David Spira and Peih-Gee Law: Escaping into Story

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Hey, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of StoryTelling. Delighted to have you join me for this episode of the FoST Podcast. Today, we’re talking about one of my favorite storytelling meetings to emerge in the past 20 years: escape rooms. Blending puzzles, theater, and cinematic world building, escape rooms transform passive audiences into collaborative participants, inviting them to step inside a story and shape how it unfolds. Joining me are two people who have been at the center of this rapidly evolving world. David Spira is an experienced designer and the co-founder of Room Escape Artists, where he’s built one of the largest communities for escape room creators and fans. He’s joined by Peih-Gee Law, known to many as a fan favorite contestant from Survivor and host of their podcast, Reality Escape Pod. Together, they share how escape rooms have evolved from simple puzzle challenges into powerful, story-driven experiences.

Stay tuned to hear what this playful and collaborative medium might teach us about ourselves and about the future of storytelling. Please join me in welcoming David Spira and Peih-Gee Law to the FoST Podcast. David, Peih-Gee, welcome to the FoST Podcast. It’s such a pleasure to have you here today.

PEIH-GEE LAW:

It is an absolute honor. I’m so excited to chat with you.

DAVID SPIRA:

Long time, first time.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Well, I’m so excited because I love escape rooms. I consider you both to be the OG experts on the subject. So to start, let me just ask, give me your sense of where escape rooms originated. How old is this medium?

DAVID SPIRA:

So you can go and pin this down to a few different places. I mean, there are all of the video game influences, the adventure games of the 80s, the point-and-click games of the 90s and 2000s. There are three different spots that I think you can call the parents of escape rooms. The first is Five Wits, which opened up in the Northeastern US, circa 2004, and they were making sort of Disney-esque proto escape rooms. They were sort of like if escape rooms were invented by Disney. Then you have Scrap, which opened in Kyoto, Japan in 2009. And that is where you have the first company calling themselves escape rooms. They were making ballroom games made for lots of people to play at the same time, each at their table, and then they would interact with stuff in the environment around them.

PEIH-GEE LAW:

Those were very heavily pen and paper puzzle style games.

DAVID SPIRA:

For sure. And then you have ParaPark in Budapest, which created what is frequently viewed as the common design of what escape rooms became for the next few years. And then on top of that, escape rooms are sort of this magpie medium. They steal from everything around them, from video games, from immersive theater, from VR, you name it, there is an escape room creator out there who is stolen from it and probably very successfully.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

And what’s amazing, I think, for many people is that this is really only a medium that’s about 20 years old. I remember my first escape room was one of those sort of classic ones where there was a clock, there was an hour, we were racing against the clock, there was chaos going on in the room, and we were all trying to survive and get out. Talk about how the form has evolved from there.

PEIH-GEE LAW:

Well, I think back in the day, they used to be much more puzzle focused. A lot of them had their roots in puzzle hunts. And it was really around the challenge of, are you smart enough to escape this trap that I’ve devised? Back in the day, you probably would’ve played some rooms that only allowed three hints. There was probably a leaderboard in the lobby letting you know, oh, this room has a 20% success rate and the fastest times available.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

You were going to fail, most likely.

DAVID SPIRA:

It wasn’t uncommon in the real early days to find games that had two or 3% escape rates, which we used to, and still do refer to those types of games as inescapable rooms with a margin for error.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Right. A new name for the field, in-escape rooms — inescapable rooms.

DAVID SPIRA:

But where it has branched off is every single thing that you would take for granted in the early days. It’s 60-minute clock, three hints, a whole bunch of puzzles. All of that stuff has proven flexible. There isn’t a single thing that you cannot remove from this or change in a profound way. So yeah, there are escape rooms that are outdoors. There are escape rooms that are in massive spaces that could take two, three, four hours to play. You pick a vector of change, there is an escape room that has done it.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

One of my favorite parts of its evolution is the addition to more storytelling, to being more actively in a world and in a narrative. Do you think that escape rooms are becoming playable stories?

