S7E11 - Everything Immersive: Noah Nelson of No Proscenium

[MUSIC] This episode is brought to you by Morty Buzzshot, COGS by Clockwork Dog, Recon, and Patreon supporters like you. COGS by Clockwork Dog is an easy to use a software hardware platform for running interactive events, including escape rooms and other immersive experiences. Their plug-and-play hardware seamlessly integrates with their software, so you can create a show with lighting and sound cues without having to write a single line of code. Map all kinds of inputs to outputs by building up simple logic steps, which determine what you want to happen and when. COGS 5 is now available. There's new and improved functionality, including remote connectivity, ZIGB connections to power smart bulbs, buttons, and switches. There's an app that turns any smartphone into your own media master. There's MIDI support to connect keyboards and instruments, as well as relay support. There is also Buzzshot integration, so you can pull the player's information directly into the game. Get the COGS starter set for only $130, plus free shipping to the USA. This bundle is usually valued at $257. You can learn more and purchase your starter set at COGS.Show. Use code "Repod and Checkout" that's R-E-P-O-D. Link and details in the show notes. Welcome to the Reality Escape Pod, your lifeline when you need to get away from the real world. I'm David Spira alongside my co-host, PG-Law. Together, we're exploring immersive gaming from all angles and we'll be joined by guests who really know their stuff. This season, we are shining a spotlight on Southern California in celebration of our convention Recon, which will be in Universal City, California on August 18th and 19th, 2024. Dickets are on sale now at realityescapecon.com. And today's guest is the founder and publisher of No Persinium, Noa Nelson. For the past decade, Noa has been covering the immersive space, sharing his perspective on everything immersive. Welcome, Noa. Hey, David. Hey, PG. Noa, did you know that fun fact? David and I actually met because of No Pro. I did. I did. I knew Anthony Robinson from Survivor and he knew I loved escape rooms and David loved Survivor, so David ended up interviewing me and Anthony about the convergence of these two things. And in a way, it felt like the pilot episode for this podcast because the conversation we had just floats so organically. Anthony, I'll go way back. Anthony was roommates with one of my best friends from the Bay Area who took our vampire larp and did a sister larp to it and been friends ever since. We've known each other for a long time and have talked at length about so many aspects of our respective publications, but I don't think that I have ever asked you the origin story of No Persinium. Where did all of this come from? How did that not happen? Oh my god. I've been to the tale. I know you love an origin story. Yeah, I have a theater degree and I also have been a journalist since I was 16. And that really comes down to my freshman year of high school where there was this teacher named Bobby Weineple. I had him for two classes, journalism and theater. Great name, by the way. Yes. And Bobby was a really talented actor and a really talented teacher and he happened to be my teacher for both journalism and theater. And that sort of defined my path. That's how much high school can define a human being. I worked for and out fit call of the radio for a very long time and when I came down to Southern California, I wound up running the local office after a series of misadventures by everyone else in that office in real rapid time, over the course of one summer, after having been at youth radio for like a decade. So it wasn't like a shock like it wasn't the new kid in town at all. And we had this project called Turnstile looking at where the convergence of entertainment and digital media was going at the time. And as part of that, I started covering the trans media stuff that was happening. So all the big movie ARGs that had just happened in like 2007 and sort of everyone thinking like, what's the next step? What's going to happen after this? And all that same time was right around when Sleep No More was kicking off in New York City. The first time I saw Sleep No More, I actually wasn't bold over. I was odd by the scale of it. But also I was going to it with a DIY, Prodissorial Eye. And I went through that piece and was like, we can't do this. We don't have a six story warehouse. We don't have brilliant fabricators. We don't have brilliant choreographers. And also the kind of way that show functions. If you don't follow the critical path or don't know the mechanics of that show, you can find yourself wandering empty halls for 45 minutes because you zigged when you should have zagged. And that was my first experience. But then I went to the event she fell like the next night. And for the first five minutes, I thought, oh no, I'm in someone's college thesis project. This is a disaster. But then there was just a little moment, this tiny little moment where you get thrown out by the red queen into the hallway. And then the white queen came by and just asked, would you like some tea? And then got this absolutely amazing Mad Tea Party sequence. That was interactive and beautifully choreographed and just had all of the kinds of elements that were at sleep no more, but just at a smaller scale. Plus a level of interactivity between the performers and the audience that only happens at sleep no more in the one on ones. But basically that show was all one on ones. And it's a scene so for a very long time. But anyway, I come out of then she fell and my mind is on fire. And I walk back through Williamsburg and just the entire time just thinking, my god, we've got to make this work or like, who's making this work? Someone's got to be making this work in Los Angeles. So what do we got to do to like build an audience for this work? And there wasn't. And I missed a show called Invisible Cities, which was this opera that took place using like broadcast technology and headphones in a union station here in Los Angeles, which is like the big famous train station. And I missed that show. Like it was like literally a few weeks after this trip to New York in 2013. And I pulled out God, it's my witness. I'll never miss a number of such show again, which became a curse. And that does actually sound like a bit of a fowsteen bargain you made there. Yeah, it really is. And then it was literally Christmas break that year. Just trying to find Google bull names that kind of made sense for something and taking this very small mailing list we had of this dinner party of these really connected folks and just said to everyone, all right, hey, you know, whenever I find something and I just put it to our little list, yeah, we're just gonna use MailChimp now. Now everybody tell two friends. And so the