lessons from escape rooms

Lessons from Escape Rooms:
​Designing for the Real World and VR

​

Another gem from the Game Developer Conference vault.  In this 2017 session, escape room designer Laura E. Hall discusses the design fundamentals and structures necessary for creating real-world experiences that offer not only entertainment, but also create immersion and transport players into heightened fictional experiences. 

VR has the potential to combine both physical and virtual worlds.  It does this by creating a new language that takes into account the physical body, cognitive processes of the brain and design that accounts for human subconscious.

To help ground players in the activity you need puzzles that match player ability and also make sense according to fiction being presented.

Puzzle solving is an exercise in observation and evaluation
e.g. The need to identify and decipher morse code (waves and dots) hidden in stamp postage marks (with no context, or illustration).
Such a puzzle could be made slightly easier by grouping the stamps, or placing them in a particular order.
But, you need to know your audience – Gamers who solve puzzles might expect to find morse code, but would people off the street be able to make that leap?

e.g. A puzzle room for a group of people who didn’t know what the corporate event involved…
Hall tried to balance skills by posing a range of puzzles
To make those accessible/easy puzzles more fun she introduced a speed run challenge, rather than a ticking clock.
She also gave contextual clues to make the puzzles accessible – e.g. showing some letters to reveal enough of a word that players could guess the rest.

CAUTIONARY NOTE –
-When people are focused and having fun in virtual worlds they may lose their awareness of time and play beyond their own physical capacity.
You may need trained, aware helpers to ensure that participants are protected from this propensity
In her games, Hall often has a hint screen that blares loudly whenever a new hint is broadcast – often the screen has to blare out a few times before it gains the players' attention nevertheless.
-Brain fatigue is also a real issue. 
Furthermore, players are also less inclined to suspend disbelief in real spaces, than in a theatre

People really don’t need a lot of props for a VR world to be real for them 
e.g.
There’s a Nicole Kidman film called Dogville where it’s set on a stage where the houses are indicated by outlines that are taped out.
So you don’t need hyper-realism…it’s possible to reduce the cognitive load and speaking to the subconscious instead.

Design a cohesive world with a complicated backstory that informs the design
-Hall makes sure all puzzles are moving forward to create a sense of progression
-Also designs character interactions to change the game state in a specific way, often with minimal dialogue (b/c people remember how they felt, not words they’ve read…in that flow state efficiency of info becomes really important….reduced dialogue to 1 line every 15 mins, only about 200 written or spoken words in total).

Here is an example puzzle room experience where each step of the story your goals change, you learn more about the world and the stakes are raised. 
- When you 1st get into the room you know you’re investigating a character who’s gone missing. 
- Your 1st task unlocks an audio recording locked in their desk which teaches about their paranoa, the world
- Next you change the security level clearance on a keycard that you send to a prearranged hiding spot indicated on that recording which alerts the character to your presence.
- They send back a hand-written note asking for your help, along with the typewriter (teaches you about technology, encoding, spycraft)
- That puzzle gives you access to a security system that you use to trace a guard’s path through the space.
- Entering the solution sends the path to the character that you’re helping who uses that info to sneak out and avoid the guard.
- You watch as this is happening on a silent screen
- But then at that point the character betrays you – they’re going to get out but you’re on your own.
- They tell you via a recording that they’ve left a magnetic pulse device hidden in their office so now it’s up to you to activate it to escape the building and get out.

Hall, Laura. 2017. LESSONS FROM ESCAPE ROOMS: DESIGNING FOR THE REAL WORLD AND VR. In GDC Vault. U.S.: Game Developer Conference.