Escape Rooms and the Seductive Ubiquity of Capture

A draft of the preface for my first book, in which I argue that--to the extent that they incline towards the abolition of the traditional author-audience relationship characteristic of "art"--video games represent the dialectical evolution of our existing aesthetic mediums

2023

This paper presents the challenges faced during the conception and development of a virtual reality game, of the Escape Room type, for simulation on the Meta Quest 2 mobile device. Based on the experience obtained, some important insights are provided, which are necessary to overcome the challenges faced and to promote a greater immersion of the player in the virtual environment. Related works demonstrate the importance of evaluating and continuing the studies presented, seeking to identify and promote significant purposes for virtual games, and promoting virtual reality teaching and learning based on the creation of proposals dedicated to immersive devices in a 3D virtual environment.

2021

Escape the Room games are popular all over the world, from New York to Kuala Lumpur, and have been created for all kinds of spaces. Although they are now thought of as a popular activity to do with friends, their origins are actually digital—its conventions derived from interactive fiction and point-and-click adventure games, and became its own genre of web games in the early 2000s. Their non-digital incarnations have taken the form of real rooms that invite participants to solve their puzzles to get out, and then have expanded to board games. This makes the escape the room genre a fascinating area of study and design, given how its history spans both videogames and physical games.<br>This special issue includes analyses and studies of escape the room games, either digital and non-digital, from all over the world. <br>The Well Played Journal is a forum for in-depth close readings of video games that parse out the various meanings to be found in the experience of playing ...

KnE Social Sciences, 2019

An escape room is a game that requires a group of players to solve a variety of tasks within a given amount of time in order to fulfill a specific goal, typically escaping a locked room. Despite gaining tremendous popularity of the game in Malaysia, there is no study being conducted in this area. Existing customer experience frameworks offer a limited explanation of this rising phenomena due to the unique inherent nature of Escape Room. Towards this end, the present paper aims to identify the key constructs of Malaysian Escape Room customer experience and determinants of the players revisit intention with respect to the Escape Room. The research is conducted on 20 players who have played at least one game in any Escape Room establishment in Malaysia. This study adopts the sequential incident technique, a qualitative approach to unearth the hidden perception of players. Thematic analysis was subsequently used to analyse the data which revealed fifteen determinants of which 9 are rela...

Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 2021

Building a more comprehensive understanding of gaming literacies, this article explores the kinds of literacy practices that emerge through participation and play within escape rooms. Based on a dataset of video recordings of participant interactions within an escape room, we perform side-by-side analyses of play based on two theoretical perspectives. In so doing, we propose alternative apparatuses for analyzing the gaming literacy practices and indeed the hidden and intended curriculum of escape rooms. This polyphonic rendering and reading are done not to argue that these are discrete phenomena within the flurry of the activity space of an escape room. Instead, it illustrates how these practices are interwoven with one another as well as with the tacit and collaborative knowledge of team-based cooperation, personal histories, and felt resources of play. Not simply noting how literacies mediate interaction in these gaming spaces, findings emphasize how learning, affect, interaction, and analog play are purposefully designed, entangled, felt, and understood.

2020

This article analyzes the design of MasterMind, an escape room that served as a means of professional development in the use and implementation of online educational tools in academic teaching. Escape rooms have inspired educators all over the world to adapt the popular entertainment activity for education. The time-constrained and problem-based games require active and collaborative participants, which makes an escape room an interesting setting for educators. As there are differences in the settings and goals of educational and recreational escape rooms, there is a need for description of the design process, taking into account game design and educational aspects. MasterMind was developed by a multidisciplinary team of educators, educational researchers and game researchers. The design analysis of MasterMind focuses on three related challenges that have informed the design process: 1) the participants' transition from the real world to the game world; 2) the alignment of game ...

The Border is Closed, 2015

In the Centre for Asylum Seekers in Bogovađa (Serbia), migrants play a game that resembles one we know, but the rules differ slightly and the name is different. In a situation where they hardly have anything to wear and eat, far from their families and homes, after walking thousands of kilometres, sleeping under the open sky, tired of constant risks, they – play. In tremendously difficult life circumstances, somewhere in a foreign land, a person develops the fundamental need to play.

