Jeroen van Hasselt: Embodied Storytelling in a Real-Life Game

Charlie Melcher:

Jeroen, welcome to the Future of Storytelling podcast. It’s so nice to have you here.

Jeroen van Hasselt:

Well, thank you for inviting me. It’s a pleasure.

Charlie Melcher:

So I had the extraordinary experience of getting to live in the Demise of the Gricers for four hours a few months ago with friends, and it blew my mind. I mean, I have never done an experience like that before. It felt like a completely new form of storytelling. It drew on many different genres, film escape rooms, LARPing. There were many different influences, but it felt completely original. So first congratulations.

Jeroen van Hasselt:

Wow, thank you. Thank you for those compliments and thank you for confirming that we achieved our number one goal. That is to make you forget reality and actually merge you into this world of the Gricers that we created. And you are right—this is a lot of influences from different media industries and I would say the one that’s foremost or the most central to our design philosophy is that of designing a video game, but then in real life, so we have no digital aspect, but we really use the design philosophy of creating a video game mechanic. But then how could we do it in the actual physical world? Years of experience and trying this out and blood, sweat, and tears resulted in the project Demise of the Gricers.

Charlie Melcher:

The first thing was it’s in such a unique location. It’s not in the middle of Amsterdam, it’s not in a big city. It’s actually in a train yard. What’s the name of the town again?

Jeroen van Hasselt:

As. So A-S, As.

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah, As. So we drove to what felt like the middle of nowhere and we literally stayed over so that we could be there and be fresh. It’s not even obvious how you find it originally because it’s just so authentically built into its environment. So tell us, first of all, how it came to be in that place.

Jeroen van Hasselt:

Yes, this is very true actually. As is a very, very small town and I hadn’t even heard of it before we started this project. They actually came to us. They played one of our previous experiences, which was called “I Can Hear You.” And this was set in an abandoned hospital, an actual real hospital. But they played it and they asked us, can you build the same thing here in As? I think we have a cool location and maybe you can build something there. And we said, yeah, we can, but we really like to do something unique. We don’t want to build the same thing again. They described like, yeah, we have this abandoned train shunting yard. It’s not being used for years. Well, I mean that already sounds interesting to me. Like, okay, let’s have a look. Let’s see, check it out. It wasn’t indeed very cool ,when you walked in there—even before you came there, it was even more rough.

Immediately it had this post apocalyptic feel. You had these classical trains all full of graffiti, and it’s set in more of a forest and you have this big tower looming over it. They said we could pick some trains from the outside. We drove a couple of trains inside that we could use as the basis for the set of our game. That’s how we started. And then we thought of, okay, what do we want to build here? Obviously we want to do something with trains, and we came up with three core design pillars for the philosophy and vision for Demise of the Gricers.

First of all, one design pillar is trains. I think that’s obvious. We have trains, we want to use that for everything that we can in our game. The second thing is that we wanted to make a horror game. And I’m super, super enthusiastic about horror, but not per se in the sense of the known classics. I’m not very interested in creating blood or gore or killer clowns. Horror for me is entertainment to experience the emotion of fear, so a primary emotion. But fear consists of a lot of secondary and tertiary emotions such as apprehension, or nervosity, or anxiety, or something like dread. And for this game, we decided—because we already knew we were going to make a big game, a long game—the main focus would be apprehension. So to feel worried and anxious about something potentially negative that could happen to you in the future. So the third pillar was to create a sense of a world. We really wanted to create the feeling that there was always more to explore. You always couldn’t totally grasp how big the area was or how many things that were going on. You would get the main story, the main gist, and that’s perfect. You do want to have these main story beats. But outside of that, there were a lot of optional things or solo moments that only a few players would find, or a hidden propaganda post that would lead to a little secret easter egg or mission. And those things really drove forward how we created the game.

Charlie Melcher:

So first of all, tell us what “gricers” are.

