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Collaboration, Awareness, and Communication
in Real-Life Escape Rooms
Rui Pan, Henry Lo and Carman Neustaedter
School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University
102 – 13450 102nd Avenue, Surrey, BC, Canada, V3T 0A3
[ruip, hwlo, carman]@sfu.ca
ABSTRACT
Real-life escape rooms involve players being locked in a
room where they have to solve puzzles in order to escape.
We co nduct ed an observational and interview study with 38
escape room players to understand how groups of people
collaborate in escape rooms, what opportunities escape
rooms present as learning environments for improving
collaboration, and how the design of escape rooms affects
collaboration. Our results show that escape rooms provide
people with opportunities to practice a range of
collaboration skills, yet not all generalize to real world
collaborative situations outside of the escape room. Thus,
people may have an opportunity to practice communicating
and maintaining an awareness of others, but the design of
the room restricts such behaviors. These findings raise
design opportunities for future escape rooms related to team
dynamics and roles, the acquisition of situational and
workspace awareness, and the teaching of conflict
resolution techniques.
Author Keywords
Escape rooms; collocated collaboration; communication;
team building; relationship building
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.3[Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and
Organization Interfaces – CSCW.
INTRODUCTION
In real-life escape rooms, players are locked in a room or
series of rooms and tasked with solving puzzles in order to
escape under time constraint. Escape rooms emerged in
Japan in 2007 and, by 2012, began to proliferate in numbers
and migrate across Asia, into Europe, and eventually North
America and Australia [32]. Since then, escape rooms have
increased in styles and numbers around the world with
influences from live-action role playing games, treasure
hunts, as well as a similar video game genre where players
help an avatar escape from an on-screen room [32].
The clues and hints to escape room puzzles are often hidden
in boxes with some form of combination or key lock that
need to be unlocked in a predetermined order. Once players
solve the puzzles in the room, they learn how to unlock the
final door of the escape room. Rooms are decorated with
objects and décor to match a theme and narrative where the
objects themselves are typically used to help solve the
puzzles. For example, the position of darts on a dartboard
may give hints to a combination lock’s code. Basic levels of
technology are a part of many real-life escape rooms. This
includes the use of sensors, lights, displays, etc. that are
programmatically controlled or incorporated into puzzles.
As escape rooms evolve, it is likely that they will include an
increasing amount of technology. For example, this may
contain the use of increased context sensing and tangible
computational puzzles (e.g., the use of objects with
sensors/actuators in them as part of puzzles). Escape rooms
may even become distributed where players connect over
distance from different rooms and help each other over
video or audio communication systems.
Escape rooms are interesting in that they have the potential
to offer researchers and designers with a means to explore a
range of social and technical research questions. This is
similar to how alternate reality games (ARGs) have been
used over the past decade. For example, ARGs have
allowed HCI researchers to explore social issues such as
trust in strangers [7], new forms of education [9,10], and
the limitations of connectivity [6]. Escape rooms could be
valuable for studying topics such as the use of networked
devices (e.g., as part of the ‘Internet of Things’) and
context-aware computing, since escape rooms are now
starting to include computationally-enabled objects. Escape
rooms also naturally lend themselves to exploring research
questions around communication and collaboration skills
since players are often corporate groups or teams of
family/friends [32] and many escape rooms are marketed
for team morale events, birthday parties, and get-togethers.
One could imagine the potential for escape rooms to be
designed as a form of educational environment to teach
work teams a particular workplace skill, or to teach school
children a lesson in math or problem solving. Escape rooms
could be designed for families as a means to foster
intergenerational collaboration and communication between
parents and children, or grandparents and grandchildren.
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DIS 2017, June 10-14, 2017, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
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ACM 978-1-4503-4922-2/17/06…$15.00
DOI:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3064663.3064767
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Despite the potential, designing escape rooms for the
aforementioned situations can be difficult as it is not clear
what design factors are important to think about and
address as a part of escape room design or study and how
technology could and should be used within escape rooms.
The challenge is that, beyond anecdotal evidence, we do not
have a strong sense of what happens in escape rooms in
terms of how play and collaboration manifest themselves.
This is because escape rooms offer a different context than
situations involving more typical acts of collocated
collaboration in society (e.g., meeting room activities,
collocated board game playing, collocated console gaming).
Escape room players are subject to various design
constraints, including time pressures, a small spatial area, a
narrative theme, and environmental effects to create a
desired type of atmosphere. Understanding how these
design attributes affect play amongst players is important if
escape rooms are to be designed as learning tools, research
instruments, or training programs for specific demographics
in the future. Thus, our research goal was to understand
how groups of people play and collaborate in escape rooms,
what opportunities escape rooms present as learning
environments, and how the design of the room affects play
and collaboration. This knowledge could then be used by
designers, researchers, or educators who want to create
escape rooms or leverage ideas from them to teach
particular skills, simulate certain types of experiences, or
evaluate particular group behaviors.
The contribution of our research is twofold. First, we
present what we believe is the first observational study of
play within escape rooms. Here we describe how
collaboration and play occurred in the escape rooms we
studied. Second, we use this knowledge to describe the
opportunities that escape rooms present more broadly as
learning environments that are enhanced with technology.
Our results show that escape rooms could be used to test
and explore social and technical questions around
leadership, group hierarchy, proxemics, and distributed
cognition where technology in the form of networked
devices and as part of context-aware environments could be
used to teach or study behaviors on these topics. Compared
to ARGs, escape rooms provide a different type of learning
and testing environment. Escape rooms are closed-ended,
require less orchestration during play, and have a different
type of immersion than ARGs. In comparison to lab studies,
escape rooms provide a fun environment with potentially
more realism. This presents a valuable alternative design
space for exploring some situations. Based on these
findings, we sensitize the reader to a series of design
challenges that should be thought about as a part of escape
room design, particularly in the case where escape rooms
might be used to target specific types of collaborative
activities or groups (e.g., training programs, education).