DAVID SPIRA:

For sure.

PEIH-GEE LAW:

A lot of the really high end escape rooms are focusing on the cinematic experience. So they have actors involved. There is incredible production design. A lot of them have custom soundtracks. You know, you ever walkthrough life and you want to hear the swelling music in the background. So we’re getting a lot of this production value in these escape rooms. And then a lot of them are making their puzzles, I would say even not so much puzzles, but tasks. They’re more task-based. It’s not so much like figuring out a puzzle, but you have to find a tool that you can use to open this thing or plug in the light bulb to turn the lights on. So these feel like real life tasks that you might be having to do to get out of a situation and you truly feel like the hero in a story.

DAVID SPIRA:

The tasks are a good glue that grounds things, that makes it rooted in your lived-in experience as a human being. I had hypothesized at the start of escape room so that I would one day play an escape room that made me cry. I thought it would take a lot longer than it did. The first one that I experienced was in 2017. It was The Man From Beyond by Strange Bird Immersive, and it moved me to my core. The core of that game is you’re going to a Houdini seance. You’re going to visit with a medium, you’re going to try and communicate with Houdini. And it opens up theatrically, and then it blossoms into a 60-minute escape room that is beautifully designed, and then it closes with a theatrical performance. And it just melted my heart. And that was the first time I saw that, but it was not the last.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I couldn’t agree more. And I think that the fact that there are rich worlds, high production values, strong narratives or elements of strong narrative, and all of those sort of cinematic elements, if you want to talk about emotion, music, dramatic lighting, all those things have gotten so much more sophisticated. I think, in fact, a lot of people tried an escape room early on and then thought, “Oh, that was too stressful,” or, “I’m not good at those kind of puzzles, and therefore it’s not for me.” And they don’t realize how far the field has come to the point where they would love them now.

DAVID SPIRA:

You are speaking to the fundamental problem that I have spent the last few years trying to combat, which is that in the early days of escape rooms, I spent a lot of time answering the question, “What is an escape room?” These days, I very rarely ever get asked what is an escape room. If I do, the person is incredibly elderly.

PEIH-GEE LAW:

And there’s still misconceptions too, because a lot of times people come up to me and they said, “Oh my gosh, I can never do an escape room because I don’t like getting locked in somewhere.” And I’m like, “You’re not locked in. Most escape rooms, especially here in the US, you are not locked in in any room. A lot of them, if you need to leave to use the bathroom, you can leave at any time.” So there have been a lot of accommodations made for the customer that I don’t think was necessarily there before, but now it’s really customizable and they’re a lot more accessible than they used to be.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

This idea that there is a lot more support in the play, like the game masters there. I think one of the things that the designers of escape rooms realized was that high percentage of failure wasn’t a great marketing technique. If everyone walks out angry or feeling depressed or lost, that’s not how you get people to come back. And so I’ve really noticed just how sophisticated so many game designers have become in terms of how to provide success, how to even — sometimes you don’t realize that you’re being given hints or that certain things are getting unlocked.

PEIH-GEE LAW:

Yeah. But a lot of creators nowadays, their ego isn’t bound in, have I created something that you can’t beat? It’s the other way around. They realize that players want the full story. So a lot of times they have adaptive difficulties. So you may not even notice that the game is being changed a little bit to suit the level of your group and meet you where you’re at, or they’re really good at hinting you or kind of walking you through so that you naturally start to look in this corner. So people have been doing really cool things with lighting. If one corner of the room is much brighter and the rest is dark, you automatically kind of know where to focus your attention, so —

DAVID SPIRA:

The moth to the flame.

