Why My Students Design Escape Rooms

[Music] hello everyone uh welcome to my talk my name is sam liberty hope you're having a great gdc so uh today i'm really excited to be presenting to you on the topic of escape rooms and specifically uh why escape rooms are so great for teaching game design basics to new students uh so uh first a little bit about me i am a professor at northeastern university where i teach fundamentals of game design and other classes additionally i am a consultant in my normal work where i do games for impact also known as serious games you can see some of my clients here over at extra ludic you'll see that there are a lot of large ngos governments and academic institutions but i want to draw your attention to some work that i did with darpa because i actually designed an escape

room for darpa on a darpa grant along with some of my northeastern colleagues so what i designed is an escape room called daedalus it was an alternate reality game and the escape room it was played online over slack and the purpose of this escape room was to test people's adaptability in teams in unpredictable and uncertain work environments so we had to design some very specific puzzles uh that satisfied those requirements and we were able to not only show that that worked but that you can actually test an experiment a controlled way with an online game or an arg compared to having to do it in a lab setting or to have numerators follow around people in their day-to-day lives so that was my uh my big escape room contribution but over at northeastern i teach

fundamentals of game design to give you a little bit of context this is usually a class of around 20 students their new game design students and pretty much every game design student that comes through northeastern has to go through this class and not only have i taught it and we'll teach it again but i actually designed the syllabus for this class along with some of my colleagues and i made sure to include an escape room in one of the early units for reasons that will become clear soon so in this image you can see some of my students working on their escape room prototype they're actually playing through it and they're in a situation where they're supposed to be on opposite sides of a prison cell uh working in parallel to escape so what will we be talking about today first i'm going to be talking about why escape rooms make such good game design lessons so we're going to go over the features of an escape room that make it good for teaching game design basics

and we're also going to go over the individual skills that students get to drill and hopefully master when they design their own escape room and a team after that i'm going to tell you exactly how i did it and how how we do it over at northeastern including the phases of design the skills that students get to drill the deliverables that we expect them to to bring for their grade and how they reflect at the end of the process to crystallize their learning so why escape rooms what makes these so good at teaching game design and making people into better game designers so the first feature i want to call attention to is the fact that they are analog and by analog i mean they are not digital they're not video games this makes them exceptionally easy to rapidly iterate uh you are basically just taking pieces of paper cardboard

whatever and moving them around and rewriting them and things like that uh you don't have to go into a terminal you don't have to go into unity uh it's uh it's pretty great for building things fast there's also no coding required which means that you don't need any special skills to do this all you need is kind of a desire to be a game designer and everything that you need to know to make these we actually teach in the class so it's very egalitarian that way in terms of what skills are required and the kinds of people that can make them so the next feature i want to talk about is how highly thematic an escape room is at least hopefully so when you go to an escape room why are you going there instead of just doing puzzles at home like a sudoku or crossword or even something more complicated and the reason that i think people gravitate towards these games is that they are very immersive uh when you're

in escape room you're really in a 360 uh immersive world that the designers uh took great care to make you feel like you were in that place and of course there's some suspension of disbelief you know some things aren't necessarily uh real uh but uh if it feels like you're there so if you're building an escape room that supposedly has you in a hospital infested with zombies and you have to escape you really want the players to feel that way and since my students don't have a huge fabrication budget you know they don't have a big special effects budget they're not incredible engineers or set designers that immersion is going to come through their game design through their puzzle design itself so this is very good practice for uniting theme and mechanic and these can be top down or bottom up by which i mean you can have either of a theme that you really want to deliver

like the zombie hospital or whatever or you can have a mechanic or a collection of mechanics that you think would make a good puzzle or escape room and then build a theme around that uh and in fact that first image that i showed you of the people in the jail cells was a bottom-up design where they wanted just to split people up and have them working on parallel puzzles so they came up with the prison theme as a wrapper for that and on the right you can see a puzzle that some of my other students made where they were doing a mafia bar themed escape room that had a supernatural twist to it so they made this kind of neat drink menu puzzle and there's lots of stuff like that that my students end up making so additionally escape rooms are multiplayer and it's good to be able to learn to design multiplayer games you have to design them for teams and that means different people moving different ways in unpredictable manners it also means multiple player psychographics so you're building an escape room that appeals not just to you or not just to a

certain type of person but to varied people on a team uh that can be large so you might have some puzzles that are for people that like physical assembly and and spatial puzzles you might have different puzzles that are ciphers puzzles that are logic puzzles there's lots of different things that you can do and my students do and it requires a little bit more work and a little bit more thought to appeal to a large team like that escape rooms feature many interlocking subsystems all these different puzzles need to be happening either linearly or in parallel usually a combination of the two they're all different but they all have to be united under the umbrella of the escape room itself um so it's really a challenge to unite all those moving parts and make it feel coherent and immersive this opens up an abundance of design space there's lots of little nooks and