These lessons focus around team member roles, awareness,
and social conflict where technology can enhance the
experience.
BACKGROUND
Real-Life Escape Rooms
There is very little empirical research on real-life escape
rooms. The only documented study that we know of is
Nicholson’s [32] white paper that reports on a survey
completed by proprietors of 175 escape room facilities
around the world. The survey documents the different styles
of escape rooms and shows that they contain a range of
puzzle types including logic, spatial and mechanical (e.g.,
moving an object a certain way), and word or math puzzles
[32]. Puzzles are presented in an open (13%), sequential
(37%) or path-based model (45%) [32]. Open models allow
players to solve a number of puzzles all at once where they
provide clues to a final puzzle. Sequential models have a
linear sequence of puzzles. Path-based models have
multiple sequential paths where solutions from each path
allow players to solve a final puzzle. Player groups consist
of groups of adults over 21 years (37%), corporate groups
(19%), groups of young adults (19%), intergenerational
groups (parents and children) (14%), and date night couples
(11%). Nicholson suggests that escape rooms be designed
for varying player experiences (e.g., hardcore vs. casual
players), replayability (so players can play multiple times
with different puzzles), and cultural diversity (designing to
match the local culture where the game is being played).
While valuable as a means to understand who plays in
escape rooms and how the rooms are generally structured,
the existing research does not explore what happens within
escape rooms in terms of play and collaboration. This
makes it unclear as to what types of group behaviors escape
rooms support and what design factors affect them.
Pervasive and Alternate Reality Games
Similar to escape rooms are Alternate Reality Games
(ARGs)—a type of pervasive game that takes place in the
real world and includes an overarching narrative that seeks
to blend together the game and real life [7,15,26,29]. ARGs
are seen as a form of transmedia storytelling as narratives
are presented across a series of mediums [8,9,10]. This can
make it difficult to design replayable ARGs so researchers
have suggested designing ARGs with multiple story paths
and a narrative that is not time dependent [21]. While
escape rooms contain themes, narrative, storytelling, and
sometimes actors [32], their level of orchestration is much
less when compared to ARGs. ARGs have been found to be
open-ended where they provide players with flexibility in
terms of how they understand the ARG, as well as closed-
ended where play is carefully planned and orchestrated with
a definitive end game for players [8]. Escape rooms are
only closed-ended, given the single overarching goal of
escaping the room. They also do not tend to blur together
real life and the game environment in the same way that
ARGs do [7]. To complete an ARG, players move along
trajectories or paths, which intersect at varying points with
the canonical path created by the game’s designers [4,5]. As
stated, escape rooms can vary in their model of paths
through the game.
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Collaboration has been studied in several pervasive games
and ARGs. For example, studies have explored trust in
strangers [7], the limits of connectivity and GPS [6],
heightened awareness of one’s environment [2], improved
navigation [3], community creation of game content
[30,31], and spatial and temporal separation [41].
Collaboration has been shown to occur amongst pervasive
game players who know each other either as family, friends,
or schoolmates [9,30] and even strangers who have similar
shared interests (e.g., game genres) [3,34,41]. Such
collaboration benefits player motivation [33], learning [9],
and can create a shared sense of history and location [35].
Ye t c ol la bo ra t io n i s n o t a lw ay s e as y a n d s pa ti al a nd
temporal separation can deter collaborative efforts [41].
Collaboration can be aided when players develop various
levels of leadership in order to coordinate their efforts
[34,41]. For example, studies of the ARG I Love Bees
showed a military strategy for establishing hierarchy and
leadership [34]. The use of digital tools and player-adopted
tools are also seen as being valuable to overcome spatial
and temporal issues with game locations that are spread
across a country [41]. Researchers have suggested
supporting collaboration by connecting players together
across larger communities and groups, e.g., connecting
novices with experienced players [21]. One way this can be
done is through asynchronous groupware that allows
players to help each other through simple acts of
recordkeeping [30,31]. In escape rooms, collaboration
likely occurs amongst players to solve the puzzles and
escape the room, yet we do not know how the concepts
from the related literature may or may not apply to escape
rooms, given their specific context and environment.
Escape rooms constrain players in terms of time and space;
in contrast, the pervasive games found in the literature
typically span much larger environments and timeframes.
Awareness and Coupling
There is a body of research that explores how small groups
of co-workers collaborate together in shared physical
spaces such as meeting rooms. Given that 19% of escape
room players are co-workers [32], we detail such processes.
Situation awareness is defined as “being aware of what is
happening around you and understanding what that
information means to you now and in the future” [16]. It
helps people decide what information is important in order
to accomplish a particular goal [16,23]. Even when seeing
the same information, people’s awareness can be different
[36]. When groups collaborate, they naturally maintain
workspace awareness: knowledge of each other’s
interactions and activities in the workspace [19,20].
Wor ks pac e awar eness allows people to coordinate actions
with collaborators, anticipate the actions of others, discuss
tasks, find opportunities to help one another, and move into
and out of closely-knit groupwork [19,20,23]. This latter
aspect is known as coupling and focuses on the degree to
which collaborators are working together [39,40]. When
partners need to wait for others fairly frequently for them to
finish their own work it is tightly coupled [37]. If partners
can go for long time periods on their own without
interactions with group members, it is loosely coupled [37].
Collaborators are often mobile in common spaces when
working together (e.g., around a shared table) [40].