PEIH-GEE LAW:

Yeah. So there’s been a lot of advancements in just how they clue these rooms to advance you into the next stage. Most creators have spent so much time working on the story and making an incredible ending. And the other side of that coin is even if you don’t finish it, a lot of creators have also written a really cool fail state. Sometimes the fail state may be even cooler than if you win. So you still get a complete story no matter if you “won” the game. And so those have been some trends lately that I’ve been really appreciating.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

So one of the reasons that I’m so interested in escape rooms is I think they have worked out or in the process of solving a lot of the challenges that are necessary for all kinds of storytellers who are creating immersive experience. For example, not having a fixed linear narrative that has no opportunity for input from the participant, being able to make it somewhat responsive, the room might respond to your level of sophistication as a player, being able to give hints, for example, or more complicated challenges if you’re particularly strong at it or easier ones. And then of course, the whole social component that escape rooms very often now are designed to require a kind of communication, teamwork, collaboration amongst the participants. You can’t play alone, you can’t win if you don’t collaborate. So I just think there’s so much being incubated and solved in this broad genre of escape rooms that storytellers in general need to pay attention to.

DAVID SPIRA:

I fully agree with you. I will also add that I think escape rooms are solving a lot of the fundamental business problems that so much of the immersive world runs into, where you have a lot of immersive — particularly in immersive theater, you have a lot of money and effort being put into a singular production that may run for three nights and then never get heard from again, but it took a dozen people, a dozen months to make it. And that is a tough way to run a business. Escape rooms have done a very good job of kind of bringing a brick and mortar experience into existence and allowing companies to perpetuate themselves through a durable product.

PEIH-GEE LAW:

One of the other things that I like about escape rooms is that when I discover the plot for myself, it allows me to internalize your story. If somebody’s just kind of spouting exposition at you, it’s hard to process it sometimes. It’s just like when you’re studying, if you write out what you’re trying to remember, you’ll remember it more. Your hand was involved.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

It’s an embodied learning. You are actually co-creating it and you’re doing it in a physical way. I mean, I remember I did a tour of escape rooms in Belgium and the Netherlands for my birthday with some friends and —

PEIH-GEE LAW:

One of the best places to play escape rooms.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Some of the greats. We were there for The Dome, we were there for the Sherlocked Rooms in Amsterdam. We just had a great time. And a few things that I would say, one, that when there’s an ecosystem of escape room designers, they kind of challenge each other and the whole thing gets better.

DAVID SPIRA:

Oh yeah. I liken it to pre-internet music scenes where you used to, before the internet, kind of homogenized mass media, you used to have little pockets in the world, the Pacific Northwest, you’d have grunge, you’d have the Asbury Park scene here in New Jersey near where I live. You would have these different pockets where there are bands playing with similar ideas and kind of pushing each other either through friendly rivalry or maybe some acrimony, but still pushing each other to make something great and to improve your music, improve your musicianship, improve your stage presence. That is the kind of thing that’s still happening in escape rooms. Escape rooms are hyper-regional. And so there are spots around the world where there are incredible games going on and those spots tend to have a vibe that is unique to there.

PEIH-GEE LAW:

Regional flavors. It’s one of my favorite things is sampling the regional flavors. But also like David said, a lot of that is because escape rooms aren’t like traveling. You can’t tour an escape room, not really. So a lot of the creators are only able to play the escape rooms that are around them locally. So that’s what they know. And so that’s what they tend to build on. Those are some of the traditions they tend to incorporate — oh, that room gives out candy at the end of its games. And then every game in a 10 mile radius gives out candy after its games just because one company did it first. It’s really fun to travel and pick up on all of the different flavors of the region.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Now I heard that actually in China, certainly pre-pandemic, that the escape room market had gotten bigger than the movie theater market. There were like more dollars being generated from people going to escape rooms than to going to movie theaters. Is that true?

DAVID SPIRA:

The Chinese escape room scene is substantial. It has been split a little bit with the Jubenshah scene there as well.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Explain what that is for people who …

PEIH-GEE LAW:

So Jubenshah is the hot new trend in China. They are scripted murder mysteries. So it is a cross between role play and a murder mystery game. Usually for a smaller group, it is role playing. So you take on the role of different kind of players, different actors, I guess, in a play. And a lot of times you are trying to figure out one of you is the murderer and we all have to sit and figure out who it is. I like it because it is a LARPing, but I am given a script. So I don’t have to come up with my own character on the fly or even my background story. That’s all given to you, but you can kind of take on the persona. The other things I do enjoy about this is that there’s always some dirty laundry that has to be aired.