newsletter started and then from the newsletter, the idea of like, well, how can we get more spotlight on stuff? And the low hanging fruit was writing reviews, right? And that's the literal beginning and then just each step of the way. We'll do a podcast podcast came up because I was like, I've been in public radio since I was 16, 17 years old. This is a busman's holiday for me. On the subject of public radio, back in 2015, before we knew each other, you did an early segment on escape rooms for NPR. Oh, the earliest. My function at the time, you three, it was a third party producer for NPR, but it had done a lot of stuff. And most of what they did was like, hey, we'll get teenagers telling stories about their lives to adults. And that have been true since I started as a teenager there in the 90s. I was in the first class. The job that I had then, because that point I was in my 30s was kind of a version of the same thing of like young people telling stories to adults. My job my entire life has been to try to explain the future or the near future to the NPR audience. But yeah, we did that piece. And at the time, there were very few rooms in LA. There were very few rooms in the states, right? I mean, what was it? 2014. So the story is maize rooms and the basement because like the basement it was already in existence and fully formed in an original form. But yeah, that story was toggling maize room folks talking with Kaden up at the basement, which I hadn't played at that point. I observed people I got to just be embedded with this group of friends who I did not know who played. I think it was the castle room at maize rooms. That was my second escape room. Oh wow. Yeah. And I was like, this isn't interesting, right? This is interesting. And I thought it was of a piece of everything else that was happening at the time because you had this very performance forward avant garde dance theater forward work happening in New York in the form of seep no more and then she fell. You had this weird ARG stuff that had been going on for first ARG was in 2001, but there are this real cluster of it in 2007. And so all this stuff felt like it was of a piece with itself. You know, this stuff wasn't happening at a breakneck pace. But there was like, you know, a two, three, four year cycle between waves of this stuff. There was definitely a couple of years between scrap opening and that next wave with Escape the Room and Puzzle Break, emerging onto the scene. And that was the point where we jumped in when we thought that there were, oh, they're just a handful of different escape room companies around here we can cover this. This is not going to become a full-time second job for us at all. This is just gonna be a chill hobby. And over the course of just a few months, that was when that explosive growth in escape rooms happened. And for us, the funny thing was when you had written this piece for NPR, Room Escape artists shared it. I shared it, but it wasn't until years later, after we had become friends that I realized that you had even made that segment. I just remembered that NPR put out a segment about escape rooms. We weren't sources on it, and then it was still good, which was a weird, rare thing at the time. For the most part, when pieces went out about escape rooms and we hadn't been sighted, it was way off the mark. We were just excited that NPR did a good job. Nice work there, buddy. - Well, and it was always hard to get this forward thinking in the moment. The future is now stuff on there. I have very strong memories of walking through the barn at NPR West and hearing my editor, oh, got it, right? My editor there at West, talking to one of the people back East as they were editing a piece about Halo, specifically Halo 4. And hearing them say, yes, first person shooter, it's a game where you shoot people from a first person perspective. And I just wanted to like drive my head into a wall because there is a type of thinking that happens in particularly high level national media, where there is an inclination to start debating, what does is mean? Something that should be obvious on the face. And when you get into the mindset, like it makes a little sense, like hey, not everyone's gonna get this. You can't just throw jargon in front of people. It's very easy, particularly in geek media, particularly in nerd circles for us to get very comfortable with our jargon and even use that jargon as shibbolus to keep everybody else away, right? - So that brings me to my next question, which is the word immersive, which I'm sure when you first started, signify that something was probably alternative in Indian underground and now it's grown into this buzzword. So how do you feel that term has changed over the past 10 years? Like what did it mean back then and what does it mean now? - I think it actually hasn't changed as much as one might think. There's two aspects to the I word. And particularly when something becomes a buzzword, I learned this in the Transmedia days, right? And Transmedia was never going to become a household word. - What do you mean when you say Transmedia? - Ha ha ha, see, there you go. I remember being at the meeting at the Burbank Airport, Marriott, where people in the room in Skype, like the leading practitioners of Transmedia, were all trying to settle, what do we mean when we say Transmedia? And I had come with a little note saying, I think we can settle this because Trans is from the Latin, meaning beyond media, meaning a medium, beyond a medium. If it's going beyond a single medium, congratulations. We've got Transmedia. Now it might not be good, it might not be many, many platforms, but you're having to use more than one medium in order to tell out the story. It's beyond a medium. When most people say immersive, they're thinking of it. It's immersive is a real word, right? And the definition at websters, providing, involving, or characterized by deep absorption or immersion in something, parenthetical such as an activity or real or artificial environment, right? That's literally what the adjective immersive means, right? And the buzzword part of it that's so sticky for everybody is that sense of absorption. So when someone's selling it with this is an immersive experience, they're often meaning you're going to be really into it. At one point, Samsung was selling an immersive toilet. (laughing) Those are called bidets. Yeah, it's true, get a bidet. But on the full side, like girls mean falling into the toilet. So pretty sure something was slightly lost in the translation there. When a lay person, when a non-designer says immersive, and what they're looking for, what the audience is looking for is something that they're going to really lose themselves in, which is why it is an effective marketing term. You're promising that people are gonna lose themselves or find themselves in something that is all encompassing. But