll be able to end in time. So from their point of view, they haven't missed anything. It's still a coherent experience, but they may not play every aspect of the room. So what you get for being a faster team is you get more puzzles and more gameplay, but everyone gets a beginning, middle and an end.

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah. It's quite brilliant the way you do that, because it's invisible for the player, right? You're just in there and all of a sudden you are solving things a little more quickly than you realized, or you're sort of somehow getting some clues that you didn't realize were being fed to you. And all of a sudden, boom, we did it and we're out of this room and we're moving on. I just love that idea that the room is somehow responsive, that this experience is interactive and being adapted to the skillset and the energy level and the ability of the people in the room.

Charlie Melcher:

The original storytellers back in the days of oral storytelling of a bard that was traveling from town to town, that person was responsive, would respond to the crowd in real time to a small group of people. But basically since the adventure of the alphabet, all of our stories have been fixed and on a rail. And now you are helping to create a new kind of gaming that is analog, but with invisible tech. And I just really think again, it's next level. It's incredibly exciting. Where are you thinking about where this kind of responsive room could lead?

Chris Alden:

First of all, in the technology, I view what we do as sort of a video game plus, not a video game minus. In other words, we're doing a lot more than what you'd need to do with a video game, because there's still that core programming, but because of the inputs and the outputs there's a lot more elements that come into play. I should say that while a lot of the adaptiveness is built in the programming, a huge part of what we do is with the people. We have a phenomenal team of game managers. We call them GMs. They will be watching the team. The game will do a lot of the adaptive, but there's no substitute for also having a game manager watching the game and occasionally tweaking the interventions that might happen. Because you really never know, the system cannot always know if the team is slow because they're just taking their time, but they're getting it, or is the team slow because they're struggling.

Chris Alden:

And so part of what we're building is the tools to give the game managers ways of sort of intervening in the game in ways that are natural, that the players won't perceive as an intervention. You can call this the future of storytelling. In a way we're not storytelling. We are trying to have a story experience. And so we're not trying to tell a story as much as how people play a story and feel like they're in a story and give them a sense of agency. And by the way, I think that's one of the great things that puzzles and technologies can do, is give people a sense that they're driving, that they have agency. They're the ones, the action is emanating from them, not something that they're viewing or that's imposed on them.

Charlie Melcher:

We use the word room, right? Escape room. But in reality it's a world. You're building worlds for people to play in. And we've had guests on the podcast and we certainly devoted real time to thinking at FoST about the building out of story worlds. And what I think is happening here is that you're creating a world that is able to be somewhat responsive to the desires and skills of the players, the heroes in this story. It's one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by the work that you do, because you are dealing with this every day, you are literally designing with analog and digital tools a way to let the players control the world.

Chris Alden:

I'm sure a lot of your listeners will be familiar with the hero's journey. This prototype, this archetype that some people say is basically the story, every story just comes down to this hero's journey.

Charlie Melcher:

Joseph Campbell.

Chris Alden:

Yeah, Joseph Campbell. And we were very explicit with the attraction at mapping out the hero's journey. And you go past this threshold from the reality, the known to the unknown, and you find a mentor and you have certain challenges along the way, and then there's an abyss. And then you come back from the abyss and you've learned a lesson, and then you have the journey home. So you map out that whole heroes journey, which is I think the archetype of many, many stories and many of our most beloved stories. If you go back in your mind and play The Attraction, you'll probably start to connect the dots of all the elements of the heroes journey that was in that experience. And it can go back from the Odyssey. It can go from The Divine Comedy and almost every popular movie and book.