crannies and things to make and that makes it ideal for a small team of dedicated designers so by that i mean again it's not a video game where you have a coder a producer an art director an animator a ui ux person a sound person no you have four or five game designers uh it is a game design class and it's the early one and we don't expect people to have uh even programming skills even though there are a lot of computer science students in the class but what you have is a group of four or five game designers they can all design puzzle ideas they can all build them they can all test them uh so this is really perfect for that and uh each can kind of master or become the master of one aspect of the escape room and then they work together to unite it uh escape rooms have obvious balancing heuristics and by that

i don't mean that it's easy to balance an escape room the opposite in fact is quite challenging but what i mean is when an escape room is not balanced it's pretty obvious why it's not balanced or where the imbalance is coming from uh so there's things that you can easily look at for instance how difficult are the puzzles uh what are your playtesters saying to you about them um the time you know it's a 30 minute escape room are your players finishing in 10 that is a problem are they finishing it never that's a problem as well is there one puzzle that's taking 20 minutes and then they're trying to cram the rest of it in the last 10 that's probably not the flow you want you'll be able to see that and then there's the legibility or ux of it and the how i think of ux in an escape room is a little bit different than how i think about it in a video game but basically i'm talking about the components how they're made how they're designed and how they're laid out uh the flow of the puzzles the flow of

the room so that when you begin the timer and people are in there in the escape room uh they know what to do they can start attacking the puzzles and figuring out how to solve them and if they can't again it's obvious that they can't and may be painful to the game designer to watch that and they can start working on a solution i'm sure there are many other features of escape rooms that make them really good for teaching these kinds of things if you can think of them go ahead and put them in the comments i'd love to see them maybe we can talk about them as we go on um but now i want to talk about the skills that your students are going to need in order to uh in order to make these escape rooms so the first one is brainstorming and there's kind of a misconception around brainstorming that it's uh just something that you do uh you get your team together and you just talk and that's a brainstorm uh and to an extent that's kind of true but really brainstorming is a skill like any other that you can build and learn

and improve upon there are specific techniques and times to use them and we talked about them earlier in the unit so they kind of know about them but this is a chance for us to actually do them and we do three of them all in one day to really drill that skill so the first one is for the whole class and i use a technique called snap that i'll go into in a lot more detail later on in this presentation the second is a small group brainstorm once they have their teams where they build consensus and the third is an individual brainstorm where they're coming up with puzzles in kind of a rapid way and again i'm going to talk about all of these a little further along when i do the the how section after the brainstorm is complete uh the next skill that we're going to be drawing is rapid iteration uh rapid prototyping so to complete your escape room in time and have it be satisfactory you really need to be building puzzles pretty quick it's not a long unit and most of the unit is

not devoted to your iterations so you're going to build them quickly get them from your mind to the page and get people playing them you test them multiple times usually they're not going to work right out of the gate so they need to be tested over and over again to get them perfect and of course physical puzzles like i said before are very easy to rapidly iterate even in the middle of a game you can stop the time during a test go in change one of the numbers uh tell them something that they should be seeing that they're not or whatever and then make that change for the next time uh going right into that play testing which is a little bit different than iterating because you have to test every iteration um and i want to call attention to a few things about how we play test these escape rooms one uh is they will be working both inside and out of class so the first play tests they do are going to be kind of

structured and observed by me and i'm there to help them out uh but then after that they're going to be doing them outside of the class and they're going to get that experience uh recruiting uh they're going to get that experienced organizing and running making sure they go well the final deliverable that they're going to give and i'll go into more detail in the second half is actually a game test right you're not delivering a final finished escape room that's not reasonable for students what you're delivering is a prototype that you will test live in class and that really centers prototyping [Music] and testing in this unit as a deliverable which kind of forefronts it in their experience and last thing i want to talk about play testing is that an escape room has major fabrication tasks you're going to be going out you're going to be buying props like the ones you see on the right you're going to be spending your own money on that you're going to be taking time probably

collectively hours with your team building cutting assembling um designing these props and components and kind of conceptualizing how they're going to fit in the room and when you're doing all that uh it really behooves you to know that the puzzles that you're put that you've put into place will actually work and the only way you know they work is by play testing them well beforehand you don't want to be spending a lot of time and money and effort on something that will blow up as soon as you put it in front of someone you want to know that it already works before you did all that work and that's something that they carry forward in their kind of student careers and hopefully as professionals that play testing is so important and with a video game just like with this escape room you want to make sure that your mechanics are going to work before you make your program or actually build them out

