Room Escape Artist

No. But come on a little journey with me…

“Thank you for noticing.”

Over the years, I have had a lot of escape room owners thank me for noticing and appreciating details that were incredibly difficult and/ or costly to execute in their games.

The conversation that follows usually goes something like, “Thank you for noticing. Literally no one else has ever said anything, but doing [that thing] took all of my [effort/ money/ sanity.]”

I’ll be honest… it brings me joy to notice things that people worked hard to build. It feels good to know enough to know what’s hard to execute. And that’s kind of the problem.

A Lesson From a Musician

Before escape rooms ate my life (I’m not complaining), I used to play a lot of guitar. These days, my calluses are gone, as is my confidence with the instrument (something that I’d like to change.) But back when I was in grad school and in the early years of my career, I spent a lot of time making music with other people.

To be clear, I was never great… and I am far from a natural. Through hard work and determination, I became what I would describe as “proudly somewhat competent” on the instrument. My knowledge of the guitar and guitar music greatly outpaced my actual ability, but I never cared. I was having fun, and I had zero professional ambitions.

Back when I was playing a lot of guitar, I had a friend and roommate named Josh. Josh was an intensely good musician. He could pick up a guitar, bass, or sit behind a drum kit and effortlessly blend into a band. I loved jamming with him and learning whatever random lessons would spill out of him.

Looking back, he taught me one lesson that I think all creatives should understand:

“The thing you need to understand about performing music on stage to an audience or at a wedding is that essentially no one in most rooms understands what’s actually difficult to play. I could play something that is basically impossible and two people will applaud… or I could bash on the same note over and over again while making guitar player face and the whole room will erupt.”

The thing about highly technical playing by a really skilled musician is that it won’t look difficult. Great players make everything look easy. If a person notices it was hard to do, it’s because they know what they are witnessing.

I think about this all the time because I love doing difficult things.

When To Do Difficult Things

I’m not arguing that people should stop doing things that are difficult to execute when building escape rooms. Rather, I am suggesting that you think strategically about how many difficult things you should build into one game, and how obvious they should be.

The difficult things probably shouldn’t be some random wall or a prop that no one interacts with. They should be big, visible, impactful moments that everyone gets to see. Otherwise, you should be prepared to tolerate that the investment usually goes unappreciated.

A Journey Through Difficult Things

For many years, my review of the Mystery Flavor Oreos from 2017 was far and away the most read post on Room Escape Artist. This piece was written on a whim. It was dripping in snark, and it went viral. And while I was proud that the post performed well, it took almost 3 years before another post finally overtook it. Along the way, I was quietly resentful that other things that meant more to me and required so much more effort fell far short of my silly Oreo review.

And rest assured, I (and the REA Team) have continued to do incredibly difficult things that haven’t gotten as much attention as I wish that they would have received.

Another difficult thing was RECON. After 7 years, we’ve gotten so much better at it, and the feedback on the event has been overwhelmingly positive. I think that RECON Laval 26 was the best executed thing that I have ever been a part of. I could not be prouder of the Team. It was still astoundingly difficult, and I hope that we made it look easy.

While I usually take this time to thank our Patreon community, this time around, I am going to apologize to them… as I was pretty much absent from chat this month on account of the aforementioned convention. And now that the post-con-blues have faded, it feels good to be back.

Special shout out to those who joined this month: Angi Deng, Joey Matsumoto, Eric Nguyen, Vick’s great great great great grandson…Vick Jr, Benjamin Church, Tanya Foster, and David Eiges

To those of you reading who have the means, we hope you’ll consider joining this wonderful group of supporters.

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