Everybody has a dirty little secret, and so part of the fun of these is figuring that out. So anyhow, that has become a really huge trend in China.

DAVID SPIRA:

Some of them can get real tawdry.

PEIH-GEE LAW:

Yes. Yeah.

DAVID SPIRA:

But to answer your original question, Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu have booming escape room scenes, as I understand it, each with their own regional flavor as well, and pushing some really serious boundaries in terms of what they will ask players to do. I’ve heard some wild stories. Sometimes makeup too. It’s a whole production when you go to play at some of the really popular games, particularly in Beijing and Shanghai.

PEIH-GEE LAW:

Oh, and a lot of times the games are still not that accessible to Western players. There’s very few games that are playable in English. There does tend to be a lot of reading in those games as well. Friends of ours who have gone and played have had to bring along their own translator. And what they have told us that even hiring, they had a hired translator and they found that they ended up actually mostly relying on their friend who was also a native Mandarin speaker because their friend had played escape rooms. So they knew what were the important parts to translate. If you just have a translator that has never played in escape rooms, a lot of times they don’t really know where to focus you.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I remember once doing an escape room in San Francisco where you literally had to all hold hands and touch panels on different sides of the room to create an electric current that went through you. If there weren’t at least four of you in the room, you weren’t long enough to hit both sides of the room, but that was just an example of having to physically connect to be able to solve. In many cases, you see very quickly people breaking into different skill sets, somebody playing certain kind of leadership role. I just wonder if you can talk a little bit about the social components and what people are learning from the experience of playing escape rooms.

DAVID SPIRA:

Escape rooms and playing escape rooms with other people has made me a much better leader, a much better follower, a much better partner. And I very firmly believe that adults lose a lot of their will and ability to play. And also the way that they play gets warped, especially I think what I’ll call an American perspective on play, which is play to win. There’s no concept of play for the experience baked into American culture, which is like fundamental to things like Nordic LARP. I really think that play for collaboration, play for the experience, play to see everybody shine — there are lots of different ways to play. And I think that the more people embrace that and focus less on the winning or losing, or definitely not on trying to be the smartest person in the room, which is what, in my opinion, the worst way to play an escape room is to go in there saying, “I’m going to solve more puzzles. I am going to be more valuable. I am going to be smarter. I’m going to prove to my friends and family that I am the dominant one.” As soon as you are going in with anything that resembles that mindset, maybe you’re going to have a good time, but you’re definitely going to ruin the time for everyone else. And the other thing is, if you go in with that mindset and you don’t play well, you’re making a fool of yourself.

PEIH-GEE LAW:

We call those puzzle hogs. David actually has a whole philosophy around how to be a good team player in escape rooms. And this is another thing that I have learned from David. It’s the best tip he ever gave me for how to be a good roommate in an escape room is if you think something cool is about to happen, you’ve almost solved the puzzle, you’re about to turn, hit the last button, whatever it is, you should call out to the rest of your friends and say, “Hey everybody, I think something cool might happen. Stop what you’re doing. Just come over here really quickly, take a look.” And then you press the thing and everybody gets to see the cool thing that happened. And that has really made a huge difference in my satisfaction rate playing and also other people playing with me.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Any other insights, David, that you would share for how to be a good player?

DAVID SPIRA:

The team wins and loses together. No one wins or loses more than anyone else. Don’t snipe or bicker with your friends, your partner. Save that stuff for outside of the room if that’s something you want to be participating in. I wouldn’t recommend it in general, but to each their own.

PEIH-GEE LAW:

Oh, I have one. The proper response when somebody wants to double check your work is “thank you.”

