Transcience: From Virtual to Physical
Driving through the torrential rainfall, the windshield wipers beat a soft rhythm on our trip to the OMESCAPE room. I was excited but nervous, having done an escape room with a few friends (and a few strangers) before this that resulted in some weird competitive dynamics. This quarter has been a magical one, however, which gave me hope that this experience would allow me to feel curious and open to the puzzles. Lulu, Jia, Dennis, Madison, and Yibing (with the help of an Ike’s sandwich, a few extra bags of chips and some LaCroix) were a fantastic crew with whom to explore this incredibly built space. Thus, it was easy to see that challenge, discovery, narrative, fellowship, and fantasy were all carefully pieced together to craft “Kingdom of Cats.” The puzzles in every nook of the rooms spoke to the challenge dimension, while the forced interactions between players made space for fellowship.
When Lulu and I chatted on the way home, she brought up a great point that although we tended to work together, the room itself did not force the cooperation between players. It would’ve been really interesting to see challenges that also required the players to cooperate, instead of coming to a solution that could be dictated by a single player’s capacity. The game designers wove narrative into the thematic elements of gameplay while maintaining a strong feeling of the magic circle. The magic circle tied in nicely with the fantastical elements of the theme. Even though it seemed geared towards children, I felt invested and interested in the fantastical narrative of the plot. Every element of the room added to the feeling of immersion that escape rooms can offer. As every part of the room is suspect for clues, the number of objects in each seemed to match the intended narrator of the challenge (i.e. Ghost Cat, Lady Cat, etc) and the difficulty of the challenge itself. The challenges were dynamic and the varied room sizes captured my attention in the middle when my interest dipped a bit.
The physicality of the escape room heightened the fantasy of the narrative. Interacting with the objects themselves instead of pressing ‘X’ to interact with the graphical interface of a chest of drawers redefined the way I interacted with the space in general. It was a contained playground, every clue must be read and every chest of drawers opened. Intoxicating! These are the feelings that I felt had been missing from my experiences with games. The genuine reward for the sensation that goes along with the physicality of the game allowed the transference of game system dynamics into the real-world (often the goal for serious games) in a concrete and valuable way. I find myself looking more carefully at the spaces I inhabit, thinking about what could be in the filing cabinet in the radio station or under the chairs in my house. If these objects could talk like they do in the game, what sort of narrative would they write? This sense of emergent and explicit storytelling speak to the wide potential of escape rooms, their intricate mechanisms, and wonderful magic circles. Now all a participant needs is the perfect crew, and even the most mundane objects can spin wild tales.
