Crypto-educational Escape Rooms: Lessons from Berlin
The concept for “The Spy Who Staked Me” was pretty straighforward: It’s an escape room where all the puzzles are related to cryptography and cryptocurrency.
By progressing through the story of the Escape room, players learn a bit about digital security, and why things like encryption can be important.
All in all, we had 11 teams and about 50 people run through the ETHBerlinZwei room. If you’re reading this to find out which team was the smartest, you’ll be disappointed to know that I will not be publishing rankings, and that the solutions to each puzzle will not be divulged (entirely), so that we can run “The Spy Who Staked Me” again.
This post is for the many people who unable to play, but were curious about “The Spy Who Staked Me” — ETHBerlinners or otherwise. It’s just a loose group of the primary lessons I learned over the course of working on the experience, and perhaps a hint at where Daedalus.Industries will go from here.
For a different genre of re-cap, check out David Mihal’s post on the role the Burner Wallet played in providing a player-friendly on-boarding experience for the clues in the room.
The fourth wall must not come down
In the world of the game, players have been hired by a mysterious smart contract to conduct an investigation into the suspicious death of Wolfgang Slchötke. The person of interest was an Alice Tannhauser, who (conveniently) rented an office at FactoryBerlin, and could be trying to steal the funds from a Daedalus Industries ICO in 2017.
The theme of the story, which I’ll call “Orwellian Bauhaus”, was written to be deliberately plausible, and set in a not-too-distant fork of our own totally normal and well-adjusted Ethereum universe. We wanted players to, as much as possible, feel like they were really stepping into a 30-something designer’s office at a Berlin co-working space, and actually breaking into a secret organization’s private messages — because effectively, they were doing just that!
Upon entering the room, players were greeted by EVE, a smart office assistant. With a little help from EVE, players looked for clues to break into Alice’s computer, then into the encrypted message server ARIADNE, where the messages of Daedalus.Industries provided more clues.
“Hello, I’m Eve. I’m a cousin of Alexa, with a few upgrades. You can say things like ‘Help me order dinner’, or, ‘help me plan a trip’, or ‘help me investigate a suspicious death’… “
EVE was a very effective tool for the room. Eve, of course, was operated by a game master, watching the players through ominous looking cameras placed in the room.
EVE allowed the game master to give nudges, hints, and occasionally taunts to players — through a character in the story. If players were really stuck, Eve could “hire a dayjob contractor” to come in and help them get past to the next clue, but only at the player’s request, and for a small slice of the player’s stake.
“It looks like Alice will be back in 15 minutes. If you like, I can cause a traffic jam and delay her Uber…”
This proved to be an elegant way to balance the puzzles so that everyone was able to make it to the plot twist halfway through the game, which came after unlocking of Wolfgang’s chess board:
If it’s not broken, take it apart, lose some of the pieces, and then it will be.
A lot of elements in the room took considerable effort to build, especially Wolfgang’s chess set (h/t to Mr. Circuit). EVE needed to be able to print out text for hints, and generate text-to-speech live while players spoke. Finally, the burner wallet needed to manage stake, unlock and sign messages with the keys players found in the room, and be able to accept a seed phrase, rather than a QR code.
And everything broke at least once, usually about 20 minutes before it really needed to work. Broken latches. Banning from the FactoryBerlin network. Escape sequences sneaking into encrypted messages. Eve’s voice set to an Australian accent (I still have no idea why). Github timeouts. Everything was on fire at one point during the weekend, and some of the early runs on Saturday were a little rough around the edges. 3Box, I’m talking to you — thanks for your PGPatience \u2661
Luckily, enough of the mechanics had “full manual” back-ups, and those teams that ran into trouble were not too bothered by a few hiccups to the story. We had planned on things going a little bit wrong, but we shouldn’t have underestimated the role of chaos @ ETHBerlinZwei
Signal to noise ratio is fuzzy and subjective
There were 4 main puzzles in the room, which corresponded to 4 keys of the shadowy members of Daedalus Industries.
One key was supposed to be very easy to find, two were of ‘medium’ difficulty, and one was exceptionally difficult, just in case Vitalik wanted to try.
Interestingly enough, several teams solved the two ‘medium’ difficulty keys, but missed both the easiest and the hardest puzzles.
PUZZLE SPOILER ALERT: On Alice’s desk, there was a sticky note that said “to do: back up seed phrase” — and there was another sticky note under the desk with the seed phrase written down. Only one out of eleven groups looked under the desk to find Alice’s seed phrase.
The other puzzles were much more involved, but for some reason more readily solved by players during the room.
Dr. Charles’ key (the hardest puzzle), also, really threw people for a loop, because it involved a bit of modular arithmetic. Chuck graciously wrote all the needed equations on a whiteboard in the room, but players frequently ignored it and assumed that it was meaningless scratch meant to provide a bit of fluff. It was a really challenging puzzle though — don’t be too hard on yourself, Raiden.
All in all, we really just need to collect more experience (points) in setting the difficulty of puzzles, to make it much much easier for beginners to jump into some ‘real’ hacking, as well as to make the most challenging puzzles still speak to the hardcore cypherpunks.
Where we go from here
The final action in the room allows players to re-claim their stake, plus a bonus for the keys they found. Alternatively, players may choose to put their stake towards the transaction fees of initializing the LABRYNTH protocol, effectively sending their money to Daedalus.Industries.
100% of people (for whom staking worked) chose to donate their stake to Daedalus. That’s some positive signalling!
Still, we recognize that it’s going to take a few months before we’re ready to do another room like this. Already there are ideas for new puzzles, new stories, and better player experience.
We want to incorporate all of what we’ve learned this summer at ETHBerlinZwei, and roll it into a much more polished rendition of “The Spy Who Staked Me” at another (Berlin-based) event soon.
If you’re interested in contributing or collaborating on a future escape room experience, you’ll need to track down one of the shadowy members of Daedalus Industries. A good lead might be Otto:
<otto@daedalus.industries>
gpg --receive-keys BB6A327948EFCFC82F8FB6AF7D42ADA63799EBE6A special thank you is in order for FactoryBerlin, Sponsors of ETHBerlin, and of course the DoD for making this ETHBerlinZwei experience possible\u2661
