What is ‘the next big thing’ for escape rooms?
To my left, a thick iron door to what looks like a grim castle dungeon, menacing gargoyles sit poised over the gate with angry red eyes. Smoke ebs silently through the bars of its rusty frame. To my right, an empty, black void with stark black walls and a black floor. No decoration, lights or sounds aside from the five TV screens hung along a back wall.
A group of new players silently prowl across the space, eyes and ears covered with the latest in VR technology. With sensors in each hand they explore an intricate and mystical ancient temple, somewhere hot and sandy. Completely immersed in this alternative world and entirely unaware of the conference happening around them. Was this a portent of the escape room of the future?
When I signed up to attend the annual Up The Game escape room conference in the Netherlands I wasn’t sure what to expect. Is it an industry event that disseminates best practice to stop people making puzzles that involve dissembling electrical sockets, extensively using red herrings or including a UV torch? Is it a place for creativity and shared learning to further evolve the escape game offerings of the future? Or do the organisers simply lock the doors after registration to see what happens to a room full of experienced escape room pros in the event of a crisis?
Safe to say that it’s actually all of those things. Although it is with some disappointment, but probably for the best, that my macgyvering skills were not tested.
So what do you actually find at an escape room conference? Here are a few things I discovered:
It’s far bigger industry than I expected
As an immersive experience designer, I have been inspired by the rise in escape rooms popping up across major cities. However, its not until you have a venue full of escape room owners from all over the world that you really see how this industry has grown. Then you venture into the hall containing the vast contingent of support industries that have sprung up and it’s even bigger. There are vendors that will promise everything from building dungeons, mechanical lock boxes or designing puzzles that imitate the latest in biometric security, through to the provisioning of online systems that can manage the customer bookings or control the game environment at the touch of a button.
In my mind if every element of a room, and the business that runs it can be purchased ‘off the shelf’, then these companies with specialist knowledge and experience are helping create new escape rooms of the future. Although you might question how ‘bespoke’ the results are, these suppliers are the main reason more rooms are popping up, and why overall standards of escape rooms are improving.
It’s not just the suppliers raising the bar
One main observation is that this isn’t a conference to cover the “Next Gen” content, or see predictions of what the next big thing will be for the industry. This event is really focused on making every offering a great experience that doesn’t become impossible if a family brings their children along, or because someone in a group happens to be colourblind.
Just sitting down and listening to people talk through how they approach unusual problems and attempt best practice was really valuable. Everyone was eager to share the lessons learned after years of operating escape rooms and after watching thousands of customers try and fail at completing their carefully crafted challenges.
How can you best use certain technologies? How can you best incorporate technology into historically accurate rooms in a believable way? How to best cater escape rooms to corporate groups, or to children? At what point do you rethink a challenge if a high percentage of your customers always struggle with the same puzzle? Getting comprehensive answers to all of these questions was easy, and will be really useful when it comes to building my next project.
Don’t expect lots of puzzles
“I thought there would be more puzzles”, a sentence that has at least crossed the mind of any player who managed to stop the clock a full half hour before whatever incoming apocalypse was scheduled to happen.
At a conference full of experts I was expecting puzzles, fiendish puzzles, and lots of them! I was ready to hone my skills of logic and deduction alongside the ‘experts’, however much to my disappointment the playtesting was actually confined to a series of backrooms away from the conference space. With corridors ventured only by those who were organised enough to get their session booked before the event, I didn’t actually get an opportunity to playtest anything.
Clearly the online booking company missed a sponsorship opportunity here, but it did make me wonder why was this part of the conference hidden away? Well, it turns out a lot of people who own escape rooms just aren’t that interested in puzzling and don’t actually know how to complete escape rooms.
In my opinion this is the result of a really worrying trend of escape room owners who are not there for the thrill of the challenge. They don’t aspire to push the boundaries or create something unique that will appeal to like minded puzzlers. They are just there to run a business, everything is bought and paid for based on what is likely to bring the maximum returns. Let’s not tar them all with the same brush here but let’s face it, lots of people out there are just around to make money.
Immersive Escape Games are the ‘new thing’
What is immersive gaming? From my perspective immersive gaming involves bringing gaming concepts into the real world using theatrical narratives, actors and/or technology. Some of the escape rooms with higher production values, as well as rooms that have set up in unique and unusual locations such as Escape the Gaol or Sherlocked have been doing this for some time, along with experience productions such as Prison Escape.
