Episode 129 Scott Nicholson on EscapeIF
Scott Nicholson on EscapeIF
Episode Summary:
In this episode of Experience Points, host Dave Eng interviews Dr. Scott Nicholson, professor and director of the Game Design and Development Program at Wilfrid Laurier University. Dr. Nicholson discusses EscapeIF, a system designed for low-resource classrooms to integrate storytelling and interactive fiction into education. He explains how EscapeIF emphasizes engaging narratives and problem-solving without relying on expensive resources, using tools like chalkboards and found objects. The episode explores the challenges of adapting educational games for diverse settings and highlights the importance of reflection in learning. Resources, including free games and guides, are available at EscapeIF.com.
Scott Nicholson
he/him/his
Professor of Game Design
Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ontario, Canada
Dr. Scott Nicholson is Professor and Director of the Game Design and Development program at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ontario, Canada. He was the host of the first YouTube series about board games called Board Games with Scott, and has designed several published recreational board games. His current focus is on escape rooms, immersive experiences and live-action games designed around real-world learning outcomes, and was the lead author of the book Unlocking the Potential of Puzzle-Based Learning: Designing Escape Rooms and Games for the Classroom. Most recently, he worked with the mEducation Alliance to develop EscapeIF, a system to allow teachers in low-resource classrooms to use storytelling games requiring only a script, a blackboard, and found objects.
(Twitter): https://x.com/snicholson
(LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottrnicholson/
(Research Gate): https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Scott-Nicholson-2
(Facebook): https://www.facebook.com/professor.scott.nicholson/
(YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/@ScottNicholson
(Website): http://scottnicholson.com
Dave Eng:
Hi, and welcome to Experience Points by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. I'm your host, Dave Eng, from games-based learning by University XP. Find out more by going to universityxp.com.
Dave Eng:
On today's episode, we'll learn from Dr. Scott Nicholson. Scott is a professor and director of the Game Design and Development Program at Wilfrid Laurier University in Brantford, Ontario, Canada.
He hosted the YouTube series Board Games with Scott and has designed several published board games. His current focus includes escape rooms and live action games aimed at real-world learning outcomes. He co-authored Unlocking the Potential of Puzzle-based Learning: Designing Escape Rooms and Games for the Classroom and recently collaborated with the mEducation Alliance to develop EscapeIF, a system enabling teachers in low-resource classrooms to use storytelling games with minimal materials. Scott, welcome to the show.
Dr. Scott Nicholson:
Why, thanks. Thanks for having me, and I hope I earn a lot of Experience Points from being on this show. I certainly could level up.
Dave Eng:
Definitely. Definitely, Scott. If anything, I think our listeners will be able to level up today by learning a little bit more about you, your work, your background, and everything. And I want to start off with that last part of your bio, which is talking about EscapeIF and just basically an introduction to it.
So some people may already be familiar with it, but some people may not be. But can you explain what EscapeIF is, and the core philosophy behind its development, and specifically how did your partnership with the mEducation Alliance shape the project?
Dr. Scott Nicholson:
Sure. So this all started, I was giving a talk at a conference about escape rooms and escape rooms in education because that's something I've been working on and been passionate about. And a person came up and said, "Scott, I'm Tony Bloome. I'm from the mEducation Alliance, and we work with low-resource classrooms. We work with classrooms around the world where they don't have a lot of resources, but the escape rooms for classrooms you're talking about require a lot of stuff." And that's true. If you've ever run an escape room in a classroom, you know you need a lot of paper, or you need locks and boxes.
In my storage room at my game lab, I have many, many, many boxes and locks, and it looks kind of like a safety deposit box room with all these boxes that are locked up. And he said, "How could you take an escape room and make it into something that would work in a low-resource classroom? Because typically, escape rooms aren't good at being low-resource. They're flashy and lots of stuff, and that's their hallmark, but what could we do?" And I thought, "That's a really interesting challenge." And I had a sabbatical coming up for the university, and I thought, "This might be a nice challenge to take on for my sabbatical."
So if you don't know, a sabbatical is where a faculty member is given either a semester or a year off to go and focus on some big, hard research questions. And so I decided to make the focus of my sabbatical. So I worked with the mEducation Alliance over that year, and we started looking at classrooms specifically in Rwanda and how could we make games that would have escape room concepts and would work in those spaces. Now, I've been involved with games for 50-plus years, and over that time, I've experienced a lot of different formats of games they haven't... and video games have been out there for some of that time, but there's lots of other types of games.
And I thought about, "Huh, well, what is an EscapeIF room? What's actually going on there?" And you're... And good escape rooms, well-designed escape rooms, and a lot of my talking and research is always about this, is about telling a story. In a good escape room, there's a narrative that's going on, and the puzzles and the challenges are all helping to convey that narrative. And that's true for really any engaging game. The story is important, and you make the mechanisms come out of and support the story because it's through stories that we learn.
