A follow-up question to that of how popular exit games are is the issue of how to get players to come back for more, for repeat business may well play a significant part in keeping a site thriving over time. It may be easier to convince someone to play an exit game if they know what one is from having played one already.
Some sites offer more than one different room, which seems likely to be a lucrative move. Perhaps someone who enjoys one room at a site can be convinced that another room at the same site is likely to be of a similarly high quality; there will always be people for whom the novelty of playing an exit game once is sufficient, but there will also always be enthusiasts who are keen to get the joy of an exit game as many times as possible. Many sites say that they change their rooms from time to time, though this represents a considerable investment.
It has also been suggested that it’s difficult to tell much of a story within an hour. It’s tempting to wonder – asking in the context of a theorist, rather than someone with experience in the business – whether it might be possible to run a campaign of connected exit room games, at a single site, telling an extended story within the same universe. If someone enjoys a game, they might well be tempted to go back for the next episode, and the episode after that, and so on. Theoretically, it might even possible to permit the players to affect their ongoing story, with choices they make when playing an early episode having an effect on their experience in later episodes.
One model has people, when they book to play, specifying if they have played any episodes in the series previously, then the room is dressed in a slightly different way according to which part of the story happens next. This requires great communication between the players and the room dresser, for if players miscommunicate their needs then they may end up playing the wrong game (and possibly feeling aggrieved about it, even if it’s their own fault). Another downside is that it would probably be impractical to have different physical attributes of the room for each episode, unless a much bigger physical room is built and not all of it is used in each episode. This seems likely to be needlessly expensive.
Perhaps a workable solution would be to have several story episodes in a connected universe that can be played in any order, or story developments that can be caught up through narrative as well as through gameplay. (It’s easy to imagine a team of four coming for the first episode, then only three of them coming for the second episode, then a slightly different four for the third episode, and so on.) To be fair, this seems to be the approach taken by at least one site already.
It’s a considerable additional level of complication to consider, but one that potentially could multiply a site’s revenue several times without the expense of having to find new players over and over again…
Hint Hunt’s two sites have some small connections, and Clue Quest does have narrative links between the two. They’re all very story-light though. I think, with a one hour time limit, it’d be really tough to do much of a strong narrative – delivering anything through text would be tricky (as not all of the team read everything) and stopping to get story beats means losing out on time that could be spent solving.
There are ways around it though – I wonder if audio could work well, similar to how video games often use ‘audio logs’ that play in the background while you shoot things to give exposition, have something playing while you initially search each room.
A final approach would be to tie the story directly in to the game, so have a murder mystery where, at the end of the hour, you make your guess on who the guilty party is. So some clues are there to point towards other clues, while some just hint at the sequence of events that you need to piece together to ‘win’. I’m hoping to do the Diplomatic Corpse live hunt thing in the next few weeks, which is more of that approach, though again, by giving you 4 hours, rather than 1, it’s easier.
All makes sense, and you may well be right about the time limit making it rather harder to convey a story. It would be interesting to see a room which deliberately dialed the story up and the puzzles or the time limit down, but probably not nearly so commercial, becoming much closer to a theatre or LARP project.
Fingers crossed that you do get to play The Diplomatic Corpse (only running for another two and a half weeks or so, I think!) as I’d love to hear more about it!
Thinking about it, I think a degree of language independence factors in too – the more narrative, the harder to port a room to different countries. And for London, the harder it is for tourists with less of a grasp on English.
I do think Gone Home, the video game, is basically a narrative-led room/house escape. The puzzles are very simple, and you could run it as a live event. Just would be very expensive and not commercially viable.