The Eight Roles for Escape Room Success

People ask me how they can succeed at an escape room.   One of the things that is important is to ensure that you have a team that can take on the various challenges in a room.

To help with this, I've developed this list of the eight roles that I see as crucial to succeeding in an escape room.  A person can have multiple roles.  If you don't have something that is listed, then be prepared to get a hint if you are faced with this type of challenge.

Project Manager - This person should have an idea of what is the current challenges the group is facing and is the person who is the communication hub.  If things are found, it should be reported to the project manager, and this person should be communicating with the group about what everyone is looking for.  This person shouldn't get stuck in working on a puzzle, but instead should be monitoring the flow of the room and ensure that people have something to work on.

Searcher - This person should be focused on looking on, under, above, around, behind, and inside everything.  They should be on the floor looking under furniture, searching in every pillowcase and pocket, and working through books in the room.  This is a great role for a younger player on a team, as they have fresher eyes than us old jaded folks.

Quartermaster - If the project manager is handling the people, the quartermaster is handling the stuff.  This person should work closely with the project manager and the searcher.  They will have a place in the room to put each type of thing that is found, as well as an area to put things that have already been used.  They will be most likely to be able to connect two different things together when facing this type of "a ha" puzzle.  They will also keep people in the room from wasting time working with something that has already been used.

Brain - The brain is the puzzler of the group.  This is the person who knows different types of logic and math puzzles and understands strategies for working through them.  There are certain types of encoding schemes that are in escape rooms (Morse code, Braille, Pigpen, 1-26 for A-Z, Roman numerals) and the Brain should be aware when they are looking at one of these and to seek a key.

Reader - This person's job is to read everything.  In some rooms, this is a crucial role, and in other rooms, it doesn't matter at all.  What doesn't work is for someone to quickly read something out loud to everyone, as people just don't listen.  It's better to have someone read documents to themselves, and then report to the Project Manager what the text contained.  This person can also look for funny patterns in text that might be an encoded message and pass that onto the Brain.  In addition, if there is a word puzzle, the Reader is a good one for it.

Rogue - This person has good physical dexterity, and will be the one to take on laser mazes, physical challenges like throwing or dropping things.  Most rooms have something physical, and a team can waste a lot of time letting everyone have a try (even though it might be fun).  It's better to let one person try and re-try a challenge, getting better at it, and then after they succeed, the rest of the group can play with the props later.  

Worker - This person needs grit.  The worker is someone who can take a process puzzle and work and work and work on it.   The other players should involve the worker as needed to accomplish tasks that are tedious.  Sometimes, there is nothing else to do other than try every key on the keyring or look behind every book on the shelf, and the worker will be the one for that task.

Game Designer - The game designer should have a different mental approach to the escape room.  They should be comfortable with how escape rooms are built, and be looking for patterns in design.  They can follow the wires from electrical puzzles to get an idea of what should work together.  They should be asking "what would the game designer want us to do" and "what is the style of this company/designer".  If there are multiple rooms in a facility, the game designer should be looking for design patterns between different rooms.  This can also be a frustrating role if the game isn't well-designed; while it is rewarding when something works because it's in the logic of the world, it's frustrating when something doesn't have a logical reason as to why it is in the world.

Side note - I wrote a paper all about using the concept of "Ask Why" to design escape rooms, which you can find here: http://scottnicholson.com/pubs/askwhy.pdf

Dialectic Vitalogue Game Release

Last fall the BGNlab collaborated with Dialectic hosting a game jam to generate game ideas about advanced healthcare planning. Dialectic documented the process with this excellent video. 

Dialectic - The Making of Vitalogue from Dialectic on Vimeo.

Two students from the Game design & Development program worked on the final game which lauched today and here is the press release. 

June 20, 2018—A new educational resource is now available to help health-care professionals encourage and support important conversations about advance care planning between patients and their families.

Vitalogue: A game about Advance Care Planning is a scenario-based e-learning game, created through a collaboration involving St. Joseph’s Health Centre Guelph, Conversations Worth Having Waterloo Wellington, Hospice of Waterloo Region, Hospice Wellington, and the Canadian Mental Health Association Waterloo Wellington (CMHAWW). Vitalogue was created by Dialectic, a Guelph-based e-learning solutions provider, and leverages insights from the Game Design and Development Program at Wilfrid Laurier University.

“Advance care planning is the process of determining your future healthcare wishes and identifying a substitute decision maker to speak on your behalf in the event that you should ever be unable to make decisions about your own healthcare,” said Audrey Devitt, Waterloo Wellington Geriatric System Coordinator, CMHAWW. “Vitalogue will equip healthcare professionals with the knowledge, confidence and practical skills to encourage and support advanced care planning conversations between patients and their substitute decision makers and loved ones, which is important to alleviate stress among families.”

Vitalogue features an interactive story presented in a scrolling, comic-book style choose-your-own-adventure game, where people navigate key concepts of advance care planning, substitute decision making, capacity and consent, and difficult conversations. Each decision made along the way is weighted with a score, and, in the end, people discover whether their choices led to a good outcome for the main character, Yarsdel Nordstom.