We've learned it through stories for generations. And so I thought, "Well, at the heart, the escape room concept is really stories with embedded challenges and puzzles." And so I thought, "Well, what if we made a concept for... the concept for EscapeIF? The F from EscapeIF stands for Interactive Fiction. Interactive fiction games, these are games that have been around for some time, the old text adventure games. The, "There's an open field here. There's a fishing pole here. What would you like to do?"
Dave Eng:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Scott Nicholson:
Those old games like Zork. Those are interactive fiction games where you're telling a story, and you're asking the players what they may want to do. And there's also a party game out there more recently called Parsely Games, which takes that concept of interactive fiction but brings it into a party game environment. So one person has a script and will point to someone in the room and say, "What do you want to do?" And that person tells them, and the person with the script looks at the script and says, "Oh, well, you take the fishing pole. What would you like to do?" And points to the next person. It's kind of a party game.
And I said, "We could do that in a classroom. We could have a classroom game where the teacher points to one student and says, 'What do you want to do?' And in responds to it and points to the next student and says, 'What do you want to do?'" And that was where EscapeIF started, was taking that concept. And what I found as I developed it over this year of sabbatical is that that concept, while it works for people that are comfortable being a game master or comfortable doing improvisation, didn't work so well with teachers who didn't have a lot of experience with role-playing games or that sort of thing.
And so I thought, "Okay, this isn't working in classrooms where the teachers don't have a lot of gaming experience. What could work?" And I started thinking about Choose Your Own Adventure books, which I loved as a kid. I would always read them and put my fingers in all the different pages so that if I made a bad mistake, I could go back. It was kind of like early save games. So I redesigned the whole EscapeIF concept around Choose Your Own Adventure book style because then the teacher could read a paragraph and ask the students what they want to do, and then the students could be in small groups could talk about it for a minute, and then everyone can vote.
And whichever way the class votes is the way the narrative goes on. And then there's points in the narrative then where we bring in a challenge. And that challenge is where the classroom math activity or learning activity comes into play, but it's embedded in a situation that's inspired by the real world. And it's really a glorified story problem, if you will, where the class has had some say in the narrative to get to this point because that's gets them more engaged. And then, when they're done, they have a greater understanding of why they would use that concept in the real world because they've had it in this embedded narrative.
So it's branching narrative games, but it only uses a chalkboard and found objects. So the teacher will use the chalkboard to record information about the state of the game. Say the players put on a coat and then they say okay, write on the board, "Okay, you've got a coat," because that could be useful later on in the game. But the idea is to make it easy for a teacher to start playing because they're just reading a script with numbered paragraphs. They don't need a lot of stuff to do it, but to create something where the students are both doing activities that lead to learning outcomes and then through reflection because the game always ends with reflection processes, reflect upon what they've done and how that can tie into the real world.
Dave Eng:
I see. Wow, Scott, that's a great overview. I appreciate it. And I think that aspect that you talked about before with Choose Your Own Adventure and interactive fiction is a really approachable format, really, because I think that you want your individual learners and your students to have some sort of agency and decision making the process, but you also don't want it to be overwhelming. And I think that your dedication overall to making it something that individual teachers and educators can use is quite admirable. So thanks for sharing, Scott. I appreciate it.
Dr. Scott Nicholson:
Yeah. One of the things that this does also is it allows the educators to make changes because it's all being done the... When you read the script, that's when the game happens. It's not like a digital game where someone's already created the images or even a board game where someone's created the cards.
With this type of game, the teacher, let's say you've got a game that's set in... one of our games is set in like a dinosaur safari because it's a playful space. Well, it may be that for a specific culture, that dinosaur concept is not popular, but they want to use, say, goats and chickens.
Dave Eng:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Scott Nicholson:
It is simple then for the teacher just to make those swaps in the game because nothing about the game exists until it comes out of the teacher's mouth. And that's power of role-playing games is it's easily adapted by the instructor as they're running the game.
Dave Eng:
Right. And I think that leads into the second point and second question. This is what really attracted me to this... to your work overall, Scott, into this interview overall, which is how to apply this in low-resource classrooms.
So I know that you talked about this a little bit before you design EscapeIF specifically for low-resource classrooms, and you talked a little bit about some individual items. Can you elaborate more on the challenges faced by educators and settings and how EscapeIF can address them?
Dr. Scott Nicholson:
Yeah, this was the most eye-opening part of the whole process because I've been designing games for decades. But typically, when you're designing games for settings in North America, people may have a paper that they can replicate. You can have them make photocopies. They'll have computers to use. They'll have an internet connection. They can show a video or play an audio file. There's some basic technologies that tend to exist, and looking at and working with these low-resource classrooms. So these classrooms, as far as resources that they have, now a typical solution that's done in the industry is, well, we'll just bring the resources there. We'll bring in 30 tablets, and we'll drop them all off or drop in one laptop per child.