Sometimes they use divide-and-conquer strategies to
complete tasks, sometimes they will perform parallel work,
and other times they will be performing closely coupled
work [40]. Social protocols are often used to negotiate and
move into and out of different coupling styles [40] and this
behavior is fluid and frequent [39]. Workspace awareness
comes from people explicitly talking about what they are
doing, overhearing the conversations of others, listening to
people’s verbalizations that go along with their actions, and
paying attention to body language and the use of artifacts
[20]. As group members work in different areas in a
collocated setting, they also tend to partition spaces as
theirs or the groups to exhibit aspects of territoriality [38].
They even maintain a certain social distance to give each
other appropriate space to work [23]. In our study, we show
how and why escape room players move between coupling
styles and how the use of space/territoriality, workspace
awareness, and situation awareness is different in an escape
room than typical meeting settings.
Team Cognition and Shared Mental Models
Tea m c ogn itio n is “th e s eam less execu tion of c oor dina ted
behaviors” amongst team members [18,24] while
distributed cognition refers to cognitive processes
distributed across members of a social group [24]. Team
cognition and coordination is aided by awareness,
communication [1,11,18], and common ground [11] and is
created by pre-existing knowledge of team members and
conditions and ongoing interactions between team members
[1,11,12,22]. Team cognition will more easily develop if
team members know each other and train together [17,22].
Tea m members who are familiar with one another have
been found to perform better at tasks initially in a group
setting; yet, over time, such differences fade as team
members get used to one another [22]. Group
communication and team dynamics are critical and affect
how well a team does at a task [14,25].
Teamwork can also depend on the ability for a team to
develop a shared mental model of their situation [13,28].
This is particularly the case when team members take on
similar roles such that shared knowledge amongst them is
important [11]. A mental model is an understanding of how
something works that lets people understand and interact
with their environment [13,16,27]. A team or shared mental
model is a mental representation shared by team members
[13,22,27,28]. Team mental models consist of knowledge
of equipment and tools, goals of the team, awareness of
what teams members know, and knowledge of effective
team processes [13]. Teams with a shared mental model are
likely to work better together because they will be in
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synchronization more [27]. In our study, we show how
mental models are shared between players in escape rooms
and how player relationships affect teamwork.
STUDY METHODOLOGY
The goal of our exploratory study was to understand how
groups of people play and collaborate in escape rooms,
what opportunities escape rooms present as learning
environments for improving collaboration and team
dynamics, and how the design of escape rooms affects
collaboration. As part of these goals, we wanted to
understand what works well in the design of escape room
and what challenges exist. These challenges might suggest
missed opportunities for supporting collaboration, which
future designs and technology may be able to address. Our
study was approved by our research ethics board.
Participants
We re crui ted team s o f p layer s t hrou gh wo rd of mo uth,
email advertisements to our university department, and
social media posts. Thirteen groups of players, including a
total of 38 people (19 female), agreed to participate.
Groups ranged in size from two to five players and were
self-selected, typically representing co-workers, friends,
couples, or family, though four teams had people who were
strangers with at least one person on the team (recruited by
a mutual friend). Most players were in their early to mid
twenties with the exception of four players who were in
their 50s. 15 of 38 participants had played in at least one
escape room prior to the study, 17 participants had never
participated in an escape room, and 6 participants had done
more than five. A large amount of participants were
undergraduate or graduate students, though many held jobs
outside of school. Occupations varied, e.g., programmers,
administrative assistants, health care providers, analysts.
Location and Themes
We partnered with Time Escape, an escape room facility
located in Greater Vancouver, Canada. We also played in
six different escape room facilities in order to gain a
firsthand understanding of how teams participate in an
escape room and how rooms and puzzles might vary across
facilities. We found a large consistency across facilities in
our region in terms of the general style of puzzles and
escape room themes yet they varied in quality. Naturally,
escape rooms vary more broadly across the globe in terms
of style, theme, and content [32].
Participants could choose to participate in one of four
different rooms at Time Escape where all had a science
fiction or mystery theme. This is because it is the most
common type (and nearly only type) of escape room in our
region. Themes included spaceships and aliens, a historical
castle, a haunted cabin, and time travel. All rooms had a 45
to 50-minute time limit and teams were allowed two hints.
Rooms varied in size but all were under 150 square feet;
thus, they were relatively small rooms and spatially could
only reasonably accommodate six people at a maximum.
This was the limit imposed by the escape room facility.
Three of the escape rooms contained a series of 2-4
interconnecting rooms with a locked door between each.
All rooms had a sequential structure of puzzles such that
they needed to be completed in a preset order; however, one
could find clues for future puzzles ahead of time.
Method
Players first selected which type of themed room they
wanted to participate in from the set of four. Then, during
each game session, one researcher accompanied the team
into the escape room to observe game play and collect
handwritten notes. This was guided by a semi-structured
observational checklist that included concepts and questions
based on the related work, e.g., coupling styles, situation
awareness, workspace awareness, communication styles,
player interactions, spatial orientation, player positioning,
puzzle-solving strategies. The observer took notes on these
concepts in addition to other behaviors that he saw. The
observer did not assist the players in any way. Two d iff ere nt
researchers took on the observation role (one observed ten
teams, one observed three teams); this allowed them to
discuss what they saw with different teams as part of our
analysis. Only two teams escaped their room and the
remaining eleven teams did not—this reflects the escape
room’s reported acceptance rate of less than 20%.
After the session, participants completed a paper-based
questionnaire that asked them questions about their past
experiences in escape rooms, their motivations for playing
escape rooms, what they felt was easiest/hardest about the
room, their strategies for solving the puzzles and working
as a team or individually, and how the escape room affected
their relationship with their teammates. We use d our
knowledge of the related literature on collaboration to guide
our questions. Most questions were open-ended in order to
be exploratory and understand a range of player experiences
in detail. After completing the questionnaire, participants
were interviewed as a group about their experiences with
questions that were similar in nature to the questionnaire.
