Escape Rooms Will Save the World!

Strange Bird has been receiving a lot of love lately from the escape room community, having recently won Room Escape Artist’s 2017 Golden Lock-in and Partly Wicked’s 2017 Room of the Year. I think it’s high-time I reciprocate that love with a true escape-room-enthusiast post.

Escape rooms could save the world. I mean that. Each time I play or observe a team playing, I sense a powerful force for good at work. Escape rooms present a radically new learning environment that has the potential to train us to become smarter, faster, more open, more complete human beings. And they’re hella fun, too—which every teacher knows reinforces learning. Win-win.

Here are some ways that playing escape rooms has super-powered me.

come together

Most job environments require working collaboratively. As I’ve learned too well, the bigger the thing, the more people are needed to get it done. That means communicating clearly, supporting each other, saying “no” firmly but kindly when something isn’t working (and not taking that “no” personally), keeping track of each other’s progress, and ultimately committing to the final glory being ours, not mine. We’re talking high-level, interpersonal skills here.

School does a dreadful job of preparing us for teamwork, as students fall into the roles of slackers slacking and feverish Hermiones doing all the work for the essential “A.” Active entertainment doesn’t help much either—in board games and bowling, usually you’re competing against each other for solo glory. And no one but the oddest duck competes in team sports outside the school years.

But an escape room is an accessible team sport. One does not win an escape room alone. Every member contributes. Even if you don’t get a big “Hero Moment,” you probably made more than one connection that moved your team forward. Just working a lock correctly is a big step!

As long as you’re engaged, talking, and listening, you’re contributing. The teams that fail The Man From Beyond fail to talk (or listen) to each other. They’re trying to play the game solo, and that doesn’t work. And just how often in life does drama ensue because we failed to talk to each other? Play enough escape rooms, and you’ll soon think communication and teamwork are the default modes for success. Which (pro-tip) they are.

I’ve ALWAYS RELIED On The smartness of strangers

“Public ticket” escape rooms, popular in the US, sometimes bring groups of strangers together in the same game. While most people prefer to play with friends, we see a lot of people come through our doors who have only 1 friend cool enough to join them for a séance-themed escape room, so they end up being locked in the room with some strangers. That sounds horrifying.

Turns out it’s not. When people have something to do, and they really want to see it done, the awkwardness melts away. You’re on the same team—and it shows. Friend groups divide up. High fives ensue. You may not know their names, but that’s not really what matters, is it? As a game master, I’ve noticed that stranger bookings tend to be stronger teams: they’re much more likely to come with different backgrounds and life experiences, and so a wider gamut of skills are at the team’s disposal. Granted, it’s not rainbows 100% of the time, but I’m happy to say it is rainbows about 95% of the time. (At least in our game—ours is not one of the frustrating types).

I know it sounds cheesy, but I always leave mixed-company escape rooms with a stronger sense that I can work with anyone, that what we have in common is far greater than what we don’t, and that, as Muppets Take Manhattan puts it, “peoples is peoples.”

Kind of a big deal in a day-and-age where people supposedly won’t share a meal with those of an opposite political bent.

looking is not seeing (spoiler level 1)

The hardest puzzle in our game requires noticing the thing that’s been there the whole time—it actually comes up a lot in escape rooms. I know for a fact that if we took “the thing” and hid it in a drawer, every team would pay attention to it stat. That’s because we filter out things in our given environment all the time. We have limited bandwidth. Thanks to evolution, we only pay attention to the things that matter—threats, rewards—and the rest can just disappear from view.

But this is not always an advantage. Sometimes my focus is too narrow. Like a horse with blinders, I don’t see the whole system. How often have I tried to work around an object in the way, rather than stopping and moving it out of the way? I have always been especially guilty of environmental blindness (“Has that building always been there???”), and that habit can hold me back from making key discoveries. Escape rooms have me seeing the wider world a lot more, and this skill not only benefits the practicals of my life, but the poetry as well.