However, the computer gaming world has finally jumped on the escape game bandwagon and is now pitching virtual reality escape rooms as the new thing. Is this the next generation of escape rooms? Maybe. Does this feel like an immersive console game? Yes. Do I think this will replace physical escape rooms? Not at all. It’s true, these games are awesome, and a lot of fun, but whether this concept will really take off as VR becomes more normalised within general console gaming is still to be seen.
In my mind, the freedom to complete challenges in a number of different ways, or collaboratively using teamwork under the watchful eye of a gamesmaster who can subtly nudge you towards the right outcome is something that can’t be replaced by a computer game. However, it is true that from the participants perspective the standard of the ‘immersive experience’ is being raised, whether through technology or the use of actors.
Within escape games people want great puzzles, but with immersive games they also want to feel like they have been transported to a new enivironment. More than ever they want to feel like the hero of their own adventure. This means that players need to have interesting but believable surroundings that tie into the engaging storyline of the scenerio. This can be difficult to do within the time limit of an escape room, particularly where the presence of historically correct architectural features, such as an old prison, victorian bank vault or 1930’s american speakeasy are lacking.
This level of player expectation will mean that VR as a technology will probably have at least a small seat at the escape room table for a while. However, it also means that more rooms are likely to start including immersive devices like actors or performers to provide a personalised and engaging edge to the experience. We may also start to see more experiences last over longer periods as is curently happening with Secret Cinema in the entertainment space, through to HackFu in the corporate training space.
Escape Room Devices can be more than entertainment
One thing that was clear from this years conference is that escape room owners are more desperate than ever to cater to the corporate market. Typically this involves businesses creating multiple identical rooms that allow two or more teams to run the same puzzles simultaneously. In my opinion these offerings bring value in the form of team building rather than actual learning but there are important lessons that you can learn about team fit, leadership and communication.
Beyond this, there were some really interesting and creative projects that have been using escape room concepts as an engagement tool. This is something that everyone at chronyko have been doing for many years, but increasingly escape room puzzles are being applied to a range of industries from marketing to change management to learning and development. The concept behind this thinking is that working something out yourself is far more powerful than being told the same series of facts. When done well, this can be enough to change behaviour, adopt new processes, introduce new products or learn new skills.
One really interesting example of this was a ‘socially conscious escape room project’ developed by Time Trap called ‘The Divide’, which is currently moonlighting at Pier Pressure, Brighton. This was an experimental escape room that was designed to highlight the stark divide between the poorest and wealthiest in society. This is done in a way that powerfully illustrates the some of the reasons behind poverty and homelessness. The room itself is still constructed to be fun, but also to make the participants think twice, and challenge some of the stereotypes and prejudices they may have about those living in poverty.
So what is the future of the escape room industry?
Most importantly, the work that has been done to prevent bad practice and raise escape room standards is an achievement. However, as with any emerging industry this is a sign of it maturing which inevitably means the mainstream of the industry is heading to a commodity. As more people who own and run escape rooms are increasingly detatched from the creation of new rooms, it feels like fewer risks will be taken to push the boundaries of the industry.
More investments are being made in high quality sets and integrated technology that is designed to primarily be player resistant and minimise reset times. My main hope is that this “off the shelf” approach doesn’t kill the imaginative diversity and uniqueness of that has been a strength of the escape room format up until now.
Whether this business driven approach leads to a potential decline of independent escape rooms is still a worry for some. However I believe that there is still a strong group of creative puzzle designers, technologists and escape room owners who will continue to challenge what can be achieved through the escape room format. To these people who focus on how escape games can bring wider benefit outside of entertainment, particularly within the education and learning arena, progress is already interesting to see.
One key thing that was very clearly lacking is the presence of any clear leadership within the industry. True, there are a few conferences where ideas can be shared but even then there was no keynote speech, and in my opinion there were no real rallying calls to pull the industry towards a new direction. I feel like the industry is now so big that it would benefit from a body that can present a united front for all the fragemented businesses and projects out there, challenge peoples thinking and validate much of the good work that has been done throughout the industry so far.
But for now, where do I think the future of the industry is heading? Who knows? The bar has been raised for sure, but whether we’ll see any new horizons being explored is less certain. Maybe it’ll be a race to the bottom, but also, just maybe we’ll see charity escape rooms in the place of charity shops to raise the awareness of particuar causes. Alternatively we might see a pop-up encampments of budding young codebreakers who lock away their phones for a day, step back in time and work together to crack the Enigma code over at Bletchley Park, or even a rise in augmented reality marketing techniques. It feels like the industry is close to a crossroads right now, so for those on this journey make sure you choose your next path wisely.