For example, we asked, “How did you let others know what
you were doing?”, “How did you know what your
teammates were doing?”, “What would you change about
your strategy for next time, if anything?, “What would you
change about the escape room, if anything?” This lasted 15
to 40 minutes depending on the team. Te ams of par tici pant s
were compensated with a $40 payment and a 10% discount
on their admission price of ~$20 per person.
Data Collection and Analysis
Data was in the form of observational notes, handwritten
questionnaire responses, and interview notes. The escape
room company did not permit us to collect any photo or
video data from the observations because of privacy
concerns; they did not want to risk any visual clues or
secrets of the rooms becoming public.
We explored the various data using thematic analysis and
affinity diagramming. We it erati vely r ead th roug h our d ata
and noted various interaction and collaboration behaviors.
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Two re sear che rs then categorized responses from
participants and our observations into groups with similar
meaning and ideas. We rev iewed thes e con ce pts and
discussed differences in opinions, which led to the
refinements of some categories. We fo und larg e cl uste rs of
data around concepts of awareness, communication modes,
and group dynamics. Within these clusters, we found
subcategories including leadership, verbal communication,
non-verbal communication, awareness through verbal
exchanges, awareness through peripheral viewing, the
constraints of physical artifacts on collaboration, loose and
tight coupling for puzzle solving, and social conflicts. We
further discussed these categories to decide which
collaborative behaviors we felt were most critical to the
players’ experience. We selected these categories as the
focal areas for our results sections.
Anonymous quotes from participant interviews and
questionnaires are shown in our results along with vignettes
of player activities from our observations. Vignette s are
based on our observations while participants’ thoughts and
feelings articulated in them come from our questionnaire
and interview data. To pr ese rve the confidentiality of the
escape room’s puzzles, we have changed the types of
objects described in the vignettes to similar yet different
objects, e.g., a photograph might be changed to a book
cover. This does not affect the behaviors we describe.
LEADERSHIP ROLES AND EXPERTISE AT PUZZLES
Leadership roles sometimes arise in collaborative activities
as a means to help guide the activities of others [34,41]. We
observed that when teams first entered the escape room, one
or more players in the team took on a leadership role within
the group. Players did not explicitly call them the ‘leader’
but implicitly they acted in this capacity. We observed men
take on this role in 7 of 13 teams, while in the remaining
teams a woman took on a leadership role initially. Consider
Tea m 1 as t hey fir st ente red the roo m:
Te am 1 c onsisted of five players who were all friends—one
woman and four men. When they first entered the room,
there was little discussion of strategy or what to do.
Instead, P3 (male) started directing players to perform
certain actions. He told P2 to start looking for clues and P4
to point her flashlight at the wall. P4 found a card on the
back of the door that she thought was the first puzzle to
work on. P3 noticed P4’s finding and started describing
how he would solve the puzzle to his teammates.
P3’s leadership role reflected his past experience of
competing in several escape rooms. He knew what types of
items to look for and had strategies in mind for solving
puzzles. Thus, he had a clear mental model of what needed
to be done. He was quick to tell his teammates this and
share his experience. In this way, he began to create a
shared mental model amongst himself and his teammates.
Other teams followed a similar process to Team 1. Unlike
teamwork that may occur outside of an escape room where
leadership selection and the assignment of tasks may
involve some time and discussion, leadership roles
coalesced very quickly amongst the teams we observed and
without any discussion. This is likely because of the time
pressures of the room. There was a general understanding
amongst players as to who had the most experience with
escape rooms and puzzles, since many of them had talked
about it before their participation, and players were quick to
accept and trust this expertise. Players with the most
experience in escape rooms nearly always took on a
leadership role. If there were several experienced players in
the group, they would share the leadership role and guide
those who were less experienced than them. When all team
members were inexperienced at escape rooms, social roles
and personalities outside of the escape room played a role
in determining a leader. For example, in Team 7, all three
participants were first time players but one of them was
more vocal in the group. The participants were from the
same church group and P21 was one of the public speakers
for the youth service. P21 assumed a leadership role in the
group by suggesting what other players should do.
We o bserv ed th at te ams th at we re ma de up of ju st co uple s
(Teams 11-13) saw fluctuation in terms of leadership where
leadership roles changed frequently. However, when teams
had three or more players, leadership roles tended to persist
throughout the duration of the team’s escape room time.
The exception was when certain players built up experience
and credibility through their play activities. This sometimes
caused dynamics to change. For example, if a particular
player solved a puzzle, she was likely to have more
influence with her team members on subsequent puzzles.
P31 acted as a leader of Team 10 early on in their session
when he discovered a series of hidden symbols on portraits
hanging on the escape room’s wall. He told his teammates
about them and suggested how they should use them. As
team members tried to solve the puzzle using P31’s
suggestions it became apparent that P32 had her own ideas
about how to solve the puzzle. She figured out the meaning
behind the portraits and then solved the puzzle. When the
team found the next puzzle to solve, P32 led the team by
making suggestions of what to try.
COLLABORATIVE COUPLING STYLES
While one might expect that the linear nature of the escape
rooms we studied would require collaboration that was
always tightly-coupled—team members working together
and requiring each other—collaboration instead moved
fluidly between loosely and tightly coupled teamwork.
Trans it io ns between Coupling Styles
Team members often began by working in parallel to figure
out what they first needed to do in the room. This
collaboration was loosely coupled and represented a divide-
and-conquer strategy. For example, when teams first
entered the escape room, they often spent the first couple of
minutes searching around the room for combination locks
that they would need to open as well as any artifacts that
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they might be able to use to solve puzzles. This included,
for example, pictures hanging on the wall and toys or other
props. Once one or more team members realized what
needed to be done, they would converge and naturally
transition to a more tightly coupled style of collaboration
where they would discuss what to do and sometimes work
in small groups on specific tasks. Such tasks often relied on
the work of others. Consider Team 12:
Te am 1 2 entered the escape room and the players began
searching independently for objects that they could use.