Jeroen van Hasselt:

Yeah, that’s probably important to share at the moment. So a “gricer” is actually a term I found in researching about trains, and it’s a term that originated in the sixties, most likely from the UK. And it was given to train spotters, or people that really liked trains in an almost fanatical kind of way. And it was an interesting time back then because it was also more of a mocking term sometimes. You could even find an actual news article that I found that said, “oh, we should put the gricers in a cage. We should save them because they’re like a dying race.” Because if you remember correctly, in the sixties, actually the popularity of automobiles was on the rise, was getting more mainstream. The popularity of airplanes was on the rise and the train as the most major, dominant transport vehicle was losing terrain. And this is also the time that the station of As also was more and more and more on the decline and becoming less popular. So we actually asked ourselves, what if these gricers, these train fanatics that kind of got more and more separated by the mainstream audience or the mainstream public, and instead of disappearing, they just hid themselves into the more darker corners of society because we are still making a horror game—and from here on out it’s complete fiction. And then you get this extreme cultist culture that you get to explore when you infiltrate this cult.

Charlie Melcher:

So let’s talk about the importance of the physicality for you. I mean, it was one of the things that made it just so powerful starting from the beginning where we got suited up into this one piece, kind of overalls and with pads for our knees and a helmet, and you really felt like you were suiting up into a role so that you could go into this world, which was very important. I mean, all of these pieces had functionality in the game. I mean, I bumped my head a couple of times and was very thankful to have the helmet on, obviously the earpiece, lots of information coming that way. The special technology that accessed things inside the game, inside the world.

I don’t even think of it as a game. You use “game,” I think of it as a story world that I played with several friends. But then of course you enter in and there’s all of this physicality. I mean you are climbing through trains, you are climbing under trains. You are sneaking through this very dark maze of a world and so embodied in that experience. Can you talk about how you thought about the physical nature of the experience?

Jeroen van Hasselt:

Well, first of all, thank you for mentioning it like you’re entering a story world that it’s transcending almost the term of a game. So thank you for that because ideally we want that. We to create your on a real live adventure. You’re almost on your own—you’re the hero of your own movie or you’re the hero of your own main arc story and instead of going abroad, traveling or backpacking, you could also go to this and be on the great adventure in four hours.

Charlie Melcher:

Absolutely. I mean, what I’m so excited about is this is a kind of storytelling that I call living stories that I believe is exactly what people are hungry for today. I think that people are tired of being passive consumers of their media. They want to have an active role and they love video games in part because of the agency that comes with video games and the social component of video games. But you’ve created a real world. I mean, instead of us visiting a quaint Belgian town on vacation with my three friends, we went down this very dark rabbit hole and played or had an adventure in a world that was—I mean, it was scary, but not in that sense that I thought I was going to die. But scary in that sense of I didn’t know what was coming next. The consequences or the stakes felt very high because I was physically in it. I mean, there was no protection of a screen or a medium separating me from the action we were in it. And again, I feel like it was so much more powerful because at times I am running or I am diving under a train to avoid being captured or I am peering through a window hoping not to be seen, but trying to see out. And I guess there’s so much meaning in all of those actions in all of those physical gestures or experiences that supercharged the emotional experience of the story.

Jeroen van Hasselt:

Yes, I agree. Yeah, completely. So here in As, because we had these locomotives, when we were walking through them, it already felt so cool to grip the handles, to climb these 90 degree stairs. How can we integrate this in our experience? How can we make this safe, how we can ensure that people get the right protection to do this safe—but also we felt like we want to do it like this. Like, if we want to include the trains and let people go in there—yeah, unfortunately, it’s going to be tough for people that walk on crutches for example, or are in a wheelchair, like, okay, we have to make the decision, okay, unfortunately this experience, it’s not for those people. Maybe our next will be, but because this was already inherent from the start, we say, okay, now we know we already have a threshold anyway. People should be able to climb some stairs.

Let’s roll with it. Let’s see if we can add more awesome elements to that. Maybe we can add crawling, maybe we can have more climbing. And we went under the trains. I’d never seen the bottom belly of a train before this whole project. I was like, “this is awesome. This is so cool to see. I want to show this to people because it will create another memory for them.” Like, 99% of the people that play a game had never seen the underbelly of a train. Now they have and it’s the first time and when something’s the first time you remember it. So it just makes the experience stronger.

