Computing Models of Escape Rooms
Computing Models of Escape Rooms
Computing Models of Escape Rooms
By Ke Jing
December 06, 2020
Summary
Scott Nicholson suggests that escape rooms can be viewed as a medium of convergence with several precursors, including live-action role-playing, point-and-click adventures, puzzle and treasure hunts, interactive theater and haunted houses, adventure game shows, and themed entertainment.
In the following section, I introduce the object graph model that can better visualize the organization of puzzles in escape rooms.
The concept of puzzle path, or puzzle organization, is an under-explored idea in the discourse on escape rooms.
Escape room designers also use wireframes to design how puzzles are connected and grouped.
Figure 4b: A complicated wireframe of puzzle flow, presented by escape room designer Thijs Bosschert in his talk "The art of creating an escape room" at Still Hacking Anyway, 2017.
First, all the puzzles in an escape room can be expressed by a graph with connected nodes, with each node being an abstraction of an object.
All the puzzles in an escape room can be viewed as a graph of connected nodes, with each node being an object in the game.
An escape room game is a puzzle program of visiting and connecting the nodes in the designed object graph.
It proposes two major computing models of escape rooms: the object graph model and the player model that matches inventory lists to puzzle lists.
Players perform the computing inside rooms of objects by updating an inventory list and a puzzle list.
Reference
Jing, K. (2020, December 06). Computing Models of Escape Rooms. Retrieved December 10, 2020, from http://analoggamestudies.org/2020/12/computing-models-of-escape-rooms/