P36 (female) found a UV flashlight and started to shine it
around the room. P35 noticed P36 shining the flashlight
and went over to help her. Together they started to use the
flashlight to look around the room and what they could use
to unlock the first lock. P36 handed the UV light to P35 so
she could enter numbers into a combination lock. As she did
this, P35 started telling her possible numbers to try. P35
waited for P36 to test out each number that he told her.
As can be seen, P35 and P36 started out in a form of loosely
coupled collaboration and this transitioned into tightly
coupled work where each relied on the other person. When
teams worked closely together, it was evident from their
activities and discussion that they shared a similar idea or
mental model of what needed to be done to complete the
puzzle. Yet if they became stuck or unsure of what to do
next, they typically would transition back to a loosely
coupled style of collaboration to pursue their own ideas.
“People tend to work together when they both understand
the puzzle. Otherwise if someone doesn’t understand a
puzzle they will either step back or try to work on
something else.” – P19, Male, Interview
Tea m s also commonly converged together when they
became stuck over a period of minutes and were unable to
progress. In these cases, none of the members of the team
had the correct mental model needed to solve the puzzle. At
this point, team members discussed if they should ask
employees for a hint. Ta king a hin t wa s cons ider ed to be a
major decision since they were a limited resource. As such,
teams most often came together and tried to reach a
consensus. For example, Team 10 sat down on the floor
together for more than ten minutes when they became stuck
on a puzzle. They exchanged thoughts about potential
strategies and talked through the need to get a hint.
Sometimes puzzles contained elements that required
players to work together by performing synchronous
actions. The need to collaborate in these situations was not
always obvious to players at first, but, once they recognized
it, players typically converged quickly to work together.
Members of Team 13 encountered a puzzle that required
them to compare two thermometers that were on different
walls of the room. It was not possible to see both
thermometers at the same time given the distance between
them. P37 started by walking back and forth between the
two thermometers. It appeared difficult for P37 to
remember the numbers on each thermometer when arriving
at the next one. P38 recognized this and started telling P37
what number was on the thermometers closest to her. P37
stopped walking between the thermometers.
Physical and Spatial Constraints
The physical constraints of the rooms themselves affected
players’ collaboration and where people positioned
themselves or moved. As mentioned, the escape rooms that
we had in the study were relatively small (~150 square feet
or less). This meant that there was not a lot of room for
team members to work in. Te am memb ers moved
throughout this space readily and we did not notice any
sense of territoriality. That is, team members did not avoid
areas in particular because they thought their team member
was working in it despite sometimes being relatively close
to one another. When team members were working closely
together on a puzzle, they would situate themselves in the
same area and stand or sit right next to each other. Often
this was very close—sometimes touching shoulders or
bumping arms—because of a lack of space.
P1 was staring at a series of light up buttons on the wall
trying to figure out how they worked. He was stuck for
several minutes so he yelled out to others for help. P3 came
over quickly and moved very close to P1’s position in front
of the lights. They were almost touching. P1 and P3 stared
at the wall for a moment together and then P1 started to
move away from P3. There were no verbal exchanges and
P3 then took over the space previously occupied by P1 to
get a better view. P1 wandered to a different part of the
room in an attempt to search for more clues and assist P2.
As can be seen, movement sometimes did not involve
verbal exchanges. In other instances, team members would
ask others to move so they could get better access to an
area. These requests were sometimes abrupt likely because
of the time pressures brought on by the escape room.
As players unlocked doors and moved between rooms in a
multi-room escape room, they would sometimes be working
in separate rooms. This made it harder to collaborate
because players could not see each other or their actions.
Players in Team 3 were standing around a dimly lit lamp
wondering what it could be used for. P9 noticed that there
was a power cable running from the lamp to the other side
of the wall in a separate room that they previously
unlocked. P10 went into the other room to look around to
see where the power cable went. After some searching, he
found that it went to a hand crank. He started cranking it
not knowing what effect it might have. This started to
generate enough power to increase the brightness of the
lamp in the first room but P10 couldn’t see it happening. P9
starting yelling to P10 in the other room to keep cranking.
While the challenge with multiple rooms is somewhat
obvious, puzzles could easily, and inadvertently, force such
collaborations to occur. Yet the tradeoff is that having
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multiple locked rooms and moving between them was
exciting for players as it suggested progression in the game.
Artifact Constraints
The escape rooms that we studied were all relatively dark
given their mysterious themes. To ass ist p laye rs, staff
provided teams with a limited number of flashlights,
dependent on the number of players in a session. For our
study sessions, it was between two to three flashlights per
team. In addition, rooms contained a number of physical
artifacts that were needed to solve the puzzles. These items,
again, affected how players worked together or did not.
P33 found a UV flashlight in the room and starting panning
it around the wall to see if it would illuminate any hidden
text. P34 suggested shining it on a particular area and P33
did so—they both looked around the room together.
Eventually, P34 asked to use the flashlight and P33 gave it
to her. P33 started moving around the room to look for
other useful items. P33 found a rope and started to toss it
towards a box a few feet away. P34 continued to look for
hidden text with the flashlight. P33 managed to retrieve the
box using the rope and P33 and P34 then came together
and took turns trying different passwords for the box’s lock.
As can be seen, items were scarce. This meant team
members had to share them. This sometimes necessitated
players to work in a tightly coupled way. We also observed
that the person who found the item would most often
maintain a sense of ownership over it, at least initially.
Thus, they would use it on their own, or follow the
directions of others for how they should use it. For
example, P33 took P34’s suggestion on where to shine the
flashlight rather than initially giving it to her. When items
were exchanged between players, it often implicitly
suggested a responsibility to take over the task of directly
using the object. For example, in the above vignette, the
handing over of the UV flashlight saw P34 take over the
searching task and P33 move on to another task. There was
no verbal acknowledgment. Instead, P34 understood her
new task and took it on.