Charlie Melcher:

The other thing that I was so blown away by was how effectively you use lighting design and sound design to be able to change the mood of the whole space. There are times when you just ratchet up the fear level, the anxiety level, I wasn’t even necessarily consciously aware of it. I just could tell that there was something bad happening or the lighting was creating little bit more of anxiety for me because it was harder to see or there was light and dark flashes. Or at times I thought there were maybe 40 or 50 gricers in there because of the audio engineering. So you were just able to manipulate, I guess my emotions through really careful, thoughtful design of sound and lighting.

Jeroen van Hasselt:

Thank you for noticing that. I mean, ultimately that’s what a good design does: you shouldn’t notice it, but it should create the effect. And we change the whole vibe and mood of the whole area depending on what’s happening. Always as a consequence, this really comes back from video game design philosophy. So when you’re playing a video game and you’re into the action, the music ramps up, things get highlighted in game what are important to you. The actors that we have in our game, they control so much of the atmosphere and they are able to change the “moods,” we call it. And the moods are combination of light effects and sound. Like you said, you notice that an event is going on somewhere in the area and you’ll know, ah, that’s not me, but oh, maybe one of my teammates being hunted down at the moment. Oh shit. And you also know very clearly when it’s for you and you’re like, “okay, wait, this is my moment to shine or fail.”

Charlie Melcher:

Jerome, tell me about the use of technology and the original technology that you developed.

Jeroen van Hasselt:

So you do not get only kitted out with safety like helmet, knee pads, overall for your clothes, but we also kit you out with the track sleeve, and this is a device that we custom developed that will be put on your forearm. This device actually provides you with the missions, but also is a handy device of, well, not only what you need to do, but also giving feedback on the moment to moment gameplay. You also get earphones in, so you have an earphone and you can hack, for example, radios for radio communication and you can get messages or audio diaries that will help you further, if you will, are able to do some. Well, another thing is it gives you flashlights so you can see. It’s not a big flashlight, you don’t want to attract too much attention from the gricers, but it’s enough to read when you’re nearby or find the right elements you’re searching for.

And so there has a lot of utility for you. What really is appreciated by a lot of players that when we provide story elements, we provide it in the most accessible way for the players. So you have audio, your voiceover, people can listen to it, but you’re also in an environment where there might be a lot going on. So sometimes if you’re not in a quiet space or where you have been hidden or something, you can also read along on your screen. So we provide full translations, also in Dutch and in English, but you can also re-listen to any recording because the device in the fiction records anything and re-listen to it if it’s not a good time because you’re fleeing from something. You can re-listen when it’s more convenient. And it’s individual as well: any player can individually decide, this is the moment I want to try this or listen to this or do this. Yeah, really creating this accessibility.

Charlie Melcher:

Then this clip-on device where you have to be clipped in order to not have this alarm go off, and the clip is a metal device that clips onto a metal cord.

Jeroen van Hasselt:

So in the game we call this metal course, we call them “tracks,” like railway tracks. If you think about a train—like, what is a train? On abstract level, a train is transport vehicle that brings something from A to B. But the unique thing about a train is that it is limited in its freedom. Like, a car can go anywhere it decides on the ground, an airplane in the air, a boat on the water—but a train is always limited to its tracks. So that feeling of limited movement, we wanted to put onto the players as well. And the only way for the players to safely infiltrate this cult is to attach to the tracks. So you are yourself limited in your movement. You are always attached to a track. Now you can transfer from another track to another track just like trains can transfer. But if you’re out of the tracks or not on a track, you’ll hear a timer.

You’ll hear a countdown in your ears go like “8, 7, 6, 5,” and it immediately extends, you immediately want to clip yourself again back to a track, because if you don’t, an alarm will go off and it will be a local alarm, so you can be sure of it that a gricer will come to investigate what’s going on. I’ll leave it up to your imagination what you need to do then. But this is just the beginning of all these consequences hovering above your head that really creates this feeling of apprehension that we talked about before, that you’re really like: okay, anything can go wrong all the time, but it also keeps the tension going throughout the whole experience, which is nice.

