Collaboration, Awareness, and Communication in Real-Life Escape Rooms

Abstract

Real-life escape rooms involve players being locked in a room where they have to solve puzzles in order to escape. We conducted an observational and interview study with 38 escape room players to understand how groups of people collaborate in escape rooms, what opportunities escape rooms present as learning environments for improving collaboration, and how the design of escape rooms affects collaboration. Our results show that escape rooms provide people with opportunities to practice a range of collaboration skills, yet not all generalize to real world collaborative situations outside of the escape room. Thus, people may have an opportunity to practice communicating and maintaining an awareness of others, but the design of the room restricts such behaviors. These findings raise design opportunities for future escape rooms related to team dynamics and roles, the acquisition of situational and workspace awareness, and the teaching of conflict resolution techniques.