what we're concerned about over at NOPRO and over at the immersive experience institute, and what I'm concerned about is in teaching this to students is, well, how do we get that immersive effect? How do we get people to be really lost in this stuff? So our definition, our short definition for immersive is, that which meaningfully puts the audience on the same level as the primary action in a story/environment, usually physically and/or narratively. For example, the audience is part of the world in a immersive piece, even if it is mainly as a physical obstacle. That's the absolute heart of it. There's more that builds out from there, but that is the heart of the piece. You're on the same level. Now, one I wanna point out, one of the seeds of this definition was actually from this simple line that was in a piece about a Japanese theme park horror thing that was on some anime news website that I still can't dig up. They were talking about the audiences on the same plane as the performers. And I was like, that's a really concise way of thinking of this, right? But we're not just talking about performers. In terms of what we think of as all the things that fit into the immersive tent, it can be a lot more than just physical things. But you gotta put the audience at the same level as the action. And if they're at the same level as the action, then we're immersive. We might not be really immersive. We might not be deeply immersive. We might not be good immersive. Let's say I don't know, I rented a warehouse in Glasgow. And maybe got some banners printed up with some vaguely chocolate factory-like things and put some actors and some green wigs. And had AI write a script. This'll be fine. This'll be great. It'll be fine. And then I let people wander around and talk to the characters and take photos in front of the background, you know, lose themselves in a realm of pure imagination. Let's say that I did that. Would that be immersive? Technically, yeah. Would it be bad? Oh, incredibly bad if you put minimal effort in. That train wreck is like that meme of what my family thinks that I do. Yeah. That's what they see. This is why sometimes these buzzwords, it's just anybody can slap that on something and call it immersive. Where do we draw the line? Technically, it is immersive. The thing is that the existence of a bad form of something does not invalidate the good work that's being done there. Right. Restaurant does not make a Michelin star restaurant or the concept of it somehow suck. Yeah. The fact that many bad movies exist does not make cinema broken. Yeah. The beginning of all this, right? 10 years ago when we were starting, I was a lot more nervous about a bad show turning off people from the work. You might lose specific people, but there's enough work right now that I really don't feel like we're in danger of that. What we're more in danger of is everything being mid, right? Everything being minimal to mid-effort. And then people getting bored with the form that way. I think that is more true in immersive theater than I think it is in escape rooms. Insofar as escape rooms are everywhere and there are markets where the few escape room companies that emerged were all so bad that the market basically atrophied and died. There are regions where escape rooms are sort of non-existent or a shell that will eventually wither away. I think with immersive theater at least where it is at the moment and has been for a long time of being very centrally focused on a handful of cities worldwide and a lot of work existing in those cities. I think that's very true in those places. There's more immersive work going on in places than we know about. It's like the same thing is try to track all the community theater that's happening in the United States. I double-dog dairy. I designed musical theater internationals website so they actually have that data for the most part. And yet there's always people running around playing with the form. That's the thing that I get excited about, right? It's like me going to sleep no more that first time and going like, oh wow, we can't afford this. We need so much money to do this. You bust out the Punctsharkin Cyclopedia, which tells stories about them in their post-college days. And I'm reading up on some of the experiments they did. And they are identical to the stuff that, you know, Shining Collective did at the Hollywood French. They're literally playing with similar things. And you get to this point where more people can make this stuff and then more brilliant work can come together. One of the precursors to escape rooms are all of the digital escape rooms. Crimson room in the room and just all of the different flash games of that early era. And that leads to scrap wanting. to do something physical. So you get to this point where there's enough creativity going on, people say, what if we try it this way? And there are all these related disciplines in immersive that can learn from each other. LARP has been going on live action role playing, right? LARP has been going on in one form or another since the late 70s. There's a human impulse to do these things and to blend them. Yeah, and if the practitioners can learn from each other, one you can solve the problems, the design challenges, that the different disciplines are facing off against, you can solve some of the business problems that everyone finds, but you can also start to create nuance and depth to the work and the mechanics. It's one of the things that made Star Wars Gothic Star Cruiser so interesting was how many different strands they blended in there and the one thing they didn't blend in was the business plan, but also they faced the headwinds of the global pandemic and all the other things. Like when concrete was poured for that particular experience, the world was literally different than when the experience got to open. We're taking a moment to thank our sponsor, Morty. Morty is a free app for discovering, planning, tracking and reviewing escape rooms, haunts and other immersive social outings, and Morty is now available for all to use on its fantastic website experience, iPhone app, and its new Android app available in the Google Play Store now. I believe in Morty so much that I have a stake in it as an advisor. We asked past guests, owner of Stash House in Los Angeles, friend of the show, and Morty advisor Tommy Houghton, what he felt about Morty. Here's what he had to say. Morty's a shortcut, a cheat code if you will, to turning new customers into enthusiasts. We used to just hand out flyers after a game, but now we point people to Morty. It's like, why give them a fish when you can teach them how to become fishermen. You can learn more at Morty.app/repod. That's R-E-P-O-D to sign up and get a special badge for our listeners. Like me, you've had the chance to experience Galactic Star cruiser before it closed. We're