Mind Gaming
Want to ace the escape room? Get some tips from a creator
Read our exclusive interview with Dr Scott Nicholson, the design-mastermind of the Red Bull Escape Room World Championship.
Dr Scott Nicholson, Professor of Game Design and Development and Director of the BGNlab at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ontario, Canada, is the mastermind behind the Red Bull Escape Room World Championship. Nicholson led a team of game design students in creating challenges for the championship that add the physical and mental aspects to that of telling a story and challenging the gamers in various skills. To improve the player experience, last year’s competitors Ken Ferguson and Wie-Hwa Huang were hired as advisers.
A visiting professor at MIT from 2011 to 2012, for Scott escape rooms are “intellectual activities that require teamwork and communication, and have an emphasis on stories and puzzles”. With an emphasis on the mind, this form of games has become a focus in popular culture; not only do they let you take on a role in life that is new and can build empathy for others, but also do the teams require a variety of skills and ways of thinking, which makes diverse teams a necessity on the way to success.
The mission for the last stage of Red Bull Mind Gamers is called ‘Omni’s Escape’ – can you give us some insight about this game, which will decide the 2019 world champions?
This escape room was inspired by hacking concepts, designed to challenge the participants in six problem solving skills: creativity, logic, visual thinking, musicality, memory and strategy. Communication is critical, and speed is of the essence. Respectively in teams of four, the mind gamers will work closely together throughout the game and express their brightest mind skills to solve the mysterious story about White Hat Laboratories and a fictitious hacker training camp.
What was on your mind when you started the design process for this final challenge?
When I took on this project, it was important to me that there be some type of a real-world connection with the content in the room. At WLU Brantford, our degree program in game design is about changing the world through games, and it was important for me that our team of students were able to explore how to incorporate learning outcomes into a recreational game. Another goal was to apply my "Ask Why" model to the game. We started with a learning outcome and a story that was inspired by the Mind Gamers movie, and worked on each challenge so that it advanced the story and made sense within the world. The other goal was to have both physical and mental aspects to many of the challenges, inspired by challenges on reality television.
What differentiates this escape room from others?
Rather than an escape room based upon solving puzzles, we wanted to create a room that was about creating interesting experiences that are not what would be in a typical escape room and that would be interesting for a spectator to watch. We recognized that we were creating a spectator sport with this escape room, so wanted to focus on challenges that would be more active and visual, and that would keep the team working together during most challenges. This means we de-emphasized searching and quiet cerebral puzzles, avoided using padlocks and black lights, and instead thought about ways to embrace the concept behind Red Bull vitalizing the body and mind.
How and when did you get into games? What’s your first memory about gaming?
Games have been important to me for my entire life. Like most of us, I started life playing to understand the world around me, and I have managed to keep my playful self active as an adult. My first memory about gaming is growing up with the Atari 2600. Far too many hours were spent holding a rubberized joystick and moving pixels around on a screen. I also always asked for board games for the holidays, even though they were rarely played in the house. I would set them up for multiple players and play the game by myself, which is still something I do to this day when figuring out a complex game.
Dr Scott Nicholson
© Mihai Stetcu | Red Bull Content Pool
Escape rooms are an unusual, extraordinary subject to study – when did you start your scientific approach and why?
I was first exposed to Escape Rooms when I was in Singapore giving workshops on gamification to government employees, and I was surprised to see these escape room facilities in one shopping mall after another. A group of librarians learned of my interest in them and went to one with me. I immediately knew they were of interest because of my prior work with live action games. My first game designs and publications were for live-action roleplaying games and I have developed many live-action simulations for training and teaching, so I saw escape rooms as another type of live-action gaming.
Escape rooms aren't something novel – they are an evolution of other types of games and activities such as point-and-click games, live-action games, haunted houses, reality television and puzzle hunts. The advantage of realizing that escape rooms are an evolution of other forms of interactive activities is that it provides us with many design lessons from these other areas useful in the creation of engaging escape rooms.
You are a huge fan of Disney. Does that affect the way you design? How does this influence show in your designs?
There are two lessons I've taken from my regular visits to the Disney parks that I use in my own design of games (and of classes). The first is the integration of narrative and the use of environmental storytelling to convey the narrative. Every Disney attraction has an underlying narrative that creates consistency throughout the experience. Even if visitors aren't told directly about the narrative, it exists as a design guide so that the attraction has a consistent look and feel. This was an inspiration behind my "Ask Why" model for escape room design, where you ask "why" about every element in the room to ensure it fits in with the world and narrative. The second lesson is to incorporate a spirit of playfulness within the activity with subtle winks to observant players. Disney does this with their "hidden Mickeys" where there are small Mickey logos embedded throughout the attractions. I enjoy putting in small winks and nudges to those who are observant. For example, one of the challenges we developed that didn't make it into the final escape room had players finding and playing a series of tones on whistles. The whistles were to be fashioned like plastic toys from a cereal box, which is inspired by a tool used for hacking pay phones – a whistle from a box of Captain Crunch.