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah, it was a very innovative device and I didn’t realize it was so inspired by railway tracks. I thought it was more just this brilliant device to keep one part of our brains always focused on having to stay clipped in and having to find the next place to clip and being scared that if you couldn’t just wander away, you needed to very quickly find the next physical tether to attach to so that you could maintain a certain level of safety. Sort of like being on a ropes course or mountain climbing or something: you had to have that rope, that attachment, all the time to be safe. It created some part of your focus there, which also added to your anxiety about what was happening everywhere else. Now it’s played by how many people, generally? Like, six people at a time or…?

Jeroen van Hasselt:

Five is usually the max. We do sometimes make exceptions and allow for six, but usually groups are between two and five. So it’s a very, very intimate experience.

Charlie Melcher:

I mean the level of design, technology, staffing for five players at a time… It must be very hard to have any business model that’s sustainable.

Jeroen van Hasselt:

Okay, so we’re lucky that it’s true. You won’t get rich from this. That’s for sure. I mean, I think everybody from the outside could see this, so there’s nothing to hide there. It really works for us as a business card or enough for what we can do because our main income comes from client work and the Demise of the Gricers was just an ultimate dream. We really want to make, what’s the ultimate thing that I will be most enthusiastic about?

Charlie Melcher:

Where do you see this type of storytelling going? And I want to just say both from a creative perspective and for something that’s viable, because again, five guests at a time, every two and a half hours with everything you put in is not a business, it’s a labor of love. But the emotions and the joy and the power of the experience for your guests is so high. Have you thought about how you can find a sweet spot between those two things?

Jeroen van Hasselt:

Yes, yes. We’re continuously thinking of that. So I do have an image in my mind for the future of what we want to do with entered, and obviously I still—Demise of the Gricers is a profitable experience. It’s running, it’s nice. People are doing it. So that’s nice. But I think it’s also, like you said, it’s an intimate, it’s a very premium experience. The price is not what you’d go to go do for playing local cards or going bowling or something. It’s definitely a premium experience and obviously we provide a lot of value for that. Before all this, I did also some research about the what brings us joy. I think a lot of people agree that what brings us joy or makes us happy is not per se the buying of stuff, but always the experience that something gives us or the experience of going to a festival, the experience we do together.

And if you can get from it a memory, then you can get joy from it longer. And if you can get it and share that memory with others, it’ll work like a multiplier. And if it’s a good story or make an impact, it grows even bigger. So then you have these core memories and you can have joy from these for a long time. You think back of a very nice camping experience or a nice shared moment with loved ones. These provide joy forever for the rest of your life. So I want to focus on that. I want to create, ultimately that’s what we want to create these experience that you can share with others that are impactful. By making sure people do something for the first time by making sure that like an adventure, they don’t know the outcome, they don’t know what’s going to happen, that makes it exciting. Then they’re really in their body, physically present. Every heartbeat counts, every breath you take, you’re really present. And I think ultimately the Demise of the Gricers is a very efficient tool and experience to create all of these facets that ultimately make you happy in the end.

Charlie Melcher:

It’s funny to think of a sort of horror conceit as a way to make you happy, but I completely feel it did. And for me, a large part of the joy was yes, part of the sense of presence, the sense of embodiment, the sense of agency that I got to make decisions or feel like I was outsmarting it or solving or succeeding. But also a huge part of it for me was the social. I thought it was beautifully designed so that there were missions that I was doing with my friends, we were breaking into small groups or going away individually and coming back and sharing with each other. You really did design it to feel like we as a group were going through something

Jeroen van Hasselt:

And those moments are important. When you come back and you share, you share what you just experienced, this solo moment you maybe had or this other person’s had or what the couple of you did. And people have a certain idea of what horror is. I’m super enthusiastic to make horror more of a mainstream thing because I feel like it has a stigma on it, the word I think. And why do we want to experience something that makes us frightened? Why do we do it? And the key is that it’s entertainment, so it’s safe. You’re not really going to get an arm chopped off or die or anything like this, but we are going to try to get you out of your comfort zone for a bit. And if you remember and go back and over your whole life, whenever you’ve been out of your comfort zone for a bit, it does something to the brain.

