Escape Joker’s Asylum

Playing escape room offline and online are very different experiences. Escape room is indeed a game that teaches a good lesson on affordance— when playing escape room online, it is always very challenging for me to figure out what objects offer what affordance and how that affordance could be achieved.

The interface itself decides what interactions are allowed and how users use it. When playing an escape room on your phone, all the interactions supported are essentially what a phone as a physical object can support. Replicates are rendered in the virtual space created on the phone, a mental model of which affordances are transferred to the phone and how they are supported by the phone is needed in order for players to fully embrace the game.

I was very excited and afraid of playing the escape room before we go for several reasons. Playing an escape room in person is not an easy thing. You have to find enough people that free during a specific period of time and are willing to give it a try for a mix of social factors and the game itself. Being able to play the escape room with people I am familiar of got me excited. Meanwhile, I was afraid that I would not be able to escape because I don’t think I am particularly good at this game, and an escape room game does require some culture literacy.

It turned out to be a great experience, even if we didn’t escape successfully. The physical settings provided lots of intuitive clues on affordance, making solving puzzles more of an intellectual challenge instead of a figuring out how the interfaces work challenge.

Another interesting thing was that, different from most escape rooms, we were placed in a room in which we players were separated into two different rooms with a one-way telephone as the only means of communication. This adds an extra layer of challenge and fun, and opens us a new set of strategies.

Designing a good escape room game is not easy. The story embedded is usually a string-of-pearls story, while in one locked physical space the designer probably want to balance the sequence of which clues are found: too linear then the game is too easy, too spacious the the the user may not have enough memory space to make sense of clues, especially the earlier ones. When you multiply it with the number of players and different skills and personality brought in by each player, there is numerous possibility in the actual gameplay, even though the escape room itself does not provide a good replayability. Our room was very complex to design, as there were 5 individual rooms and players started from 2 groups each exploring a different room at a time.

Time is another interesting control in the game. Players essentially have 2 resources when playing the game, their team intelligence and time. The later stage the game is in, the more tweaks time does to the gameplay. Certain strategies, behaviors, and especially emotions will emerge when the time is very limited.

The time I planned on spending on this essay is also limited, so this is an (abrupt) end of this essay.