At the Red Bull Escape Room World Championship
© Mark Somay | Red Bull Content Pool
Do you think escape room designs add an extra reality experience to the world of gaming?
Most games have players control an avatar within the game world. One of the reasons that virtual reality is growing in popularity is the concept of "embodiment," where the players have a more full-body experience in the game than with other screen-based games. Live action games, such as escape rooms (and sports), are unique in gaming in that the player and the avatar are one and the same. Putting a fishbowl over your head and looking at screens does not compare to physically being in a space with friends working together to overcome challenges. It's not only important for the mind, but also lets you take on a role in life that is new; in this way, escape rooms can build empathy for others. Escape rooms are powerful portals to history and other places in the world, and can be seen as interactive museums as well as puzzle-based games.
Why are people fascinated by escape rooms?
One of the attractions to escape rooms is that they are a cooperative experience. In other forms of gaming, we have seen a growth in games that require players to work together against the game. With escape rooms, players are put in a space together and have to rely upon each other's skills to succeed. The fact that players are physically together in the same space makes the game more intense than if each player was safely behind a screen controlling an avatar. When the door locks and the timer starts, players realize that all they have is each other to make it through this challenge. Another attraction about well-designed escape rooms is that they offer a variety of challenges, so that each person on the team has the chance to be the hero at some point during the game. Diverse teams perform better than teams with the same type of people, so escape rooms offer an opportunity to bring a group of people together who don't share much in common but allow them to succeed as a team.
What different player types (observer, logical thinker, the group-former etc.) do you see in escape rooms? Which player types/skill personalities does a perfect team need?
There are a few key skills that are useful in most escape rooms. First is someone who is detail-oriented for searching; younger players are good additions to teams as strong searchers, as they look at the world with different eyes than older players who make assumptions about how the world works. Second is someone who is good at managing tasks and team members. Most rooms have multiple challenges that can be tackled at the same time, and one person needs to be able to understand what is complete and no longer important, what is currently an active challenge that needs to be solved, and what room elements have not yet been explored. This person will lead the communication between team members and ensure that people are working on tasks that match their skills and interests. Third are individuals good at different types of puzzles, such as someone strong with mathematics, logic, and patterns, someone good with words and being able to read under pressure, and someone good with physical manipulation of puzzles and putting things together in different ways.
Dr Scott Nicholson
© Predrag Vuckovic | Red Bull Content Pool
What inspires you the most when designing?
Putting the player at the centre of the design is the most important thing to me. At heart, I'm a social scientist, which means I'm focused on the impact of what I've created on players. I've realized that game design is, at heart, an application of experience design, where the player experience drives every other design decisions. When I'm making a game to change the world, I think about how the player will be motivated to engage with the activities through the experiences that are created. When designing, I regularly ask the question "Does this design decision move the player closer or further away from the desired experience?" By asking this question, I then have a way of making design decisions and justification for each choice I have made as a designer.
Do you have any favourite escape room games?
In order to avoid spoiling games by naming them, I will instead talk about a few moments in Escape Room games that I have fond memories of. I enjoy games that allow players to do physical activities that are playful and allow for deeper immersion in the story, like crawling around tunnels while playing the role of a mouse escaping a house, climbing up and down the sides of a pirate ship or running around a two-story house looking for lost pets. My favourite moment in a game was when we were in a mafia-themed game and realized that we needed to cheat at a casino game in order to continue on with the challenge. I appreciated this because it required players to embrace their roles in the game and think outside the box.
What would you tell to encourage people to join the Red Bull Mind Gamers project?
One exciting thing about the Red Bull Mind Gamers project is that it is an adventure! For many people, they don't have the chance to participate in something that could lead to a global adventure; the redbullmindgamers.com website allows anyone to take those first steps and to test themselves. It's like a real-life movie where the players are answering the call to action, and the adventure is real and waiting!
Which games from the Red Bull Mind Gamers platform do prepare you best to try an escape room?
Each of the puzzles can help players build their mental skills in different ways, and I would suggest that players looking to be competitive be able to play all of the games! Another skill to develop using the platform is communication, where one player watches another person control the game and gives verbal instructions that the controller must follow to overcome the challenges. Being versatile and being able to communicate clearly are valuable skills for not only escape rooms, but also for life!