Escaping Together: The Design and Evaluation of a Distributed Real-Life Escape Room

Imagine you are abroad for business reasons, and some of your colleagues go to a team-building escape game together, and you cannot participate because you are away.

Today such situations can occur quite often. Researchers Hanieh Shakeri, Samarth Singhal, Rui Pan, Carman Neustaedter and Anthony Tang from Simon Fraser University and Calgary University in Canada explored one of the possible solutions to this problem – a distributed escape room.

Escape games are based on the idea that a player must get out of a closed room solving various puzzles and tasks. One of the main aims of escape games is to learn how to cope as a team, whether it be family, friends or a team of co-workers. Escape room games played as a team also improve team morale and team spirit of a given group. End results include strengthened mutual trust, relationships, and teamwork.

Unlike real-life escape games, where all players are required to be physically present in the room, this escape game differs from the others in the way that it allows you to connect two separate escape rooms with audio/video links and the same or very similar artifacts. As a participant, you don’t even have to be in one place with the other players.

In order to make sure such an escape game can actually function a special prototype of distributed rooms needed to be designed. This pilot escape game, called Escaping, consisted of two rooms, one for each person from the group. The players had 45 minutes to escape after they entered the room.

There were 34 total participants divided into 17 groups of two. According to the questionnaire given to the participant before the study, 20 out of the 34 had played the game at least once before. With the help of video and audio systems, used for collaboration and communication, the participants needed to solve 4 puzzles in order to escape the rooms. Some puzzles required more cooperation and some, in contrast, could be solved individually. All of the teams were able to successfully complete the puzzles since this escape room was simpler and easier to escape than many commercial escape rooms.

The findings and outcomes revealed some of the players preferred the intrigue this experience created for them, with different items across the rooms. Other participants preferred situations where the artifacts were quite similar, and they could share the same expectations and purpose.

Escape rooms are primarily based on mutual collaborations. In order to achieve it, it is necessary to either use similar artifacts that can create such an experience in both of the rooms or use high quality capturing mediums to get a good grasp of everything in the other room. The ability to create identical spaces was not possible, because only basic technologies were used in the study. This might’ve caused some problems with the teamwork aspect when they, for example, couldn’t see all the artifacts of the partner’s room because there was no camera to film the entire space.

In conclusion, the main idea of this study was to determine what factors are necessary in order to design, distributed real-life escape rooms, so players will be able to share the experience with remote partners and enjoy the game just as if they were in the same room. In the future, better technological design should be used in order to allow the remote user to explore the second room and objects in its entirety.

Sources: http://hcitang.org/papers/2017-chiplay2017-distributed-escape-rooms.pdf

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