Escape from Dune
--
A media experience created in collaboration with Caden Gaviria and tanner gardner
Overview
For our final project, we created a Dune themed escape room that served as a transmedia extension of the Dune franchise. Taking place in our classroom in “Universitas Hall,” our classmates had twenty minutes to escape from the classroom. The experience consisted of about 4 puzzles that led into one another, culminating in a final prize of “spice.”
Motivations for the Project
We chose this project because we wanted to create a physical media experience for the class that applied many of the concepts we have learned throughout the course. A themed escape room based off of existing intellectual property already plays with and considers many of these core concepts. We chose the theme of Dune since it builds on our Dune screening class experience in week 5 and aims to continue the #dune-hype that we have been creating all quarter.
Promotion
Before the experience, we sent out a promotional paratext to the class in order to reveal our project and create hype for the experience.
Designing the Room
To design our escape room (ER), we utilized the Star Model and core concepts from our course. The Star Model is an educational tool intended for teachers to design and play their own escape rooms proposed by Luca Botturi and Masiar Babazadeh. The model consists of five game elements, (1) Narrative, (2) Game Flow, (3) Puzzles, (4) Equipment Items, and (5) Learning (optional) (Botturi and Babazadeh 2020). We primarily focused on the first four elements since the intention of our project was to provide a transmedia experience that builds on our knowledge and experiences in our course, rather than utilizing it as a teaching tool.
Narrative
The Narrative, or the overarching story or theme of the escape room, extended the world of Dune, drawing on the transmedia storytelling principle of worldbuilding (Jenkins 2010). In this sense, the ER served as a hyperdiegetic experience, such that the circumstances surrounding the escape room exist within the world we know but outside of the filmic gaze. According to the Star Model, the Narrative element involves assigning players an active role and assigning an ER mode or type (i.e. escaping a prison, solving a mystery, liberating hostages, etc) (Botturi and Babazadeh 2020). Our players were assigned the role of crew members and were tasked with escaping from an underground facility on the planet of Arakkis. This intended to create a sense of symbolic immersion, the ritual of “crossing various thresholds that mark the boundaries between “everyday” and “media” spheres (Garner 2016). In this sense, our escape room allowed players to leave the outside world behind and voyage into the narrative world of Dune.
Game Flow
The Game Flow, or the structure of the game experience, involved creating different phases, which included an introduction into the world and narrative of the ER, exploration of the space, solving puzzles, unlocking a challenge, etc. While we originally intended on creating groupings, we let players naturally split into groups to work on different parts of the escape room. The experience was cooperative rather than competitive, meaning that the players worked together throughout the experience, and the class needed to escape collectively.
Puzzles
The Star Model introduces three types of puzzles: (1) cognitive puzzles, which require thinking skills and logic and are the most common, (2) physical puzzles, which require body movements or manipulation, and (3) metapuzzles, puzzles which bring together results from the other ones, and are often connected to the narrative in key points of the gameplay (Botturi and Babazadeh 2020). While our ER primarily utilized cognitive puzzles, it included all three of these types. Through the problem-solving of puzzles that players partook in, we hoped to generate a sense of ludic immersion. This type of immersion arises “when one is able to achieve a satisfying balance of challenges and abilities” (Ermi and Mäyrä 2005).
Equipment Items
Equipment items in our ER included (a) the room itself as a space, (b) items that generate the narrative (escape room instructions, printed documents, and props that embody the theme or setting), and (c) elements that implement the mechanics of the game and that should be manipulated in order to solve the puzzles (Botturi and Babazadeh 2020). Through equipment items, we hoped to create thematic immersion, which involves entry into or the creation of a media environment with a high degree of thematic continuity, accompanied by a sense of moving into a liminal border zone between the real world and the diegesis (Moulton 2021).