except again with an escape room you don't need to code to learn that so the last skill i want to talk about is fine tuning which might seem like it goes along with iterating and testing and it does but uh what i am talking about is slightly different so uh early on in this uh experience you're going to be making kind of sweeping changes to your escape room uh conceptually organizationally uh logistically or making large changes to puzzles maybe even throwing puzzles out those are kind of large changes by the end you're going to be focused on these fine tuning things and puzzle design is very granular so a very small change could have a big impact on the experience of the players a very small thing can ruin the whole experience so you're going to be balancing to the clock it's a 30 minute escape room that you're designing and ideally you want people finishing it near the end or being almost finished at

the end so you have that 30 minute plus or minus two or three minute window and it's a challenge to get people consistently landing in that window and that requires fine tuning fine-tuning of the components fine tuning of the puzzles and fine-tuning of a hint system which of course you'll need to develop because no matter how good your design is people will get stuck and they'll need some sort of hint system so is that going to be a resource based hint system time based freebies it's really up to the students and another thing that i found is that the iterations on these components can really take students over the finish line and making it clear and fun to players but can also kneecap a good design so you see on the right that's a puzzle some students did it was a jigsaw style puzzle where they had to find and assemble these pieces and then get a code off of it but as you can see the components are very flimsy they're small pieces of paper

and they turned out it could be easily lost and in fact that bottom right hand piece did get lost luckily the students were still able to play through because although who knows what that last digit was a one a six a four but they could just try them all but that was not the experience that my students wanted when they designed this escape room so if they were a little more thoughtful about their component design they wouldn't have had that problem okay so um how to teach with escape rooms uh i'm gonna show you exactly how i did it so you can adapt it to your own need uh and you might have more or fewer students than me they might be older or younger more or less experienced so this isn't one size fits all but i encourage you to take this and kind of iterate with it so here is the unit overview uh it's a three week unit the first week is devoted to research and brainstorming so kind of ideating our escape rooms

the second week is about prototyping and iteration so building and testing it out and then the third week is going to be the deliverable week where we're going to actually live playtest that final escape room for each team and uh do our post-mortem uh so the first thing we do is field research students can visit any local escape room they want i usually point them towards escape the room in boston because they have good production values and do a good job but they all have to go they do it on their own time it's not an organized field trip they have to organize themselves and go and then they write an experience report so everyone is kind of on the same page and we do this because not everyone has been to an escape room right and if you're going to design one it's important that you have played at least one so they go out and do this to build their base experience from there we go to brainstorming and again i use this technique called snap that's been very valuable to me as my in my role as a designer for games for

impact and it's called snap because it's based on a card game popular in the uk similar to war where you flip over cards and when they match somebody says snap and whoever says it first gets to take those cards as a point so this technique is really ideal for having a large group of people with a lot of different experiences and ideas and synthesizing one view of how to move forward so how it works is a student each student writes out post-it notes we don't use playing cards like in the game snap we create post-its so i might ask what are the mechanics that are that you want to have in an escape room and what are the themes that you want in escape room and they'll write three or four post-its for each one of those uh so just so you know what we're looking at now is from a snap brainstorm although it was not from an escape room it was from a different class that i taught at northeastern but we did use snap we used a digital board called miro

because we couldn't meet in person because of the pandemic however normally we do meet in person and we do use a whiteboard uh and a whiteboard marker in real physical post-its and it does work better that way so uh someone will come up after they have their cards and present their first one so someone might say i want to make a horror themed escape room and they'll put it on the wall and then anyone that has something similar or the same gets to say snap and they come up and they say hey i have a haunted house they stick it up there and the closer it is conceptually the more those post-its overlap and then if somebody has something that snaps to either one of those they say snap and they go up and then you can snap to any of those three and you keep going until no one can snap to any of the posts in the cluster and then you move on to the next one hey i want to make one based on cute animals snap i have cats and over the course of this thematic clusters form and then once everyone's cards are on the wall

we form these clusters you might move them around a little bit to make sure it makes sense uh it also takes some of the pressure off being perfect in the beginning because you can move them around and then we name those thematic clusters after that there's a kind of consensus phase where they get to put stars on the clusters that jump out as being relevant so i might ask promptly questions like what are you excited to work on and uh what would be unique in terms of an escape room that hasn't been done a lot before or what do you think is feasible to do in three weeks and then those stars go up based on that and where those stars clump uh is usually a good direction for the students to move so after that we do a group formation based on those clusters we have small group brainstorms they can use any technique that we've gone over in class or any other technique but these small group brainstorms are really just about building consensus so you know thematically and mechanically what you're making and how