SITUATION AND WORKSPACE AWARENESS
Situation and workspace awareness are critical for
establishing smooth collaborative work and come from
knowledge of what others are doing in the same
environment [16,23]. In many work settings, this awareness
is gathered through a combination of verbal and non-verbal
communication, and the peripheral viewing of activities
[16,19,20,23]. Yet, in escape rooms, we found that verbal
communication dominated awareness gathering.
Verba l Co mmuni ca tion
The most common way that team members stayed aware of
what others were doing was through verbal communication.
Players would often shout across the room to get a response
from a team member or to form an agreement to ask for a
hint. For example, if one player found a clue or a solution
that would benefit the team, s/he would verbally announce
it to the team. If a team member needed assistance from
another team member, s/he would yell across the room.
Rather than a more typical calm conversational tone, verbal
communication was often louder, more direct and
sometimes reflected little patience with others. Verbal
exchanges were found throughout several of the previously
presented vignettes. In addition, consider Team 4:
Te am 4 co ns isted o f a ver y ex per ie nc ed es ca pe ro om p la ye r
and two first time players. When the experienced player,
P13, came to the realizatio n that the puzzle he was working
on was very similar to a puzzle he had done before in
another escape room, he became noticeably excited and
called loudly to P14 and P15 to come over. P13 told them
he knew what to do to solve the puzzle and described the
steps for it—the conversation was short and to the point.
Next, P13 started moving back and forth between two
pieces of paper that were attached to the wall at different
locations. He told P14 and P15 to match the lines drawn on
the paper together and that they should form four digits;
this would likely be the combination to the lock.
While searching for clues, some players would often ‘think
aloud’ as they worked. Here they verbalized what they saw
and what they were trying to do to solve the puzzle. The
hope was that others would hear what they were doing and
try something similar. Consider Team 11:
P33 and P34 were trying to figure out what the numbers on
two different wall maps meant. P33 was standing near one
map while P34 stood near the other. As they thought
through the puzzle, P34 kept saying her map’s numbers out
loud over and over. P33 heard this and would occasionally
glance between P34 and the map closest to him.
Similar to the above situation, we noticed other teams and
players counting items out loud and reading words out loud
that they found on walls or objects. Our interviews showed
that other players noticed this behavior and found it helpful
to gain a sense of what others were doing.
Non-Verbal Co mmuni ca tion and Peripheral Viewing
The use of non-verbal communication tended to be more
rare than verbal communication when it came to
maintaining situation and workspace awareness of what
others were doing. Team members were often more focused
on their own efforts as compared to that of their teammates
and they did not often look around to see what other people
were doing. Instead, players quickly tried to work on their
own tasks. This is likely because of the time pressure
imposed by the escape rooms. Body language was also not
seen to be very useful for communicating steps to complex
logic puzzles. Unless the room supplied team members with
some form of writing board, they could not write down
notes or answers which others could see and understand.
Thus, information about how a team member was solving a
puzzle was often ‘in their head’ and not somewhere visible
for teammates to see. Sometimes team members even
preferred to not write things down because they felt it was
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faster. Consider Team 2 where P7 preferred to memorize
answers to a puzzle rather than write them down:
Te am 2 c onsisted of tw o wo me n a nd on e ma n. P7 was
trying to memorize a sequence of symbols to enter into a
combination lock. P8 stood next to her with a writing
board and marker but did not write anything down. Instead,
P7 tried to only use her memory. P6 and P8 watched but
did not know why P7 was trying the numbers that she was.
In our interview, we learned that this was frustrating to both
P6 and P8, but they felt they needed to trust P7’s memory
and judgment so that they did not get into a fight with her.
At times the dim lighting in the rooms (in order to create
mystery and match the themes) made it difficult for players
to see what others were doing, what artifacts they were
using, and what body language or gestures were being
conveyed. Teams had only a limited number of flashlights
or objects with light to help them see.
In the rare cases when people did look or glance around to
see what was going on around them, they would notice
where people were generally positioned and if they were
using any artifacts in the room. As illustrated in previous
vignettes, the peripheral awareness of the actions of others
was sometimes used to change one’s own course of action.
SOCIAL CONFLICT
Our participants saw social conflict as somewhat inevitable
given the time pressures placed on them. When teams
progressed smoothly through the game session, we found it
unlikely that conflicts occurred. As one might expect, it was
only when a team began to struggle or was not satisfied
with their progress that conflicts arose. Most often team
members recognized that they should set aside any
differences in opinion in favor of focusing on solving the
puzzles. That is, the conflicting parties understood the
pressing need to escape the room and were willing to put
their emotions aside for the time being. The conflict,
however, sometimes resumed post-game when team
members would chat about their experience.
Social conflicts that were minor in nature occurred when
team members disagreed about puzzle-solving strategies or
were ignored in the decision making process of taking a
hint. In these cases, we observed noticeable annoyance on
the faces of the affected players or a change in their
behavior over the course of seconds to minutes.
Te am 1 2 s ta rt ed i n t he e sc ap e r oo m w it h P 36 t el li ng P 35
what he should look for and try to find. The two searched
for several minutes and then P35 appeared frustrated. He
said aloud that he wanted to receive a hint. Rather than talk
with P36 first, P35 walked directly to the button to call for
the hint and pushed it. After receiving the hint from staff,
P35 began telling P36 not to waste time looking around the
room aimlessly anymore and that she should be more
focused on the clue. He began walking between two
pictures on the walls to double check what numbers P36
had read off of them to ensure she was correct. P36 stopped
working and watched P35.