This paper analyzes freedom structures of computer games from the perspective of existential philosophy, classical game and play philosophy, game studies, and the spatiality of games (e.g. Aarseth 2001; Nitsche 2008; Günzel 2012). Aiming to contribute to an existential ludology, it argues that freedom is a basic element in games which occurs between structural fear and boredom. This paper offers an essential structure of freedom in games different from romantic play theories like Huizinga (1998) and Caillois (2001) which hold “the first main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom” (Huizinga 1998, 8) and in which freedom signifies the player’s voluntary decision to play and to thereby suspend rules and customs of everyday life . However, concepts like the “lusory attitude” by Suits (2005) suggest that – apart from free play –most other instances of play (such as the playing of a game) provide freedom from everyday life only at the cost of different constraints . It is therefore to assume that the difference between freedom and restrictions in everyday life is repeated in games, too. This paper holds that games considered as “mirror image[s]” of reality (Fink 1968, 22) exhibit a similar existential structure as Heidegger’s Dasein (2008) in that “play is a basic existential phenomenon, just as primordial and autonomous as death, love, work and struggle for power” (Fink 1968, 22). It should be noted that Fink as a German native speaker does not distinguish between play and games. This paper therefore suggests studying the phenomenon of freedom in games from the perspective of existential philosophy with an emphasis on fear and boredom as discussed by Heidegger. To do so this paper demonstrates that many existential computer games (games whose own being at play is at stake (Gadamer 2004, 106; Leino 2012)) like Minecraft (survival mode) (Mojang 2011), Tetris (Pajitnov, Gerasimov, and Pavlovsky 1984), Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo 1985), all first-person shooters, XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis Games 2012) etc. depend on an elementary restriction to freedom which will be termed the fear-structure based on Heidegger’s analysis of fear (2008). In these games there exists always at least one entity (tetromino in Tetris) or event (running out of money in SimCity (Maxis 1989)) which is not supposed to coincide with another, detrimental entity (upper game space limit in Tetris) or event (building an expensive building in SimCity) that is usually in a harmful physical or metaphorical distance. Otherwise the game’s continuation is at stake. In terms of an existential ludology the fear-structure is a substantial part of the “gameplay condition” (Leino 2012). This paper argues further that freedom in existential games always depends on the successful understanding and dealing with such fear situations by the player. Since the fear structure is essentially spatial, the best way to deal with such threat is getting as much literal or metaphorical space between the detrimental entity or event and its susceptible counterpart. It will then become visible that the freedom differs in kind and degree. In Tetris the space between the detrimental and susceptible entity expands and contracts only a little over the course of gameplay but the player cannot do much else during the game. Hence the freedom in Tetris is only a promise of negative freedom understood as “the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints” (Carter 2012). In Minecraft (survival mode) the space of threat can get much larger dimensions to the extent that the fear-structure is temporarily suspended, e.g. if the player entity is hidden in a safe house or it is continuously suspended like in Minecraft (creative mode). In Minecraft (survival mode) we can then speak of a positive freedom based on negative freedom. Positive freedom is the possibility for “freedom as self-mastery or self-realization” (Carter 2012) when there is no threat to a game’s continuation. This leads to the opposite extreme of the fear-structure in games. If there is little to no threat to the continuation to the course of gameplay like in Passage, Proteus, or in Minecraft (creative mode) there is primarily positive freedom possible (Carter 2012). This positive freedom then is expressed in practices such as constructing a hard drive in Minecraft (Atherton 2014) or going on vacation in Grand Theft Auto V (Lindemann 2014). The lacking threat is a lack of “an essential need” and leads directly to what Heidegger terms “profound boredom” which paradoxically opens up the possibility to a game’s “innermost freedom”, i.e. to realize its own authentic possibilities to be (Svendsen 2005, 126, 122). In these games the gameplay is no more “imprisoned” by the same tedious activities of the everyday threat of a game’s continuation but it can “open[…] up to itself” and realize its own authentic possibilities to be (Svendsen 2005, 123) . The perspective of existential philosophy on games with the key concepts fear, boredom, and freedom will allow for an alternative conceptualization of computer games apart from romantic play theories. It makes the existentialism of games explicit which so far only has been implicit in said theories.

Game Studies, 2021

While much of the scholarship around games focuses on either communities of play, or the content of the games and gameplay themselves, comparatively little attention has been paid to the infrastructures that players must negotiate to gain access to the gameplay experience. In this paper we focus on the interfaces on the periphery of gameplay. These systems—such as authentication and login systems, distribution platforms, menu systems, controllers and character configuration and selection interfaces—serve as thresholds that mediate and dictate who may experience gameplay, and what kind of experience they are permitted to have. We term these kinds of peripheral-to-gameplay interfaces periludic, drawing on Genette’s formulation of peritext. We focus on interfaces for authentication and character configuration because of the practical, legal and performative outcomes they enable and enforce. Authentication processes control who is permitted to access games and gameplay, and under what legal and conceptual terms. Character configuration constrains who players are allowed to be within game worlds, and thus who games are about. We use these examples to position the notion of the periludic at an intersection between game studies, media studies, HCI and social science. We argue that attention to these often invisible or transactional aspects of gameplay experiences will allow games scholars to better observe how power and authority are negotiated by players of games.

Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Game Based Learning, 2019

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