going to dedicate, I suspect, the good portion of the bonus show to Galactic Star cruiser. But now that you have had a few months distance from your experience, I am curious what was the moment that truly stuck with you? Oh, I mean, that one's easy. 45 minutes past muster, which was muster was sort of where the narrative kicked off and the characters really started playing. We were in the climate simulator, which is the patio out back. Such a good dad. Yeah, it's a great gag. And a Sandra, who at first glance might look like he's another passenger who just paid the upcharge to get the alien face makeup, who's this guy's like busking because he wants to make it big as a musician. And he comes in, his job is to go around and get people to make up songs with him. And we did that, and then I improvised one in Hutties and improvised a song and an alien language that sounds like it belongs. Yeah. Nice. For me, the thing that stuck with me after all this time more than anything was just how much I enjoyed the jumps to hyperspace. Anytime a jump happened and I wasn't by a window, I was a little bit sad. But yeah, just watching like those stars elongate and then streak that moment brought to life for me just felt like a childhood dream come true. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of Kant Miss experiences, we are going to be bringing a ton of people to Southern California for Recon, the reality escape convention this coming August. Now, are there any specific experiences that you hope guess will attend? People who are new to Southern California, who haven't experienced anything here, what are some of the Kant Miss immersive experiences here? So for escape room fans, almost certainly already know things like the nest. They probably know that the ladder is finally open over at Hatch. You could do those in the same location. It's a bit of a trek, but the Ministry of Peculiarities is an absolute Kant Miss thing. That's a real wonderful hybrid of the absolute base of it is escape gaming. And then there is this icing of performance that happens inside of it. The hard thing with Los Angeles is that you never know what the immersive theater companies are going to be doing because there's been no sit-down show. But scratch another layer off and something that I think anyone who's interested in this form absolutely has to do when they're in LA is hit up the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. It is this weird kind of curio spot with its own mythology that presents itself as a museum. Jurassic is completely misnomer. It doesn't really have anything to do with dinosaurs. It's more esoteric and strange. And I don't want to reveal too much, but it's the kind of place that you go through and then you come out thinking, wait a second, what if I just go through? And it is often remarked by a lot of Imagineers as a truly inspiring space. And on the escape game side, like, you know, if you can get down to Anaheim and go to Crossroads, there's the Weeping Witch and the Hex Room and all that sort of stuff. Those are ones there. No, I mentioned in a whole bunch of deaths from this season. Yeah, the curation is pretty much straight on, right? The hard thing is theater is an ephemeral form, right? I would say if you see that the Speakeasy Society or JFI or E3W productions or spy brunch, if you see that some of these companies are doing something, then you might want to go check that out. I'll plug everything immersive. So we have both the Facebook group and a website. And if you go into everything immersive.com and you plug in the city, you will see what's there. You can probably start plugging in in June to see what's going to be happening in August in Los Angeles, because that's when people start announcing stuff. And if you have a ticket to recon, we will be sending out newsletters, letting people know what they should be playing. But this is certainly an incredible list to start with. And I have not been to the Museum of Jurassic Technologies. Oh, PG, have you been? No, I haven't. This was news to me. PG, next time I come to tower, we're going to have to go. Oh, this could be excuse to go back. Apparently they're plotting something new. Buzzshot is a scaperum software, powering business growth, player marketing, and improving the customer experience. They offer an assortment of pre and post game features, including robust waiver management, branded team photos, and streamlined review management for Yelp, TripAdvisor, Google reviews, and Morty. Buzzshot now also has integration with our other repot sponsors, Morty and Cogs. Trusted by thousands of escape rooms worldwide, Buzzshot provides industry leading tools and amazing customer support. When you book a Buzzshot demo, you won't get a sales pitch. The team at Buzzshot genuinely wants to understand your business, so they can tailor their software to match your unique needs. When asked about Buzzshot, Dawson McKay of Escape Alaska told us this, "Responsive and helpful support is above and beyond anything I've experienced with any other service." Streamline your marketing and grow your escape room business. Repot listeners get an extended free trial, and 20% off your first three months with no setup fees or hidden charges. Visit Buzzshot.com/repod. That's our EpoD to learn more. So this next question is probably my most anticipated one, and I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on it. But what do you think escape room owners can learn from attending more immersive theater, and then conversely, what do you think immersive theater creators can learn from escape rooms? I think the number one thing escape room owners can learn and to look for is the power of a performer. And what a well-trained performer brings to creating the reality of the experience, the way in which they can step off script and create more of a reality for the people who they are interacting with. And that is often not about lore, but about connection. And the human connection in the moment. The particular is the key to the universal is one of the trusums of the performing arts. And knowing that you can leave people thinking that the world is much bigger than it is when you have a good performer who knows how to do that. I strongly agree with that. And I'll add, I think that that difference between connection and leaning too hard on lore is something that a lot of people could learn. In the bonus, we should go at length on lore. We'll talk more about that in the bonus show for sure. On the reverse side of it, right? I think particularly not just on the ones that do good with scenic, but when there's a lot of thoughtful narrative design in the space, I think that when immersive theater people come to an escape game, that looking at how environment can tell story, and how that also creates a real grounding in reality. And when you get these little tiny details that again