As can be seen, discontent emerges between P35 and P36 in
this situation and it led P35 to be more ‘bossy’ with P36.
This frustration led him to ignore her in the decision to take
a hint. Sometimes other teams saw people being ignored
during hint decisions as well. Team members were either
preoccupied with their own individual work and did not
notice a team deciding on a hint or team members felt a
player’s input was less relevant because of puzzle
inexperience. For example, Tea m 6 v ote d t o s ee if they
should receive their first hint. In this case, every team
member was given the chance to voice an opinion. But as
time passed, the more active team members forgot P21
during the voting for the second hint. The team did not
realize their mistake and apologized to P21 after the study.
P21 was frustrated but able to forgive his teammates.
“Feel a bit bad forgetting to ask my friend if he wanted to
ask the second hint.” – P20, Female, Questionnaire
We only saw major conflicts occur amongst two teams. By
major, we refer to conflicts that had a noticeable effect on
the team throughout the remainder of play, e.g., a player
stops participating or there is a verbal argument. In each of
these cases, the teams included at least one stranger to a
team member (as opposed to teams where all players knew
each other). Players said they had a harder time
communicating with those people they did not know.
Sometimes they held back on things they wanted to say.
Other times, players did not listen as closely to those they
did not know well, and there was a lack of trust. For
example, a major conflict arose with Team 5 where two
participants (P16 and P17) refused to talk with each other
after the game. Prior to the study, P16 and P17 did not
know each other and had been recruited by a mutual friend
to participate. During the course of the escape room, they
recognized that they had different play styles and
personalities. The team had been unable to escape their
room and felt this was a result of a logic puzzle that the
team spent more than ten minutes on. While the team tried
to complete it, P16 became impatient and offered to take
over the puzzle. P17 was primarily working on the puzzle
and refused to let P16 help and, instead, she continued to
solve the puzzle at her own pace. The puzzle was
eventually solved, but participants became wary of each
other’s suggestions. After the study, P16 and P17 said:
“I found it is hard to prove something is wrong to people
you just met. If you try you could possibly offend someone.
If you don’t, you won’t make progress! It is a tradeoff.” –
P16, Male, Questionnaire
“If the people you don’t know and they play well, may be
made friends. If the people you don’t know, and not good at
team work or no contribution, definitely would not want to
be friends and never play again.” – P17, Female,
Questionnaire
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DISCUSSION
We n ow discuss our results and their implications for
design. Our goal is to sensitize readers, including designers,
researchers, and educators who might use escape rooms to
study particular research questions, commercial escape
room designers who create escape rooms for the public, as
well players of escape rooms (including companies that
might use them for team building events) to the potential
benefits of escape rooms as well as the ways that escape
room designs may affect participation in them. We f eel this
is especially important if escape rooms are designed to
specifically teach certain skills, such as strategies for
effective collaboration and communication practices,
specific workplace training, or as tools to build
relationships, such as between family members (e.g.,
parents/children, grandparents/children). What may seem
like simple design decisions can easily turn out to not be the
case (e.g., puzzle structure, number of rooms, lighting). For
this reason, we explore how the design breakdowns that we
observed suggest opportunities for technology interventions
as a part of escape room design.
Collaboration and Awareness
First, we found that escape rooms provide people with
opportunities to practice their collaboration skills where
they are able to perform various nuanced collaborative acts.
Tea m mem bers move between loosely and tightly coupled
group work and can practice methods to smoothly do so;
they can practice gathering situational and workspace
awareness; they can practice their communication skills;
and, they can practice the development of a shared mental
model. The time pressure of the room tends to cause people
to ‘not hold back’; thus, it brings out somewhat of a more
‘authentic’ form of a person in a short manner of time. That
is, one can see how another reacts and collaborates when
under time pressure and a potentially increased amount of
stress as a result. This could certainly be advantageous as a
means to learn about others and develop team skills in a
short amount of time. This is promising because we know
that many people participate in escape rooms for such
reasons [32]. It also suggests that escape rooms may be
valuable environments for teaching more specific types of
workplace or school training that involve collaboration.
Ye t e sc ap e r o om d es ig n s can easily make it so the
collaboration and communication skills being taught and
practiced are not entirely like situations outside of the
escape room. This raises questions about their
generalizability. Research shows that in collocated settings
it is important for team members to gain situational
awareness of what is happening [16,23] and workspace
awareness of collaborators’ activities [19,20,23] where this
comes from hearing others, and seeing artifacts and actions
[16,19,20,23]. However, escape rooms may have different
attributes than common work or educational locations in
order to match a theme and narrative, and create a sense of
panic (e.g., time pressure, multiple rooms). This may cause
people to overly rely on verbal communication and raises
questions around how escape rooms might be designed to
encourage non-verbal communication and situational
awareness through peripheral viewing, while still
maintaining a sense of allure brought by the escape room’s
theme and narrative.
Critical points in time when team members in our study
needed to gain situational awareness, but perhaps did not,
involved the changing use of artifacts (which were often
scarce) as well as the movement of a person through the
room, which could suggest a changing strategy or the
finding of artifacts that might be of value. Given that a key
problem was people overly focusing on their own work at
the expense of knowing what others were doing, one could
imagine the design of technology that attempts to make the
work and actions of others more salient in an escape room.
For example, one could imagine a reactive escape room
environment where objects provide audio or visual
feedback when picked up or put down, so that players may
be more likely to glance at the direction of the feedback and
gain a greater sense of situational awareness—one of the
challenges we observed in our study. Similarly, one might
imagine feedback of player movement throughout the room
with areas of the room briefly lighting up when players
enter or leave them, as an example. Ideas such as this may
allow players in escape rooms to gather a greater sense of
situational awareness even within themes that are dark and
mysterious. It may also help to train people to know that
such knowledge is valuable and can aid collaboration. Of
course, one would not want such feedback to be overly
dramatic or overt. Thus, technology designs would need to
offer a careful balance.
