Room Escape Artist

Escape room players are just ordinary people. Don’t cast them as someone extraordinary. Take them on an extraordinary adventure.

What I Am Not

I am not an astronaut. I am not an archeologist. I am not an elite detective. 

I cringe when game hosts are forced to tell me that I am. Not because pretending isn’t fun, but because I am now forced to play the game thinking, “what would my character know?” instead of just interpreting information naturally, as myself.

I sometimes struggle attacking puzzles when I think “my character should already know how to do this” or “wait, my character would already have some knowledge about this, am I missing something?”

There is something freeing about playing an escape room as yourself, knowing that since the game is designed that way, information will be provided to you as a lay-person. Being told to “take the throttles to full power!” is a lot more fun when I know the game is treating me as myself and expecting that I will have to figure out how to do that instead of the depressing feeling I get when I am supposed to be playing as an experienced pilot, but I don’t know how to adjust the throttles.

Something just doesn’t make sense if I, an experienced archeologist, am struggling to translate common hieroglyphs and can’t remember the names of common God figures. Similarly, I dislike being cast as an FBI agent without access to standard equipment, backup, forensics, and other basic resources a federal agent would surely have.

What Players Want

I have long been an advocate for escape room designers taking the advice of Lee Sheldon when considering their player audience.

Sheldon, on what game players want, from his book Character Development and Storytelling for Games:

What do audiences want from storytellers? If we listen closely, they will tell us:

• Take me to a place I have never been. 
• Make me into someone I could never be. 
• Let me do things I could never do. 

If we can fulfill those three far-from-trivial requests, we will have succeeded.

When we think about that 2nd bullet point – Make me into someone I could never be – I don’t think Sheldon intended us to attempt to make our players into someone they could never be just by telling them they are someone else via a 1 minute game intro video or piece of exposition recited by a game host. 

“You are the top scientists in your field,” or “You are expert FBI agents,” or “You were recently sentenced to life in prison,” etc… those types of extreme role projections are not necessary to make players into someone they could never be.

Anyone Can Have An Adventure

Remember, the Goonies were regular kids. Bilbo and Frodo Baggins were just regular Hobbits, yet they went on great adventures and did, in fact, become people they never thought they could be. We saw ourselves in those normal characters, and Sheldon’s requirement was fulfilled as their stories progressed.

Escape rooms as live action immersives, provide a medium for us to live those adventures. We aren’t seeing ourselves in some on-screen character. It is happening to us. It feels weird if I am expected to filter what is happening through the lens of an unfamiliar persona. 

Grand Examples

I am a big fan of Escaparium. Their Laval location houses some of the grandest adventure games in North America. Yet in two of their biggest, Wardrobe for Sale and The Forgotten Cathedral, players are cast as normal folks just looking to buy some furniture or mere tourists visiting a World Heritage Site. That is it. That is all the player needs to know when those games begin. You play as yourself.

Narrative and puzzle design take over to bring players up to speed with what is happening, but never ask players to try to be something that they are not. I love this about Escaparium’s games.

Make It Personal

• Players are more likely to feel personally invested in the game when they are portraying themselves. 
• Casting participants as themselves helps blur the line between reality and fiction. 
• Players are more likely to fully immerse into the scenario when they are not playing a predefined role, allowing for deeper engagement with the narrative and environment.

Conclusion

Most escape game stories and themes can be built or adapted to allow customers to play the game as themselves. Casting them as someone else rarely benefits the experience and often makes the game play more clunky and confusing.