“i don’t know why, but we call it killing time”
It’s no secret that manipulating a captive audience is *not* something I do for the good of said audience, but rather out of a pure and distilled curiosity I have focused around social dynamics and crowds. Luckily for them though, my tests and projects involve very utilitarian-esque goals, usually aiming for the greatest amount of enrichment in everyone’s collective experience during the time they’re there. It’s selfish selflessness, I suppose. Over time, I’ve also gotten really good at playing into the strengths and skills available to me; between my own expertise accumulated in tech projects and games, pooling some cash together, and the occasional assistance from a friend, there’s quite a bit I’m able to pull off. My (likely last!) annual Christmas party is coming up sooner than later, in which I’m trying to push myself to the edge of my capabilities. With this, there has been a large amount of organizing, planning, and generally mulling over the limits of what’s possible and, given it may be the last time, what will stick with people the longest. I really wanted to throw out a blog post before this all goes through, so here’s a bit of a brain spew on the topic and some tangential mediums to reference for anyone else that’s considered working on similar projects.
A Starting point
As like with most things, I’d wager my beginnings with the topic originate with some video games, namely DS visual novel 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and the blockbuster AAA Call of Duty‘s zombies gamemode. The former is quite straightforward; I’d experienced a small amount of escape room flash games when I was younger, but this game would have to be what hooked me onto escape rooms as a point of entertainment. The latter, however, goes a bit further than that, while remaining thematically similar. For anyone not familiar, CoD:Z is a game type featured in many Call of Duty titles, an arcade styled, round-based horde shooter. Starting out very quietly, the maps released began to reveal that they had a (somewhat) cohesive story that the characters involved were embarking on, but it wasn’t a standard story. Instead, it was hidden throughout the maps, small secrets you could find for pieces of information, eventually culminating in what would become a mainstay for the series; an entirely hidden multi-step quest with very little instruction, only hinted at by a single voice line each time the map was launched. This point is why I feel justified in mentioning CoD:Z and 999 in the same sentence: the developers had just made a standard map into its very own, hidden in plain sight escape room. For quite a while, those working on the game at Treyarch (the company behind development to begin) were able to hit some incredible community moments that I’ve yet to really see echoed in any other game’s lifecycle. Due to the obscurity of many of the steps chosen, each time a map was released, massive community movements would embark on a journey together to find out the next chapter of this secret story that they had the privilege of knowing about, and it’s without a doubt one of the coolest implementations of a story I’ve seen in gaming. It really ticks all of the boxes as far as I can tell; not only was it highly memorable, exacerbated by the fact that anyone participating felt as though they were part of a club due to the ‘secret’ nature of it all, but it also directly encouraged immense socialization by design — despite being digital, the steps being impossibly hidden meant that the community efforts were always going to pop up. The control the developers had over the community was so intense that I’d be hard pressed to fault it for anything outside of sticking the landing in a few places. A true masterclass of immersive entertainment.
What’s a pirate’s favorite letter? (NOT C!)
As a tangent from the point on CoD:Z, I’d be remiss if I didn’t add a sidenote for Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs for short (get it a pirate goes ARRRrgghhhh so their favorite letter is R. or something. do you get it. I suppose they’re more for Yarrrrrrgh’ing huh. whatever.) Realistically, the mechanics around these often would function the same way; a story was told online through a digital medium and hidden messages and puzzles would usually await viewers. The point of an ARG was to establish this aforementioned ‘alternate reality’ in which fictional characters would be affected by the actions of real people through the use of transmedia storytelling. For instance, a character may go missing in the story, prompting viewers to derive their phone number based on the sounds of a phone’s touch-tone frequencies, give them a call, and attempt to pursue a quest of saving them. None of this is real, except for the fact that by being an alternate *reality*, it would tend to blur the lines a bit. Real phone numbers would be used. GPS coordinates to locations in real life were given. Physical cassette tapes were sent to viewers who blindly put their full name and address into a Google form link after weeks of trying to crack the password for the website housing the form (this one’s hyperspecific because I did this 😀 ). Being a story format more than anything, this caught like wildfire in any aspiring indie media creating communities, most prominently hitting the online horror scene. For the most part, it’s hard to say anything that ARGs really did *better* than CoD:Z ever pulled off, but that’s in part due to the fact that ARGs were flooded by so many low effort attempts at niche internet fame — when you don’t have to make an entire game, it’s a lot easier to hop on the bandwagon. Overall, a really nice case study for looking into how transmedia storytelling and immersive entertainment can interweave in the modern era on low budgets. For anyone looking for examples, I’d point toward This House Has People in It by Wham City Comedy for a more surface level exploration, or the Frog Fractions 2 ARG by Twinbeard for an example of how deep some may go.