DAVID SPIRA:

Yep. Double checking is polite. Never get upset with someone for double checking where you’ve already searched or double checking a solution that everyone’s confident in. Let someone else put it into the lock. Save your critiques, positive or negative for the end of the experience. You’re not going to be in there that long, no matter what. If you hate it, shut up. You can talk about it later. And if you love it, cool. Stay in the moment. Don’t spend the whole experience thinking about how much you love it or talking to people. Oh, that’s really cool. I wonder how they did that. If you’re having a wonderful time, stay in the moment. And if you’re having a bad time, there’s a decent chance someone else in the room is having the time of their life. Let them have their moment, let them enjoy it. And then afterwards you can talk about what you didn’t like.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Words of wisdom. So let’s talk a little bit about the finances. And this is — as a business model — most of these run six, eight, 10 people at a time, sort of a small number. Obviously there are some that do bigger scale. They tend to run for an hour or maybe longer. They can’t charge thousands of dollars to play. So how does this work economically that makes it sustainable?

DAVID SPIRA:

A bunch of different things. First is you need to have a decent location. A decent location is either easily accessible to lots of people or the right space for you to build what you want to be building. There’s two different schools of thought. There’s two different ways you can go about it. You often find your chains and franchises near city centers. You often find your kind of epic, large-scale escape rooms and what we affectionately refer to as escape room districts, which is usually light industrial zoning. So the location matters for what you want to build and who you want to attract. The number of games that you have matters a great deal because your cost of acquisition for your customers goes down with each subsequent game you can sell to them, especially if you’re making good games. And pipeline your games. If you’re building something spectacular, I highly, highly recommend factoring in pipelining.

PEIH-GEE LAW:

Pipelining is basically when the team does each room in a linear system. So after you’ve kind of solved everything in that one room, you have progressed into the next room. And then behind you, there is a staff member who’s coming along and resetting the room. And so might be — you’ve just played A, you’ve gone through B. Well, while you’re in room B, somebody is resetting room A, you are now playing room C. A new group has started in room A. Usually there’s like a one room buffer in between, but this way they’re able to fit at least two or three more groups into a time slot than they normally would if it’s not pipeline.

DAVID SPIRA:

Yeah. Most escape rooms make most of their money between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon. And so you need to be able to maximize your throughput at the times where people actually want to play escape rooms.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Talk about some of the trends. There’s some consolidation happening a little bit from the mom and pops to some bigger groups.

DAVID SPIRA:

The largest amount of new companies opening in the escape room space or new facilities opening are coming from chains and franchises. That is where the most proliferation is happening right now. There’s a lot of money behind these companies. We’re also seeing a lot of regional chains that are forming, very successful mom and pop companies that are buying up other escape room companies that may have been failing or struggling and creating these little regional chains. Sometimes they get rebranded and it’s clear that they are a chain. Sometimes they keep the old brandings and you have these invisible chains that are proliferating in different parts of the United States, and there’s a ton of them. And the only way to know them is to have enough insider information to piece it all together. The other trend that we’re seeing is just that the companies that are making incredibly strong, powerful, story-driven games, they are thriving.

They are selling tickets extremely easily. Escape room tourism is growing as a thing. People travel to do it. It’s funny because it’s one of those things that people are like, “Why would I travel to play escape rooms? I have escape rooms at home.” When you travel to destination cities and play true world-class games, they’re showing you something that is truly unique to that area. People are like, oh, I only want to travel to have a cultural experience. You’re having a cultural experience. This is unique to that region and to these artists and creators who are making this stuff. It’s magical.

PEIH-GEE LAW:

And people travel to see Broadway shows. They travel to London to see some special musicals or shows, museums. David, I’m going to plug you again. Room escape artist does escape room tours. So they take people to locations and they plan all the escape rooms for you. So they already pan pick the ones that you should be experiencing. And so that’s kind of a really fun way to experience this. If you’re listening to this, and this sounds like your idea of a good time and you don’t have anyone else to go play these rooms with, that’s what their tours are for.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

So David, where are some of the best places in the world? Where have you done some of your favorite tours?