“Because healthcare decision-making relies heavily on applying abstract concepts and principles to novel situations, a scenario-based experience was a clear design choice. We wanted healthcare professionals to practice the skills in real-world contexts, not merely learn more information in a way that was divorced from its application,” said Aaron Barth, President of Dialectic.  

The Vitalogue e-learning initiative is an outcome of the three-year Advance Care Planning project “Conversations Worth Having,” focused on educating healthcare professionals and residents; ensuring legislative compliance across healthcare settings; and improving support for caregivers.

Play Vitalogue: A game about Advance Care Planning

See The Making of Vitalogue (video)

About St. Joseph’s Health Centre Guelph

St. Joseph's Health Centre Guelph has been serving the Guelph and Wellington community since the day it first opened its doors as a refuge for the sick, the injured, the frail, and the indigent in 1861. Today, it is Guelph's leading, fully-accredited, not-for-profit provider of resident long-term care, complex continuing care, and rehabilitation services. The Health Centre also offers excellent community outreach services for people who live in their own homes but need a little assistance in their day-to-day lives. In addition, St. Joseph's out-patient clinics offer a range of services in the areas of geriatrics, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech/language pathology, rheumatology, and bone densitometry. sjhcg.ca

About Dialectic

Dialectic creates immersive e-learning, organizational change and customer engagement experiences - powered by science and smart multimedia design - to solve problems and elevate performance. We illuminate core challenges and design an ideal solution, based on our expertise in behavioural science, psychology, education and creative design arts, to change thinking and elevate outcomes. Dialectic.solutions

About Conversations Worth Having Waterloo Wellington

In 2015, Hospice Waterloo Region partnered with Hospice Wellington to launch a three-year project focused on Advance Care Planning and Health Care Consent. With three dedicated staff and funding from the Ministry of Health, the project reached out to community and health care settings as critical sites for engagement and education. The staff engaged individuals and groups across the community and health care sectors to raise awareness, build correct understanding and encourage Advance Care Planning conversations. The project funding came to a close in April 2018 but both Hospice Waterloo Region and Hospice Wellington continue to coordinate community education and provide resources across Waterloo Wellington. acpww.ca

For more information please contact:

Audrey Devitt

Waterloo Wellington Geriatric System Coordinator

Canadian Mental Health Association Waterloo Wellington

1-226-820-3830

adevitt@cmhaww.ca

Aaron Barth

President

Dialectic

1-226-979-2424

aaron.barth@dialectic.solutions

www.dialectic.solutions

Live chat with Amanda Warner

Join us Monday, April 2 from 11 am to noon for a live chat with learning designer Amanda Warner, designer of the games Fake It to Make It, about how misinformation is created, spread and targeted, and Posto Facto, in which players become news fact-checkers. She is also the creator of a wide range of online courses, including a six-module course about how to diagnose, treat and prevent childhood tuberculosis created with The Union in collaboration with the World Health Organization.

 Warner will be taking your questions about game design live on Monday. You can also tweet us your questions ahead of time using #AWInterview. Be sure to sign up below for a reminder when the live chat is about to begin!

Game of the Year Fair - April 6th

It's time for our annual Game of the Year Fair!  

On Friday, April 6th, from 6-8pm, we will be showcasing our best student-created games.  Throughout the year, students have been creating games, and we have selected the best ones.  Come see a room full of board, card, and digital games designed to change the world!    You can drop by at any point, and we will be announcing the winners of the Game of the Year awards at 7:45.

Open to the public.    Here is information for visiting the BGNlab:  http://bgnlab.ca/visiting/

April GameTalk - Dr. Emily Flynn-Jones

Game Talk:  Thursday, April 5th, from 7-9pm in the BGNlab in Brantford.  Open to the public.  

For our last GameTalk of the academic year, we welcome our post-doc, Dr. Emily Flynn-Jones. This GameTalk is an opportunity to meet her and learn about why she makes games and why she makes them with us. 

You will learn why she feels partly responsible for the 80s industry crash but isn't particularly sorry about about it, why she moved from television to games even though she stood on a mountain with Tom Hardy and worked in the Tardis, that 90s Nickelodeon shaped her game design philosophy, that she is a feminist and makes games that are political and personal and is dedicated to exploring subjects unspoken, and that game design is a form of catharsis for her. Cats might also come up.

Overall, this will be a talk about how who we are, how we have lived and what we love can inform our art. 

A content warning:

This talk makes frank reference to the speaker's experiences with anxiety, depression, mania, agoraphobia and death. While this sounds dark, these are crucial to why Flynn-Jones makes what she makes and she also has a healthy and appropriate sense of humour about her mental health so it won't all be grim. As the late great Carrie Fisher said: "If my life wasn't funny then it would just be true and that is unacceptable."

Here is information about visiting the BGNlab: http://bgnlab.ca/visiting/