i only care about this reality
With the tangent based off of CoD out of the way, how’s for one based on 999 now? Escape rooms are a modern concept, first stemming from old internet games, brought into reality for the first time in 2007 over in Tokyo. The first American-based company opened in 2013 (for any wondering, 999 released in 2009), ushering in an era of fad in-person experiences. These experiences involve gathering a group of friends (or acquaintances…) and participating in a timed challenge (commonly an hour) in which the goal is to solve puzzles to escape a room. These rooms always have a loose narrative attached to them and come in quite the number of qualities. Starting out, my fascination with them definitely focused much more on “I’m smart and introverted and thus I like solving puzzles :),” which, while true, is no longer my interest with them. Nowadays, I find it much more pertinent to point out that these experiences are as close as you can get to a Disneyland-like environment for a fraction of the cost and time. It’s lightly taboo to allow oneself to get invested in whimsical experiences, and thus escape rooms act as a bit of a trojan horse to let people have a magical experience without having to come to terms with their own judgments. With that said; some rooms *suck*. I’m very thankful that I had the opportunity to help create a local room near me, in which a large portion of my work was just coordinating and programming the lighting to create a unique experience involving fictional technology. Contrast this with a room I’d gone on a double date to in which we were given UV flashlights that hardly worked, one of their puzzles was almost physically impossible without having enough practice, and you could hear other groups screaming over the walls. When done right, these rooms are our only opportunity for ‘magic’ experiences in scattered communities without needing a trip to a theme park hours away, but when done wrong can feel like a scam given the pricing of these rooms. In spite of this, if you haven’t had a chance to try one, I’d highly recommend giving it a shot if an opportunity arises.
and what if i want a lot more socialization with strangers?
This is the section I find the most intriguing and ripe for exploration; what if it was possible to use these experiences to increase social interaction and raise the relative value of the time spent purely by facilitating an easier time of communication? While I’ve worked on projects similar to the previous instances, this is the genre that I feel I haven’t touched on enough. I’d like to touch on two examples here: murder mysteries and megagames. Murder mysteries, taking the form of a dinner party, show up in a few different forms. A prominent one that I won’t be touching on much here are those in which a production company invites guests to have dinner while a story plays out around them. These experiences do have interaction, as guests are invited to solve the murder in front of them! However, I don’t have enough experience to speak at much length on them. Rather, I’d like to focus on at-home experiences. Often put on through a kit made by a third-party, hosts are encouraged to invite their friends over and run their own ‘murder’. Guests receive roles ahead of time and dress up for their character, with specific lore and information that they’re to remember, finally showing up for a night of dazzling roleplay. This all raises one of the hardest lines to balance — if someone self-identifies as an introvert, how can you expect them to have enough buy in emotionally to have a good night with their friends? Being asked to be someone else is a dual-edged proposal; acting as another personality can feel freeing, but the stress and anxiety of getting into it can kill the mood of even the most socially resilient people. This puts most of the onus on the host, if they’re able to sell the scene enough, the results will be very rewarding. However, if someone feels too anxious before the host has a chance to sell the theme, if someone doesn’t dress up enough, or if a guest doesn’t know their character’s notes well enough, it could ruin the night for everyone. This is the primary reason I’ve always hesitated from running a similar party.