Social Dynamics
Second, we learned that escape rooms provide people with
opportunities to practice leadership skills and varied social
dynamics, where this may not always map to social
hierarchies and roles outside of the escape room.
Leadership was often based on puzzle solving experience,
yet similar to studies of ARGs [34], this was also an
emergent behavior based on the completion of game tasks.
Like other teamwork situations [13,22,27,28], leaders
worked to share their mental model of the situation—in this
case, how the escape room puzzles might be structured.
Based on our post-game discussions with teams, we
recognized that players and groups come into the escape
room with an existing set of social roles and structure. For
example, some people were used to being social leaders in a
group because of workplace or family dynamics and
hierarchy (e.g., a manager of a workgroup, a parent of a
family). These dynamics sometimes dissolved in the escape
room and new ones emerged based around one’s experience
with puzzle solving tasks. If players are not expecting a
shift in social status and it occurrs, social conflicts may
arise. On the other hand, some players may have a positive
experience if they are interested in or okay with
experiencing a new role within the group.
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This raises design questions around if and how escape
rooms should be designed to preserve existing team
dynamics and roles. For example, should escape rooms be
specifically designed for workgroups where elements of the
escape room ensure that a team manager remains as a
leader? This could be done, for example, by giving certain
instructions or clues to just the manager. A simila r approach
might be used to strengthen existing notions of family
hierarchy. If technological artifacts were placed in the
room, they may, for instance, react differently to different
people depending on their social role. For example, an
object may reveal more information when held by a parent
than her child. This reflects the varying degrees of
understanding that we saw players have when looking at
and thinking about objects in the room. On the other hand,
there might be ways to consider the design of escape room
puzzles and activities that purposely work to disrupt the
normal social order of groups so that people learn new
skills and, perhaps, gain a greater sense of appreciation for
the skills that others bring to the table. Again, technological
artifacts may be programmed to respond differently to
different people and this might purposely change over time
to encourage them to explore new roles and interaction
styles.
Social Conflicts
Third, escape rooms provide people with opportunities to
face and deal with conflicts where they might learn
important conflict resolution skills. Our results showed that
conversations in escape rooms can become domineering in
nature, people may lack patience with others, people may
infringe on typical expectations of territoriality and
personal space [38], they may work in much closer
proximity to each other than they are typically used to [23],
and they may be forced to use shared artifacts even if they
do not want to. These all have the potential to lead to social
conflict. However, this brings with it the opportunity for
people to understand and learn from what may make them
feel uncomfortable, and, if conflicts arise, seek ways to
resolve them in a positive manner.
This suggests that escape rooms could be designed to teach
common conflict resolution skills, such as the sharing of
ideas or listening to teammates’ views. For example, digital
puzzles might require the inputting of ideas from multiple
different teammates before a successful answer is accepted.
Resources and puzzle artifacts may be imagined as varying
in numbers depending on sensed dynamics in the room. For
example, if tensions become high like we sometimes
observed (e.g., loud voices are sensed), digital objects may
be replicated so that people can be encouraged to work on
their own for a bit to step away from a situation. This could
work with items digitally projected on a wall or physical
objects that can be ‘turned on’ or ‘off’ programmatically.
Changing interactive visuals in the room (e.g., lights
turning on in certain areas) may also encourage people to
move to different areas depending on social dynamics. In
this way, play could be migrated between tightly coupled
and loosely coupled work, as needed, to encourage good
collaboration skills and conflict resolution techniques.
Puzzle paths could even be adjusted on the fly to move
between sequential and parallel paths. Sequential paths
may be beneficial for teams that are working well together,
as we saw for many teams, while parallel paths may work
better for team members that are experiencing problems,
such as those who do not know each other well and value
more independent play like was the case for several teams
in our study. While automatically sensing social dynamics
and reacting to them may be difficult, escape room staff
could monitor behaviors and adjust the contents of an
escape room and its appearance from a control room, if the
escape room had a greater degree of technology embedded
in it. Thus, a greater degree of room orchestration by
escape room operators—more similar to that seen in ARGs
(e.g., [7])—and the ability to do so, may be beneficial.
Limitations
While valuable, our study is limited in that our players were
mostly of a younger demographic (early adulthood) with a
cultural background specific to the area of North America
that we studied. Thus, our findings could be culturally
specific to this age group and cultural background. Further
studies should explore how players of both an older and
younger demographic (e.g., children) play together. Studies
of escape rooms in countries with likely different cultural
backgrounds (e.g., Asia) would offer compelling cross-
cultural comparisons to our results. We a lso s ugge st fu ture
work that explores different types of escape rooms beyond
the science fiction/mystery ones that we studied. We al so
note that the average number of players in our study groups
(~3) is less than the average size of groups reported in
Nicholson’s survey of escape rooms [32]; as such, real
world situations may see slightly different group dynamics.
CONCLUSION
Our paper described an exploratory study of players’
collaboration in escape rooms through observations, post-
play questionnaires, and interviews. Our results describe
the ways in which play manifested itself in escape rooms
and how the design of the room affected teams’ experiences
and activities. We found that escape rooms can provide
learning environments for exploring social questions around
leadership, group hierarchy, conflict, proxemics, and
distributed cognition. We also found opportunities for
furthering the use of technology in escape rooms where
designs could be used to enhance collaboration, awareness,
and communication. This presents opportunities for
researchers to explore the design of reactive, computational
environments where one could research social and technical
questions around the use of networked devices/objects,
context-aware computing, etc. We offered several design
ideas as starting points for exploring these avenues.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We t hank th e Nat ural S cien ces a nd E ngin eerin g Res earch
Council (NSERC) of Canada for funding.
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