suggests something a lot bigger, and that often it's being done not in a fully scrappy way like things are really professionalized, but it's still surprising to see how much a little bit of ingenuity, how much prop and set deck goes a long way to that specificity of character and world, and that you can bring a lot of that into an immersive theater piece. Really great escape games could almost work as installation art pieces without any interactive bits at all, and you can still drive a ton of story from that. And so have that eye in your head when you're going through an escape game. Yeah, I think you're right about that as well. One of the recurring conversations that we have had over the years is about the various forms of immersive snake oil. What are the current forms of it that are earning your eye? Oh boy. Well, you might think that I'd be really upset with this whole willy-wunker situation or whatever the Glasgow thing is. For those who are listening months from now and have forgotten about it, it became international news when the cops were called on a bootleg willy-wunker immersive experience in Glasgow that made children cry, but has delighted the internet for about three or four days now as we're recording this and actually inspired what people are saying might be this year's hot couples Halloween costume. It's truly the bodie-mick boat face of terrible immersives. It's really incredible and I've been delighted from the start. My first comment on everyone posting was like, why is everyone complaining? They were invited into a world of pure imagination. But at the heart of that story is the abuse of AI tools in order to create the scripts, the art, the marketing materials for it. Look, as a Star Wars fan, I don't think it's a surprise for me to be saying that AI usage is really some dark side of the force stuff right now. Machine learning tools have created a lot of amazing things in video games and they can be very powerful like the Photoshop filters and tools and editing tools that are being powered by this stuff. They're cutting down time and you put it in the hands of a talented artist and you wind up doing some great stuff. This idea that someone who just turns to a computer and just says, "Give me a Willy Wonka experience" and then suddenly the computer hallucinates it. No, I have to correct you. The correct way that you approach the AI in this particular set of circumstances is, "I want Willy Wonka experience now." No. Give it to me now, chat daddy. Yeah, so you go to chat daddy and demand "You're Willy Wonka experience now." And it dreams forth true madness. I saw this script. The performers were asked to create true magic. They were like the perform opens his hand and a light magically floats to the ceiling. It helps you to bubble and the moonlight goes up into the ceiling and then the stage director was and the audience is awed and it's like, "Oh my god." And so this is the thing we're up against. That's the thing that I worry the most about that has my eye or is just the stamping out of human creativity. These are mediums. These are means of communication. These are ways that we transmit meaning between people. A book transmits meaning between the author and the reader and it suspends the ideas in time in the form of paper. A performance is a lot more a femur. Something like an escape game is somewhere between those two things because sooner or later it'll fall apart. I'll be no longer viable as a business. But when they're good, there is some level of meaning being transmitted between. It's literally why when we revise the definition of immersive not that long ago, I wanted to put the word meaningful in it to remind people that they are sharing their communicating. So no matter what the actual practice is, if someone's doing something just to stamp something out, I'm not interested in it and that'll clog things up. There's gotta be a spark of creativity. There's gotta be something that someone is trying to communicate. It can just be very sign felting in like, "Have you ever noticed that this goes that way?" And so long as you're trying to transmit something, then you and I are good. I mean, I like the ideas. At least you're trying to communicate. If you're getting a machine to do it, not so great. I think the other thing that kind of gets my eye or is as someone who's like an indie media producer, as someone who's been in the trenches for 10 years this way and who comes from public media before then, I worry about the folks who are dropping in now, showing up, now the party's really going and that it's established itself and that it's proven out, "Oh, this is something that can survive a pandemic." Right? There's something really here. I worry about an irrational hype cycle coming through and doing to this scene as a creative scene and as an industry, what the cycles of NFTs and the cycle we're in an AI right now and the cycle that was around, say, magically for augmented reality. If no one remembers what magically was, magically promised augmented reality glasses that were going to make perfect holograms that we would see just by dawning a little pass-through vision kit. It had this huge amount of hype. It got all this money from Google. They hired Weta, Peter Jackson's effects company to do all this work for them. They hired away brilliant science fiction writers, folks like Neil Stevenson, people who had invented ARGs, the whole nine yards, and brought them all down to Florida to work on this thing. It sucked a lot of the capital's attention and the oxygen out of the VR market just as VR was starting to be a thing and kind of set that back by a few years. This constant drive to build up a big hype cycle. NFTs and crypto drove a bunch of money into stuff that was meaningless. I think of a kind of money that was spent on a single board eight. And if I had handed that money over to three escape promoters and three immersive theater artists, what we would have been able to get out of that, it would have been way more valuable on a cultural level than a single board eight. I very much agree with you. I'm not so worried about this particular type of investor mucking up the immersive arts that much. These are the non-digital ones because they don't scale well enough. The types of people who want to dump money into things and own a space, they do it because they think that they can own the way that it scales and make money in perpetuity and that rarely works out the way they plan for it either. Yeah, but also it bends a market. They can definitely bend a market. They can definitely get creators to start to over commit and over dream and build bigger than they will ever end up being able to see through because the money will eventually go away. The next market bust, there are definitely risks associated with them. I don't see them owning the space in the way that if VR takes off, that