We love meeting other folks who enjoy immersive entertainment. This is a space to share ideas, find collaborators, talk about experiences (with spoilers!), and give/ get recommendations.
If you’re part of the New York City escape room and immersive community – or if you happen to be in town this week – we’d love to meet you.
Also, we’ll have some popular friends joining us from the other side of the world!
This is probably something that we should talk about a little more often.
Normal Vision
I’m going to give you a little background information. Then I’m going to show you a few easy ways that you can adapt your escape rooms to make them fully playable for players with colorblindness.
You can make your escape rooms playable for people with colorblindness with minimal effort and without spending any additional money.
Finally, the improvements that you make for players with colorblindness will improve the game for normal-sighted players as well.
Accessible Design
“Accessible design is a design process in which the needs of people with disabilities are specifically considered.” (Washington.edu)
There are times where it isn’t possible to create something that can be universally experienced in the same way. However, there are ways to ensure that the thing can be experienced at all.
Credentials
Professionally in my life as a digital UX designer, I’ve been practicing and advocating for accessible design for over a decade. I’ve written a white paper on this and given talks on the subject. (I no longer work for Phase2, but I’m still proud of this talk.):
Designing Escape Rooms For Colorblindness
How do we design escape rooms for colorblindness?
Most people with colorblindness can see color. They just don’t see it in the same way that normal-sighted folks see it. While monochromacy is a thing, it is incredibly rare.
With that in mind, here are 3 techniques that I recommend.
Colorblindness Simulation
The Coblis — Color Blindness Simulator is a free web app that allows you to upload images and see what they look like to people with different types of colorblindness.
And yes, you read that correctly, there are a number of different forms of colorblindness. Red-green colorblindness is the most common by a wide margin and gets all of the attention.
How Do I Use This?
Run images of your puzzles, designs, and interactions through the simulator and ensure that there is enough contrast that the colors appear different from one another.
In general, high color contrast helps.
That’s the key. Just make sure that every player has the opportunity to visually differentiate relevant colors from one another.
This is the same image run through the simulator to visualize different forms of colorblindness:
Normal Vision
Protanomaly
Deuteranomaly
Tritanomaly
Protanopia
Deuteranopia
Tritanopia
Monochromacy
Blue Cone Monochromacy
Additional Indicators
If you’re planning to use color as an indicator, add another layer such as a texture or a symbol.
Symbols
Combining colors with symbols means that players aren’t in the position where they have to communicate color. They can communicate by the corresponding symbol if they so choose.
Textures
Similarly, adding a unique background texture that corresponds with the color can provide another way to differentiate between, say, purple and blue.
Lighting
We beat this drum often: provide adequate lighting.
If you’re using low lighting for atmosphere, that can be cool. Please provide spotlighting for workspaces, puzzles, and inputs.
This will help improve the experience for all of your players, not just your players with colorblindness.
The Bottom Line
Make the experience a bit smoother for everyone by improving color contrast, giving people more than just color to identify gameplay components, and providing good lighting.
There are disabilities that are truly difficult to design around. We may explore those in the future. Colorblindness, however, is one that doesn’t have to be a problem most of the time.
If you’re on the fence about Escape, Immerse, Explore: New Orleans this July, you have 1 week left to decide… unless other people claim the last few tickets first.
The last day to purchase tickets is Tuesday, May 28.
13th Gate Escape, Baton Rouge (5 escape rooms… including their new horror game Asylum!)
An immersive puzzle event set in the French Quarter, designed and produced by Escape My Room
A weekend with Lisa and David as escape room tour guides
A talk by Lisa and David
A catered group meal
Bus transportation to 13th Gate Escape
Exclusive discount coupons to book additional escape rooms at these venues
Networking with other tour attendees
The option to play an escape room with Lisa or David
Event t-shirt
We have an incredible group of folks coming to this event from all over the country… and even from the other side of the world. Yes, 1 person is coming from Australia! On this trip you will have teammates who are as excited about these escape rooms as you are!
This is all included in your ticket for $799 per person.
Take Advantage
While in town, you can take advantage of the amazing food, drink, and partying that New Orleans has to offer.
Escape My Room will have Escape Extinction: Sharks running at the aquarium. Clue Carré will have new games open at their new location in Surge Trampoline Park. While these games aren’t officially part of the tour, you will have time to book them while you are in town. You will be some of the first players in the community to see these new attractions.
Don’t Wait
These tickets are only available until Tuesday, May 28th. There are only a few left and we anticipate they will sell out before the week is up. Buy your ticket today!
We had our suspects, but we couldn’t solve it… until Lisa caught a break.
Case Closed
For the past 7 years (with one exception), Lisa and her longtime friend Roslyn have chosen a single day to walk the ~35 mile perimeter of Manhattan. The event is called The Great Saunter (although they never do it with the group or even on the same day). This year, they did their Great Saunter in November.
When you walk 3 dozen miles with a person in a single day, the conversation tends to cover a lot of ground. Roslyn, who had been a character in our wedding puzzle, mentioned that she had visited Meow Wolf.
With that little bit of information, Lisa unravelled the puzzle that had been vexing us for 5 months.
We had suspected so many people from the escape room and immersive theater worlds that we completely neglected to scrutinize suspects from other facets of our lives.
Meow Wolf Documentary
In other, related news, while we still haven’t had a chance to visit Meow Wolf (and we truly want to), we did go see their documentary in the theater last night. It was equal parts entertaining and interesting.
The documentarians who pulled this together from old and new footage did a fantastic job. The film was energetic.
Meow Wolf’s origin story was legitimately riveting. Watching a collection of talented anarchistic artists struggle with success, organization, process, and commercialization was compelling.
The friends who’ve been to Meow Wolf and described it to us did an amazing job.
The film ended exactly where I was expecting, which was a declaration of aspirational commercial goals. This was an elaborate and artful commercial. I can’t blame them
Hearing someone say something like, “we don’t want to become like Disney” with contempt in their voice made me smile.