Sometimes I catch a player without a puzzle pacing around the room. There are still puzzles all over the place, if only he would see them. But looking is not seeing, and one does not see with one’s feet. Seeing requires a deliberate act.

power over your environment (spoiler level 1)

Arguably my favorite moment in the Man From Beyond doesn’t involve a puzzle “aha!” nor an actor-player interaction. There’s an item in the room that players activate. It repeats. It’s up to the players to decide if they still need the information or if they can de-activate it. De-activation requires: 1) noticing it; 2) realizing it’s annoying; 3) confirming that your team doesn’t need the information any more; 4) taking the steps to de-activate it. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but ultimately these steps culminate in asserting your power over your environment. You CAN change the world.

This ain’t no “solve.” This is a super-power. If we can really see things, the next step is we can improve things. Instance: why not turn off that TV nobody’s watching at the restaurant? And that’s just the beginning of the revolution, my friends.

And yet, about 40% of teams require the game master to deactivate it (we have a lot of redundancy in our control room). They just don’t notice it, or they fail to realize they have a say in their environment. It’s like subconsciously they have hunkered down and accepted their fate of this item repeating endlessly, and it takes a conscious, powerful leader—the game master—to put them out of their misery. Not cool.

Power to the peoples.

you can’t give up

Escape rooms are tough. The vast majority of them require 100% completion of the puzzles to earn the “win” condition. When you get stuck in an escape room, you can’t rage quit. You can’t procrastinate. Someone in that room will eventually need to solve it, so you might as well roll up your sleeves and go at it again—don’t just walk away! In fact, now is the perfect time to call in a teammate who might see things differently. If you don’t get it, share it. Tell them what you know and what you don’t. After all, the most satisfying problems aren’t the easy ones to solve.

Double-check your work

We all have these stupid shackles called EGOS. Egos stop us short of becoming our better selves. We don’t want to improve, we don’t want to change, and we do NOT want to be wrong. Yet we are wrong all the freakin’ time.

That’s okay. Escape rooms taught me that. I can’t tell you how many dumb things I’ve done in an escape room—overseen something obvious, dropped the ball, messed up the math, worked the lock all wrong—and I’m not necessarily getting any better. Thankfully, someone usually corrects me in time. In fact, that’s what it means to be a team: we’ve got each other’s backs. Nowadays, if I suspect something should work when it doesn’t in an escape room, I double-check my work. Ego be damned: maybe I got it wrong. If that still fails, I introduce a new person to the problem to make sure it really and truly doesn’t work. Double-checking your work consistently will not only win you more escape rooms, it’ll get you in the habit of correcting mistakes and collaborating with others to make the Thing the best it can be.

EMBODIMENT

Escape rooms, like other forms of immersive entertainment, give us our bodies back. Too often we chain ourselves to chairs to stare at screens—we might as well be those brains in vats. But escape rooms don’t come with seats. You’ll need your hands, feet, and knees to find the clues. If you’re lucky, the kind of puzzles will even engage your body, and you’ll find yourself running around, lifting, kneeling, twisting on tip-toe to solve a challenge. I think embodiment is why I love escape rooms but don’t dig puzzle hunts (whether at home or at a bar). The tactile experience adds immeasurable value.

I recently spent the perfect 24 hours in the NYC area: 5 Wits West Nyack, an immersive audio tour in Central Park (Her Long Black Hair), Komnata Quest’s Maze of Hakaina, Paradiso’s Memory Room, and my eighth visit to the McKittrick Hotel.

In that short period, I had never felt so deliciously alive, so present in my physical form. I felt…whole. Like a lion. Like I had just annihilated Cartesian dualism. I think this is the way I was meant to feel. But it was foreign. Maybe the last time was on the playground…? Hey! How come adults don’t have playgrounds??? Maybe that’s what immersive design should be about….

save the world? Really?

Okay, yeah, I’m being a bit optimistic. An average escape room doesn’t train people to do more than indiscriminately yell every number combination they can derive from the room. What’s worse: you’re often rewarded for guessing. That’s…not a habit that’s going to save the world.

But if more escape room designers take the guessing out of the game and focus on logical, rewarding design, then every player will walk away feeling stronger, smarter, more eager to work together, more ready to take on the world.

And the world needs taking on. (Good thing I’ve packed my scroll quiver.)