And we have seen again and again these projects fail in the long term because the infrastructure isn't there to support this technology. It works for a little while but then starts to break down, and things don't work, and then your technology is no good. And we see that ourselves, with our phones and with our tablets now, every time there's a new version of an operating system, all of our old software, much of it doesn't work anymore. It's just gone. So I said, "Let's not bring in technology. Let's use the technology that they have there." Well, the technology in many of these classrooms would be a sand floor, would be the students would usually have some sort of small... a chalkboard or writing board like that. There would be a chalkboard in the room, and then you would have found objects. So rocks, sticks, things like that.
And then you have people. You have the students themselves. You have eager students, and that's it for your technology base. So what can you do out of that? And that's a big challenge, even with the normal way you do escape games, if... A low-resource escape game in North America would be a game that's using a photocopied paper, so a puzzle hunt type thing where you take a packet of puzzles, you photocopy it, you give each group, but you don't even have disposable paper like that. That's not even an option. So it was interesting to rethink everything to say, "Well, what if we don't have any of that? What can we do?" Well, the one thing that we do have is storytelling. And these are... In fact, you have a stronger storytelling culture than you do in cultures where the stories are told to us by electronic devices.
So the idea of an oral game where you're telling stories and having choices based on the stories can work quite well in this kind of environment. And the nice thing about designing it for a low-resource environment is then you could still use it in a high-resource environment. Even if you have all the bells and whistles, you can still do a storytelling game. All you need is that script for the teacher to read. So that was... that's always been a big challenge in this is how do we make sure that people can play the games? And the nice thing about it is 10 years from now, 50 years from now, 100 years from now, you could still play the games. There's the games will still be playable, which is what you can do with storytelling and you can't do with the digital games of today.
Dave Eng:
Right. I think that's a really admirable way to, I think, approach, I think, this challenge and the situation overall, Scott, because I think that to your point before you were saying we would provide classrooms or educators with individual resources like iPads or computers or anything else and say, "Here's some resources. Here's the project that you can do."
Whereas I think that you took it from an opposite approach, and correct me if I'm wrong, whereas you looked at it as, "Here are the resources that you already have access to, and here's what you can do with it." Would you say that that is an app, like a summary of what you're trying to accomplish?
Dr. Scott Nicholson:
Yes, it is. And the nice thing about that is then you can turn it over and help the students to begin to make their own games.
Dave Eng:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Scott Nicholson:
And this is one of the things I'm really excited about where EscapeIF can go is once the teacher has shown the students what this branching narrative game looks like, then there's no technology, there's no programming you have to learn to tell your own stories. And this is one space we want to look moving forward to in the future on how do we create a repository so that students around the world that create their own branching narratives can share their stories, can share how they see math affecting their lives by writing a story about it, by creating these branching narratives.
Now, you can then take all of this and use a tool like Twine. Twine is a free tool that allows you to create web-based branching narrative games. It's once you've done the hard work on writing the branching narrative story, it's very easy to plug that whole story into Twine and create a web page where people can explore the games if they have the digital tools. So it's nice that that is available if people want it. But what I find, and we've done some of this, what I find is when people play a Twine version of these games, it doesn't work as well.
And the main reason is when you're doing it as a storytelling game, and you have the students all stop and talk about what's going on before offering them the ability to make a vote and a choice, then that reflection, that discussion, that's where the learning happens. If I put it to you in a digital form and you have, "Here's your question, choose A, B, or C," and there's no forced time to reflect, to discuss, to probe, then you lose that, and it becomes superficial.
So that... Now, you could do something like it where the teacher shows it on the screen and then stops and makes the students have those discussions. But having that time for students to discuss, and this is a little tip for anyone using board games in the classrooms, if you want to make a board game in a classroom, have more reflection and a deeper engagement with learning outcomes, make the students play in pairs and they have to talk about their moves before they make them.
Dave Eng:
I see.
Dr. Scott Nicholson:
Just adding those moments where you force people to talk greatly increases the time when people are engaging in a deeper way with what it is they're doing, rather than just making quick guesses to see what happens.
Dave Eng:
Yeah. And I... For those of you who are not familiar with Twine, I'll make sure that I include a link to this... to that website in the show notes. But I think to Scott's point, it is you could use Twine as a structure that replicates how the formal elements of the game come together, but not necessarily the specific outcome.
So I think that what you said before, Scott, about how to use just games in the classroom. It doesn't have to be role-playing games or EscapeIF rooms or board games or anything else, but making sure that you have that adequate time for reflection, I think, is critical. Would you agree?