you're going to utilize the room because the classroom does become the escape room and then after you have that we do a puzzle brainstorm so how that works is we break up and individually come up with puzzle ideas and the reason we switch to individual at this point is because it's just so much more efficient so if you have a team coming up with a puzzle brainstorm you might have four or five people working together over half an hour and they get one really cool puzzle idea that's well fleshed out and that's a nice thing to have but if you have four or five people brainstorming puzzles individually uh coming up with a couple instead of having one you have like maybe 10 or 12 which is important because an escape room has a lot of puzzles in it so they also start kind of writing out how the puzzle works and they can then present it to their team who don't know the puzzle and see if they can understand it and start solving it and if it's exciting to them so you get an immediate proof of concept play test

right at the end of the brainstorm which is a nice thing to have so that kind of puts us right into rapid prototyping so we have our puzzle design we start doing some paper prototyping of that by that i don't mean necessarily that they must be made of paper just that they're lo-fi and easy to iterate so it could be something digital like the one on the left which is a presentation um it was done in powerpoint and you go through steps or it could be paper it could be glass it could be really anything that doesn't take that much effort to do but we start building those quickly and testing but who tests it uh that's an important question because eventually you're gonna need a fresh team that has never done your puzzles before to play your final uh final prototype because if they've seen your puzzles before they can kind of fake their way through the escape room and it's not a good test so what we do is we match teams up with a partner team so those green lines team

one will play team two's puzzles and team two will play team ones and vice versa uh and if you need a fresh look later on you might go diagonally so team one might help team four but that means that the teams that are connected with blue lines have never played their escape room puzzles at all and they're fresh and they will be the team that will play test your final prototype when you do the live testing class so team one and team three team two and two four and team four um you're play testing inside class in that structure way that i talked about before but then you're also play testing outside of class and the reason that we play test outside of class is a because there's just not enough time we have only a couple classes devoted to building and testing each class is an hour and 40 minutes and four hours is not enough time to play test and develop an escape room so you need to do work outside of class this also gives each student the opportunity to actually organize and run their own play test instead of just having

the team leader or whoever running play tests all the time and that's an important skill for players to for students to build then after that you're going to fabricate make something that looks a little bit nicer something like the props on the right that are kind of not you know super polished but are funny uh and and fun and can immerse your uh your team in their escape room uh and that can be quite a major project like i talked about before so now today's the day the day that you're going to do the live play test and this happens in class during class time and it runs the entire escape room with your fresh team under a timer and like i said that timer is 30 minutes now there's a question of space because you have four teams and each team needs to play for half an hour and that's two hours and that's longer than uh than a class so i usually reserve a separate classroom and i put two of the

teams in that and then that gives you an hour for escape room play and then each escape room has 10 minutes of setup before 10 minutes of breakdown and feedback gathering after which is just about perfect although it is still tight so because it's still tight it's really important that you make sure your students have all their prep done before class starts you don't want them showing up cutting pasting marking coloring printing because then they won't have enough time to set up and it'll cut into the other team's time and that is not fair so we stress that they need to have it all done and ready either the night before or the morning before not in class and to make sure that they not only leave time at the end to gather feedback from their playtesters but have an organized way to gather that play test feedback and the reason that that is so important is because it will feed directly in to the reflections that they do the

postmortems that they do so you're going to need an organized way to get good quotes and good insights from your players not just stand up there at the end and say well what did you think um and i'm sure if you said that people would talk but you want to get good specific questions about your puzzles in addition to your own observations so it's actually important that one student takes notes during this as well so okay the reflection the final final deliverable uh is this post-mortem reflection so this is probably the first post-mortem that my students write in their game design careers it's not something that high schoolers typically do so uh it's important for them to understand what a postmortem is and why they're written so uh i assign them to read three postmortems for favorite games uh they're easy to find online you can google them plenty of them are up on gamasutra as as you all know

and they can really get a sense of the form of them and the content of them so once they do that we have them write a group post-mortem on their escape rooms so we want to hear what went right what went wrong and what they would do differently in the future so this is essentially an honest evaluation of their work um and uh crystallizes what they learned in their experience so that they can continue carrying it forward in their academic and professional careers because if they don't take the time to reflect a lot of that learning can get lost and equally as important is for me as the professor i get to see them work through in written language their experience so i know what they struggled with i know how they're thinking about their next room basically they're conceptualizing their next prototype their next iteration in that document

for me to see and that's really really helpful for me to grade them so that is it that's how how and why i'm sure you're really excited to do it yourself uh if you have questions that you have not already asked in the comments below feel free to reach out to me i'll try to answer them you can reach me about this or anything else at my northeastern email address which is there on the last slide you can also find me on twitter where i sometimes talk about game design and medium where i write about my design process and approaches so i hope to see you and i hope that you have a great remainder of your cdc take care everyone