Transitioning Escape Rooms to a Virtual Environment

Abstract

Escape room games have gained in popularity in both entertainment and education venues over the past several year. The global health pandemic put an abrupt end to in-person escape room programs due to the enclosed space in which they take place. In an attempt to continue to utilize the escape room concept we set about to create a virtual escape room using commonly available software and assessed its usability and participant feelings about the experience. The results indicated that the participants thought the escape room was engaging (88%), that they had to work as a team (95%), and that they overall enjoyed the experience (85%). Virtual experiences cannot completely replace in-person experiences, but there are ways to introduce important teamwork and communication concepts to participants and make online meetings and conferences more engaging.

Planning an Escape: Considerations for the Development of Applied Escape Rooms

“…Digital escape rooms will likely differ from their physical counterparts in this consideration as they are not constrained in the same way by physical dimensions, but may instead have unique concerns involving technological implementation, operational error detection and correction, levels of achievable fidelity, and methods of team interaction as a result of the created venue. Some of these considerations can be seen in the article by Kutzin, Sanders, and Strother (2021) where development of an escape room was created in a virtual environment. Puzzle operation, team interaction, and facilitation of participants who are not physically co-located were included as specific deliberations when implemented in that non-physical space.…”

When design gets in the way: student learning and digital escape game

“…Case reports of escape games used online or for the remote classroom have been published in recent years, especially within the health sector (e.g., Vergne et al, 2020;Abdul Rahim, 2022;Helbing et al, 2022). Some research papers investigate the design process of migrating an escape game online (Kutzin et al, 2021;Videnovik et al, 2022). However, pedagogical research on the use of these games in the context of online teaching and learning remains limited (e.g., Rodríguez-Ferrer et al, 2022;Vestal et al, 2021).…”