It’s at this point that I bring in megagames, an idea that I’ve only recently become acquainted with. Megagames originate from the wargaming community; think of the boardgame Risk (or, if you know me, Diplomacy !), for instance. Normally, Risk is designed for 2-6 players. Megagames take a similar game concept, but expand it to a player count of dozens. For instance, one of the most popular megagames, Watch the Skies, asks ‘what would happen internationally if aliens showed up?’ In this, 20-40 players split into small teams of various countries, in which each member takes a separate role, such as being a head of state or an international ambassador. Afterwards, teams naturally interact with each other, with the aid of some minigames, to find out the state of the world as time goes on. Compared to a murder mystery in which one needs to prepare with homework, no prior knowledge or prep is required here, yet the benefits of playing a ‘character’ still show up, as you develop your own goals throughout the game that influence your behavior. The biggest drawback of this all is that, well, wargames generally are niche for a reason. The concept of playing out international relations simply isn’t as enticing as a murder to many (and they’d be wrong… but whatever!!). Yet, I find it a proposes intriguing solutions to the issues at hand with murder mysteries. As noted previously, these are still something I’m personally very new to, and thus it’s possible this has been tackled already by someone else. I truly think that something here could become an overnight fad, if not something that sticks around in the general social sphere for a while, it just needs a better coat of paint.
AND HOW ABOUT nO SOCIALIZATION WHATSOEVER?
Without socializing, I find the interest in these immersive events shifts entirely toward something else; giving a viewer a bespoke, long term (positive!) memory. This is why I don’t find myself that interested in murder mysteries put on by a production company, they generally seem a lot lighter with their intents and thus have a less serious mood in my view of them. This is not to say that little to no socialization makes a bad experience, far from it. Rather, immersive theater fills this void. These murder mysteries themselves would surely be considered immersive theater, but some heavy hitters are far more interesting to investigate. Enter Sleep No More. A loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth from New York City, a play would run all across in a warehouse designed to look as if it was a manor for a period of 3 hours per show. Actors would run between floors, duck through secret halls, and would be acting concurrently in various locations. Guests would be forced to pick the action they enjoyed and follow along, acting as a sort of pseudo-director. Despite this, the show was only actually an hour long and would loop thrice over the time in which guests visited, allowing viewers to catch more than one plotline while there. To me, such a premise is genius, making guests not a direct part of the action, but rather forcing them to frame their own stories is so beautifully unique, and yet, I would be worried once again about this nebulous ‘buy-in’ idea for the average person. Sleep No More has this covered. Showing up to a manor in which you’re hardly acknowledged can be intimidating and feel embarrassing as fear of being noticed rises. This is why SNM introduced their key concept: masks. Every guest received a mask to wear during the night. A bit bigger than your average masquerade mask, these are an ingenious addition. Masks help give the viewer a wall from social anxiety, hiding them away from the strangers and allowing them to sink into the narrative, to immerse themselves fully. This is doubly effective in that it also hides *the others* to isolate the actors from the general audience. It’s so simple, and yet I would have never thought of it. It’s such an obvious fix for so many issues the show would have otherwise. To further push how effective SNM was with their decisions, they made these masks even more powerful by introducing one-on-one moments with actors. At times, an actor would pull an audience member aside to a secret room and give them a monologue, sometimes removing their mask. In this instance, the tool that was intended to isolate a viewer was now used to make them feel seen more than ever. It’s incredible. Sleep No More has been closed since January 2025, but its influence will not go unseen in the broader art community, as it’s one of the most unique experiences that have been available to date.
WHERE’S NEXT?
If it’s not evident by now, immersive entertainment is something I care for to a great extent. As I write this, I’m planning a new escape room that’s going to be run for friends and family during Christmas. I’ve got another project started in which I’ve begun recruiting and writing for a Sleep No More-inspired project run within a unique 3 story Victorian-styled house, which I hope I’ll be able to run sometime in 2027. In an era where the internet is becoming increasingly isolating with fake users hitting all-time highs while discourse and arguing remains the king of online discussion, I predict in-person social events are going to become all the more rewarding. We’ve seen this already as various online creators have run gimmick events that have had explosive turnouts. Humans are social creatures. We *want* to interact with each other. This is why I think this space is such an interesting one to keep an eye on, and is something I hope manages to garner more fascinating ideas and creators soon.