DAVID SPIRA:

So in terms of tour destinations, we’ve done a New York tour. We have done Montreal three times. We’ve done Orlando, what will be two times shortly. We did a New Jersey tour. We have done San Francisco a couple times, Albuquerque a couple of times, and we also did the Netherlands last year. So we’re constantly adding new places to the roster. There’s some really cool stuff in Spain, but just be mindful. It’s extremely physical in Spain, really physical. You’re going to be happy and comfortable doing a lot of climbing and crawling — sometimes an uncomfortable situation.

PEIH-GEE LAW:

I got to say, I got to give a plug for my hometown. We have a lot of really incredible escape rooms in Los Angeles. [SPIRA^For sure.] They may not be at the scale of some of these big European games, but they are very … I think we have a lot of really creative games here.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

So Peih-Gee, you’re best known for having been on Survivor and making it to the top five. And there’s an example of being in a story, in a game, having to both navigate that gameplay of that structure and be able to sort of participate, if you will, as an actor in that experience. I’m wondering, how did that influence your thinking about escape rooms and just the sort of changing nature of participation from passive to active?

PEIH-GEE LAW:

Sure. I mean, Survivor‘s a LARP. It’s funny because I always say that and I can see the light bulb go off over people’s heads because they don’t think of it that way. I guess because you are watching it on television, whereas I’m actually doing it. So it’s like, as I call it, the world’s best immersive game. It’s definitely a game. But here’s the thing, does it have to be set on a deserted island? Probably not. You put it in a house and now it’s Big Brother. But having it set in the environment that it is in changes how you approach relationships and it changes how you feel about things. And so when you’re put in that mindset, having an unusual environment around you, having a costume or dressed in the rags, you’re physically hungry, like going through all those things, you’re able to step out of yourself a little bit. And that does help with like, “Oh, I’m playing a game. I’m not in the real world.” And you start to really embody that character.

You have to feel a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit unsure to be open to receiving a new experience because new experiences by default are always a little bit risky. You don’t know if it’s going to be good or bad. And so with something like Survivor, we definitely experience that a hundred fold, but that’s the joy of escape rooms, immersive experiences in general. You get a taste of walking on the wild side a little bit. Again, I think with these immersive experiences, sometimes you have to be put in those unusual situations to know how you’re going to respond. And so those are the moments that I’m constantly reaching for. I’m constantly looking for those moments when I’m in these immersive experiences, whether they’re escape rooms or theater. It’s just kind of testing yourself and seeing how you respond in some really unusual situations.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I really do believe that one of the key lessons of escape rooms, that there’s a kind of story design that can be created that really get us to learn to work together and to enjoy the idea of storying together, of playing together, of being connected. And our world’s hungry for these kinds of playing stories. And I also want to just, again, commend you for the great work that you do with your community and your podcast and your newsletter. And thank you for that work, David and Peih-Gee. And let’s go. What are we going to do escape rooms together? I want to come on the tours.

DAVID SPIRA:

Let’s do it, Charlie. We’ll figure it out. I would love to play some games with you.

PEIH-GEE LAW:

Yeah. Hit us up anytime. And for anyone else out there who has listened to this episode and you’re like, let’s go, let’s go play some escape rooms, Room Escape Artist has regional guides on their website. So if you want to know what are the best escape rooms, the best games to be playing, either in your city or a city that you’ll be traveling to, you guys should make sure to check that out so you don’t waste your hard earned dollars on a lesser room.

DAVID SPIRA:

Don’t play bad games. We can help you.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Once again, I’m Charlie Melcher, and this has been the Future of StoryTelling Podcast. My thanks again to David Spira and Peih-Gee Law for joining me today. If you enjoyed this episode, please check out my new book entitled The Future of Storytelling: How Immersive Experiences Are Transforming Our World. It features nearly 50 groundbreaking immersive experiences and celebrates the companies and people who’ve created them. It also has a very unique interactive dust jacket with 12 different covers that you can personalize and choose the one that best suits you. It’s available in stores and online wherever books are sold. The FoST Podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong and story on.