is a space that will be owned by a few companies. Yeah, I'm not worried about this in terms of owning the space at all. If we live in a world where we have four or five ten-pole immersive companies, that's the way it winds up being, but there's an ecosystem going around it, so be it. But what I'm more concerned is the boom and bust type thing, and that I've watched some companies go and spin their wheels doing corporate work or behind the scenes corporate work and then just kind of disappear because they got to make money. But if that's the only game in town, if that's the only place that the money is flowing to, that's where things get dicey. Yeah, and that is a more risky place to exist than owning your production and owning your venue and owning your IP. You end up in a much riskier place when so much of what you are is owned by other people. That's coming from someone who spent most of his career as a consulting designer of things. And I can tell you with the deepest of sincerity, anything that I have ever been paid to make by someone else, no matter how good it was, no matter how much effort I put in, no matter how skilled the team was, no matter what was put into it. None of that stuff exists anymore. It's all gone. And that brings me to my final bit, which is as I've been going through for my class and like digging up archive material to explain what was this thing? What was this thing that inspired this person to make this thing that we all know? And finding that even on large legacy media archives, you can't find Lynn Gardner's review of Robert Wilson's HG installation in 1993 that inspired the aesthetics of punch drunk and you can't find the Mike Figgis film documentary that was made out of it, that's out of print. You can't even find an article from the Atlantic City's blog that's talking about the night heron, which was this wild thing they did in a water tower in New York because the Atlantic City's blog doesn't exist anymore. You go onto the creators website and they've still throwing a link out to a blog that doesn't exist. There's a good chance that by the time this comes out, Vice may have just decided to pull the plug on vice.com's archives. We're losing generations worth of material and evidence of this stuff happen at all, which means that everyone's just going to have to reinvent the wheel. And so it makes me happy that there's folks like Laura Hall out there who's trying to archive more. - I can tell you are also speaking to Laura Hall. - Yeah. And starting to compile this stuff and preserve it. And I think the thing that actually gets my eye up is like a lot of people I think just take this information for granted, they take the existence of what you're doing, what I'm doing for granted and don't understand how fragile it is and how it would be even more fragile if either of us one day said like, you know what? I'm going to court some media conglomerate or somebody's dumping a much money into the space and we're going to sell the brand off and put it over here and then they can go and run with it. And then we could just start setting our clocks to the day that the archives were gone, that a generation was gone. - It's true. I think that so much of the escape room and the immersive space in general is so ephemeral. Even the games that last for a long time are not permanent. None of this stuff is permanent. - And that's okay. - Yeah, and it's okay. But it is important that we document this stuff and I think that is more than anything what I think of when I look at the archive, the thousands of posts and reviews that we have on Rhymascape artists that you have on No Pro, these are in many cases some of, if not the only evidence that a lot of these experiences ever existed. - Yeah. - And that is in some ways an honor and also in some ways a little bit frightening. - Oh, it's terrible. - Yeah. - Scary. - I mean, that's part of the reason why we started doing spoilers clubs because there's not that much documentation about some of these amazing escape rooms out there because everyone's trying to avoid walkthroughs, spoilers, things like that. And so we now have a show where we can have the creators actually be able to talk about their creations using the spoilers, assuming that the audience has played it in doing a full recap and walkthrough. And I just wanted a place to be able to talk about the games that I liked, but for David, a large part of why he started doing it is to have that on the historical record. - Yeah, I'll tell you as someone who is trying to teach college students who haven't gotten to do a lot of this stuff, every time I find a script or a well reported piece that contemporaneous to something that happened in like the 80s or the 70s, I'm so grateful because oftentimes you'll see that those folks are struggling with the exact same issues that the people who are making it now. And you see that and you go like, wow, there was a show, Tamaro was in Los Angeles for like nine years and the 80s into the early 90s. And then there wasn't a big piece of immersive theater in the United States for like another 15 years. And you sit there and think that's an entire lost generation. We could have had people playing in this form. Of course, that means I also just as usual, I forgot about Tony and Tina's wedding. And it's like, yeah, man, Tony and Tina's wedding sure. - This is one of the things that I have been thinking about recently and it's something to them thinking about for future seasons is there are older creators in this space whose stories are not well documented and who have been doing work in adjacent immersive spaces or puzzle spaces for decades. And if we don't sit down and document their story, we're never gonna have it. And one of the major regrets that I have, and I have no delusions that like I was likely to ever land this interview, but I really regret that there isn't a good interview with Stephen Sondheim on all of these different immersive experiences he was making for his friends. - Yeah. - He was doing some really crazy stuff from the glimpses I've been given. - And let's think about that, right? About how that relates to all the stuff that we're into and that this audience has gone through. The literal most creative minds, the cultural movers and shakers in core creative industries and performing arts, they love this stuff. Sondheim was making this stuff on the side of her friends. Imagine a world where the market was mature enough that actual Sondheim experience could have been done for everybody. You look back and you see like Stephen Spielberg, his entire life and career has been trying to figure out how do we do interactive stuff, how do we do games? From the failure of the ET video game through game works, through being deeply involved in like universal theme parks, to the AI, ARG, ARGs exist because of AI and that was because Kathleen Kennedy pushed