It also does something afterwards and it makes you feel stronger. It makes you feel like you’ve pushed some boundaries. You feel you get more confidence afterwards. What I noticed is when my sister, she hates horror. She’s so scared of it, but she knows she had to play my games because I’m her brother. But what was most interesting is that after she played it, she gets this feeling of victory, this sense of victory. “I did it. I did something that I was scared of. I did something that I thought I could not do, and I conquered it.” And this feeling of conquering lasted for days. And I am not a scientist in this sense, I have not researched anything of this, but my gut feeling is definitely that when you’ve conquered your fear or push your boundary, you do feel more confident afterwards. I think we can all agree on this. I feel people have an intricate desire to experience all kinds of emotions—all emotions actually—to feel alive. If you have an oversaturation of one emotion, you kind of feel gray. You feel maybe like a cog in the machine, or when you’re doing the same thing in and out, you’re stuck in a rut. So we want to do these experiences that get us out of the comfort zone, to get us to feel differently.

Charlie Melcher:

I very much appreciate it. You were the first person to come on the podcast and talk about horror as a genre and its value. Do you explore other genres as well in your storytelling?

Jeroen van Hasselt:

I did before a lot, like more broadly. I’ve definitely narrowed the focus down. We love to do things that are tense or create some form of tension, psychological, and this can also be fun tension, like a football match can be tenseful. Comedy as well, that’s an element we like to add a lot. So in a television show, you know, need to have a much broader kaleidoscope. You can’t, at least at the momentarily, you can’t do a whole game show that’s horror. You need some lighthearted moment, you need comedy, you need—but we do create tense games. So for example, in “Nowhere to Hide,” it’s a game about hide and seek, but in a fun way, but also some tension when, maybe it’s psychological and we love how we can we play with the player’s mind or viewer’s mind that there’s tension maybe who gets eliminated or what is this person going to say or do. These are just small examples. But we do specialize a lot in creating tension. This can be in a horror way, but this can also be in a fun, lighthearted way.

Charlie Melcher:

I will say too that for me, I learned something about myself because I played in a very conservative way. I was trying to be safe and it was very clear to me that I was playing it safe. I was not going to be the one who ran off and got killed first. I was going to make it through.

Jeroen van Hasselt:

That’s great that you learned something about yourself.

Charlie Melcher:

There is no question. I learned something about myself. And again, the story that we tell to each other, my friends and I afterwards, was incredibly bonding. I mean, we felt like we lived through a test, a war—an experience that was so heightened that it’s something that none of us will ever forget. So yes, I thank you for that and I really hope that you will go on and create many more of these. And in the end, I’m most impressed with is just how you invented something that borrows from many other places, but became something uniquely original.

Jeroen van Hasselt:

I hope we inspire others as well. Not just As, but I really hope that other cities want to build something similar in their own flavor and push boundaries as well and create these awesome experiences. It won’t be long actually that we’re opening our next one: we’re reopening “I Can Hear You,” which was first set in the hospital. So a lot of people had not experienced that and we found a new location where we can rebuild it. It’s much more of an intimate story. I think also for us, it’s pushing less boundaries than Demise of the Gricers, but I think this is a super, super focused experience and really, really, really awesome. Obviously we’re doing some new tricks as well because we learned some things, but nice to have a bit of a more…easier scope, let’s put it that way. And also create something that we are already familiar with. That’s nice.

And then we are already looking on for the next project. We found a location this time. the next location is going to be an actual mine for our new project. And also very excited about the future, what other people are going to do. I think it’s everywhere. About a year ago we were approached by the Nike store, for example, and they asked us, can you build an experience for stores? We were super busy then, we couldn’t, but the fact that they approached us to help them do that already tells me—because the stores in the Netherlands, a lot of the smaller cities there, the stores are leaving. They cannot attract enough people to the city. And the only way to attract people is to make it unique, to add an experience to it. So to me, all of this is just so telling that people, like you said as well, are craving experiences, are craving these unique moments that they want to do.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, Jeroen, thank you for being such an innovative, next-generation storyteller and for the great work that you’re doing. And I can’t wait to experience the new pieces. Please keep us up to date on them. And thank you for being part of this podcast and sharing so openly about your craft.

Jeroen van Hasselt:

Thank you very much. And yeah, thank you for the invitation. It was an honor. Also, likewise, I’m very inspired by your vision and what you share about storytelling. So actually this rekindles the fire even more, like I’m excited to keep on pushing. Thank you for recognizing all of this.