This is a blog post from my Masters work which was conducted in 2018-19. It is a re-post from the original site where the blog was held and was only slightly adjusted to the new website. If you are interested in the larger project you can read the thesis here.
Six blogs in and I haven't even justified why the heck I am building an escape room for my MA. A large part of that answer comes out of previous work I did with Ageing + Communication + Technologies (ACT), where we developed an escape room that discussed the issue of elder abuse. Outside of small personal adventure games I had made as a summer camp coordinator, this was my first major game design project. The project taught me a lot about the medium, opened up a range of questions on its potential, and pushed me to its possibilities.
Academic discussion on escape rooms, like the genre, is new. Understood as collaborative puzzle solving games, escape rooms invite players into a narratively rich space where they connect logics and clues to complete a set of challenges. Simply put, take a bunch of people, put them in a room, and don’t let them out unless they solve some puzzles. The experience has been blowing up over the past decade, with rooms constantly popping up in North America and many quickly earning profits.
Their rapid growth, has not been matched (yet) by academic literature. While somewhat connected to nordic LARP, escape rooms, provide a less immersive but more direct relation to material. What I mean by direct, is that rooms can be standalone, not rely on many other players, and don't require the actor buy-in that LARP inscribes.
Game genres almost always get taken up as potential education tools, with escape rooms being no exception. Escape games are already showing to be a promising way to have students apply learned knowledge, and engage with material. However, based on my own experience, we can go further. The environmental potential of escape rooms, alongside the puzzle and adventure focus of its challenges makes it a strong contender to deal with serious issues.
In the previous post I touched on the notion of praxis games, where ideas are enmeshed into games. In this process, praxis games focus on 5 heuristics, 3 of which escape rooms can strongly address: situated praxis, evidence-based rules, and guided discoverability (Wilcox, 2019). Functioning as a physical space that designers can design, like a set for a play, escape rooms are effective analog spaces to situate players around a specificities of an issue or situation. Additionally, the focus on puzzles requires players to gather evidence, and create ideological connections based on the rules of the physical space. Finally, the puzzle path design that pushes players towards a specific final goal (i.e. finding the holy grail), allows designers to guide players towards how, when, and where knowledge is discovered.
The nature of play, alongside the environment, makes escape games effective educational spaces, especially for dealing with larger more complex issues or situations. In my own work, the interwoven narrative and gameplay provides the potential for designers to use metaphors, analogies, and even allegory in the game. Escape rooms all contain a narrative that unlocks as players progress. It abstracts a situation and frames interaction, which alongside puzzle solving can reinforce knowledge, guide players, or present new ideas.
I am exploring the power of allegory and metaphor in the game's narrative to reflect digital systems. Attempting to answer the question of how do we show a digital algorithm in an analog spaces, the use of allegorical, analogous, and metaphorical actions allow conversation beyond the game to connect these ideas. For example, algorithmic filters sort, categorize and then discard data to create user profiles. In a game, these actions can be presented to the players as the process needed to solve a puzzle, drawing an analogy to these system. This can be further supplemented by a narrative that highlights the errors/concerns with these processes.
While part of using the escape room genre was to study the educational value of the genre, I realized that the immersive experience caused players to reflect the game to their own life. This presented a potentially unique format to conduct interviews around. Among my research on digital filter bubbles, echo chambers, and general media habits, Canadian literature is almost entirely uses quantitative methods. While helpful, this creates a huge gap on qualitative Canadian media habits, specifically around how users filter content, and where user trust resides online. Using the escape room as a way to engage players around the issue, and ground the conversational debrief after the game encourages players to connect their personal media experience with the issues discussed in the game. While this is still a hypothesis, I am interested in how this medium can be used to move beyond disseminating knowledge, to include meaningful data collection.
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