Warner Brothers really hard to do this kooky idea to the point where Kathleen Kennedy herself did functionally dead drops for the ARG at press conferences for the movie. - And it was same with the Nolan's over the WISO series, ARG. - Yeah. - They had to put it on the line to make that happen. - Yeah. But like, you know, you stop and you think about this and it's like, look, Stephen Sondheim is arguably one of the most important creators in the history of theater. I think you can make an argument that he might be second to Shakespeare. And this guy loved this stuff and he was fairly prolific in what he made and there is no evidence of any of it anywhere. - Now you've bummed me out, David. - So when you look at these random companies that are doing wonderful things and aren't Stephen Sondheim if his work isn't being documented, someone's got to step up and do it. And so that's I think what I love about what we are collectively doing but also why I'm so thankful to the people who are supporting both of us on Patreon and the sponsors that support our events and our shows and all of this different stuff because it is hard and it is expensive and no one else is going to do the work. - Yeah, and more to the point, no one is as committed to keeping that work in the public domain because it can be tempting for folks to just like, yeah, we're gonna own that full stack, right? And it's like, wolf. - The temptations to go and throw things behind a paywall are real. The amount of times where I've heard people come and tell me like, hey, you know what? - A Rumascape artist could make a lot more money if you just put a lot more of your content behind a paywall. That would be a good way to go and make more money. And we are constantly trying to fight this urge to make all of this stuff disappear because so much of what we're trying to do is elevate it and shine a spotlight on it and you can't do it when everything is locked behind a paywall. - Let's talk about the future. You recently started teaching immersive arts at the college level and I know you're interacting with these students who are really excited about this space and what hope has this instilled in you for the future of the immersive space? - Oh, I have irrational exuberance about all this stuff. It was hard a few months ago when there was this turning of the seasons and it was like, the burnt city is closing. Oh, see if the more is closing and then it was like, oh, well, are we closing? Star cruiser shutting down, right? Which again, bonus episode everybody. It was getting hard to be like the professional like, I'm the optimist in the space 'cause I have to be. But being there with the students and seeing that there's an actual level of the form, right? It's not about like, I wanna make a lot of money, right? It's not, this isn't about get rich quick schemes. They wanna make ARGs. They're obsessed with the idea of telling stories this way. They wanna figure out how to make a good immersive experience, right? It's not cynical at all. They believe in the power of the form. And that's what takes all of this from being a fad and becoming a medium in industry is that the love of the form is such that people pursue it at any cost. This is how they want to express themselves. Immersive in particular is interesting because there's always some sliver of agency given over to the audience. Always some. It's not the center of what immersive is, but there's always a tiny little sliver at the very least in the requirement, right? It's the eye of toad in the spell. God, have it there. And in doing so, every time you're making something immersive, you're creating a communications field between the audience and the makers or their intermediary. There's a way of looking at an escape room, for instance, as being a conversation between the puzzle maker and the players. With the game master in the middle, trying to help that flow of communication go. I've created a story. I want you to understand the logic behind this room. You're going to use your powers of deduction to figure out the logic of this. If not necessarily the narrative, then the meaning behind what's happening here. And usually out of necessity, there's someone sitting in the middle playing interpreter. And that relationship maps on to something like a piece of immersive theater with like, well, the performers are playing that role. Or a maps on to a role playing game. Again, the game master is playing that role between, say, like a printed adventure or whatever their notes are, but it's living, it's dynamic and no two instances of it will ever be the same. You run three groups, people through Curse of Strod, you're going to get three radically different role playing experiences. You run three different groups of people through sleep no more. They're going to have radically different experiences. You run three different groups of people through weeping which. And even though the room has its logic, and there's the performance moments that happen, the variable of how the players are reacting, the dynamics going on with them creates a unique experience each time. And that's the thing that I think drives people to want to make this stuff because of the emerging behavior of the players and how it is a unique moment in time. That ephemeralness of these immersive experiences is baked into the DNA because that's the way life is. It is ephemeral. What comes next for you Noah? A lot of work, a lot of suffering. I'm suffering. Lots of Yoda impressions. There's a lot of behind the scenes where I could go on right now, right? We do an event called the next stage and we're talking with our venue and trying luck dates and yada yada yada. There's actually a lot of the next few months is just incredibly boring admin stuff that absolutely positively has to get done to lay the foundation for what the next 10 years of this project is going to look like. Preach. Yeah. On the fun side. And who knows, by the time this drops, there are things we're working on right now. Like in April, we're going to have the immersive invitational. This is probably going to come out after April. So that will have been done. That's a format that we do that's produced by our friends after our theater company and the immersive experience institute is a partner in this thing. And we love it. It is a 72 hour film fest style immersive festival folks come in on a Friday. They get their space and assignments and the challenge for the week. And then by Sunday morning, they have made work and are previewing it to people. And very excitingly, the piece that won the 2019 edition of this is a piece called casting by Corinne Wicks and it was just playing at Jim Nopiti in New York. So it's toward and it's also been put up at like Denver Film Festival. So in a perfect world, we'd be doing one of these every other month in a different city around the United States and just Johnny Apple seating this stuff. Because in the macro sense, what comes next is helping more artists make work and not just getting discovered and for making the work, but like really seeding what the next generation of creators will be or what the next generation of projects will be. That's what I want to do most to all. I love that. I wish that for you. What is the best way for people to follow your work or connect with you? You type in the words no prosinium, P-R-O-S-C-E-N-I-U-M into anything other than Twitter. You will find us and you can follow us because we are ubiquitous in that way out of necessity. We do have a patreon which gets access to our discord which is you know, increasingly vibrant as the days and weeks go on. I tell you that wonky thing really. You draw a lot of engagement. So people go out there and make some more disasters so we can all make fun of them. There are no bad clicks, but they can do that and no prosinium.com. What you'll find there is there are regular, whether it's enough work, there's weekly review roundups which are capsule reviews of whatever the latest material is across both theater and VR and installation art. And once in a while we do actually also review an escape game if there's like a real heavy narrative or performance aspect to it and it's in one of the areas that we service. Something like doors of divergence or crossroads. But I think the thing, and I definitely want to give this plug in, the thing that I'm proudest of is we make a call sheet which is this jobs listing that we do that cuts across the different disciplines and is global. Usually stuff that like Catherine U has forwarded me because Catherine Superdiligent about that. She used to be the executive editor of No Pro and like my partner all this stuff and these days she works for Meta so she can't be active but can't stop her from emailing me, job listings to put out to people and making that happen for folks. And if you want to get a real sense of how strong the field is, go look at what jobs are being offered up. Particularly if you go back to the February one of this year. Wow, it was popping. That sounds like a fantastic resource. And not to mention you have a podcast also. So anybody who's listening to this medium, I assume you're in a podcast. Definitely go check out Noah's podcast. He covers immersive theater, immersive as they say immersive everything. So go check out the podcast. I really enjoy the new format. I think you did a really great job with that. Thanks. Noah my friend, it's been a long time. I have truly enjoyed talking with you today but more than anything I've enjoyed talking with you over the last, I don't know, eight years or so that we've known each other. You have certainly saved me and Lisa from making some disastrous decisions and we were setting up our Patreon back in the day. And it has always been so lovely to have a friend who understands the publishing and reviewing side of this world who I can talk to and brainstorm with and commiserate with. It has been an absolute pleasure. Here's to another 10 years. Thank you David. It's always great to be able to talk with you and it's always great to see you PG. And yeah, here's to another 10 years for both of us. The reality escape pod is produced by Teresa Piazza with support by Lisa Spira, Richard Byrne, Catherine Ewan, Tommy Houghton, where edited by Steve Ewing of Stand Inside Media, Music by Ryan Elder, logo by Jeanine Proct and all of this is brought to you by roomescapeartist.com, your home for well researched, rational and reasonably humorous, escape room, and immersive gaming content and events. If we haven't made it clear enough this season, the reality escape convention, Recon is happening August 18th and 19th, 2024. Get your tickets and hope to see you at Recon. You can learn more at realityescapecon.com, details on the show notes. Believe it or not, we are 10 years into roomescapeartist. It took a long time for us to decide that we were going to go and open up a Patreon, but we eventually got there because some loyal readers at the time were really insistent. Over the years, we have added a lot of different things to that Patreon. People at the $5 level get access to the bonus show for this podcast. Folks at the $15 level get the incredible Spoilers Club. But more than anything, they get to support all of the things that we're doing here. And it's hard to tell you just how much that means to PG&I, to the entire team at Room Escape Artist. We put in so much time, so much love and so much energy into everything that we are doing here to support the escape room and immersive gaming communities, to push them to be safer and more fun, to be smarter and more efficient, to try and pull new players in. We're working on all of these things all the time. And the money and support that we get from our Patreon community is the fuel that keeps all of that moving forward. If you're a part of that, thank you so much. And if you have been considering becoming a part of it, give it a shot. We really truly will appreciate it. Thanks. You can learn more about all of this at patreon.com/roomescapeartist. Big thank you to our highest level Patreon supporters, Karen, Dawnward, Panic Room, Piyush from SEO Orb, Olivier Escape, Escaparium, Byron Del Monaco, Breakout Games, Keystone Escape Games, Derek Tam, Paula Swan and Rex Miller. Thank you for your ongoing support and thank you to all of our patrons at all levels. You've made it to the end of this podcast. You must be an amazing, resilient and very loyal person. If you're still feeling that delightful afterglow, why don't you head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you review your podcasts and leave us a five-star review. It really means a lot and it helps us to spread the word. Maze rooms was, it was fairly hilarious because it was the early days. It was like low-rent as heck and they were importing their games from Russia. At one point I remember doing a test of jungle game, not Jumanji, it was jungle game. It might still be there. Sorry if it's still there. I think this game is long gone. But it was like it was me, Alon Lee of Exploding Kittens fame and Scott Gillis and someone else with us, I can't remember who else was with us. And it was early in the run, like re-release and like the power breaker broke and we got actually trapped in the secondary room because they had peddental the wiring themselves. So when the power failed in the room, the magnetic locked didn't pop open. The magnet was just sealed, we couldn't get out of the secondary room. We called them with our cell phones. They weren't taking cell phones at the time, thank goodness. But yeah, we actually got trapped, actually trapped in a escape room for a hot minute. So it was like early early days when like things were very questionable and practices, you would not allow it all anymore. [MUSIC]