Dr. Scott Nicholson:
That's the most important part.
Dave Eng:
Right.
Dr. Scott Nicholson:
You can have a bad game experience, but if you have a good reflection time afterwards, it can still be a good learning experience. We generally recommend you save about a third of your gameplay time for a structured reflection where you have the students talk about what they've learned. You have them talk about how they could apply what they've learned to the real world.
You have them talk about what they're going to tell their parents about what they've learned, have them talk about how they can connect what they've learned in this game to other classes, and then have them think about what their next steps will be based on what they've learned in that game. Those structured reflection questions will also help you as a game designer realize things your games are teaching that you never considered because the learners will tell you things they got out of the game that you didn't think about whatsoever.
And if you just come in and tell them, "Well, here's what you should have learned, A, B, and C," then the students will never cement, "Oh, well, I got D, E, and F out of it." And having all those voices about what they got out of it that makes the learning outcomes be so much richer and so much more applied in situations that you hadn't thought about.
Dave Eng:
Right. Well, Scott, I don't think you need to convince me anymore. I mean, I've already seen your presentation about this, but for all the other listeners and people consuming this episode right now, if they want to get started with EscapeIF, if you're a teacher, an educator, and you want to start using this in your classroom, what are the first steps that they should take? Are there any resources or communities where they can seek support other than getting in contact with you?
Dr. Scott Nicholson:
So EscapeIF.com is the primary website, and what you'll find on that site right now are I believe we have... we're up to eight games. These are all math-based games because that's currently mEducation's focus that you can download PDFs for and play them in your classroom right away. You're going to find guides on how to facilitate these games. You're going to find guides we've written on how to write these games and worksheets on how to create the games.
And we ran... With teachers in Rwanda, we ran a workshop that helped them to create their own games and do their own storytelling games. So you're going to find all those resources at EscapeIF.com. You'll also find a link to a Facebook group that we've created around EscapeIF so people that are starting to explore it can reach out there to find other people who are working with this.
And what we're looking for is if you create an EscapeIF game or you make a game with your students, give that game back us. We'd be happy to include it in the repository because that's our goal is to build out this repository of games that people create. Everything in EscapeIF is an open source. Everything is free to use. We're not... There's no charge on any of it. We're not making any money off of any of it. This is designed as a way for people to tell stories and share those stories with others.
Dave Eng:
Great. Thanks, Scott. So if you didn't catch that before, I'll make sure to include those links in the show notes and the description for this episode so you can check it out at your leisure. So Scott, thanks for joining us today. Where can people go to find out more about you?
Dr. Scott Nicholson:
The easiest place is at scottnicholson.com. That's sort of a Meta site, which point you to my Facebook, my Bluesky, whatever social media platforms are currently popular when you listen to this, I probably have something in my YouTube channel of Scott Nicholson. You'll be able to find all sorts of things about games and pottery and homesteading and growing things in the garden and everything in my life that's going beyond just games.
Dave Eng:
Excellent. Thank you, Scott. I will again include the links to Scott's website and everything else he's talked about so far in the show notes. So thank you again, Scott. I appreciate it.
Dr. Scott Nicholson:
Hey, what's that noise? Ding. Well, I think people just leveled up. Well, that's exciting. Congratulations on your level up, everybody.
Dave Eng:
Thank you. And I think you've leveled up, Scott. I've leveled up and everyone else has leveled up as well. So I hope you found this episode useful. If you'd like to learn more, a great place to start us with my free course on gamification. You can sign up for it at www.universityxp.com/gamification. You can also get a full transcript of this episode, including links to references in the description or show notes. Thanks for joining us.
Again, I'm your host, Dave Eng, from games-based learning by University XP. On Experience Points, we explore different ways we can learn from games. So if you like this episode, consider commenting, sharing, and subscribing. Subscribing is absolutely free and ensures that you'll get the next episode of Experience Points delivered directly to you. I'd also love it if you took some time to rate the show.
I live to lift others with learning. So if you found this episode useful, consider sharing it with someone who could benefit. Also, make sure to visit University XP online at www.universityxp.com. University XP is also on Twitter at University_XP and on Facebook and LinkedIn as University XP. Also, feel free to email me anytime. My email address is dave@universityxp.com. Game on.
Cite this Episode
Eng, D. (Host). (2025, January 12). Scott Nicholson on EscapeIF. (No. 129) [Audio podcast episode]. Experience Points. University XP. https://www.universityxp.com/podcast/129
Internal Ref: UXPJJ24Z8ZQI
References
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Eng, D. (2019, December 10). Decision Space. Retrieved November 26, 2024, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2019/12/10/decision-space
Eng, D. (2020, August 20). What is Player Agency? Retrieved November 26, 2024, from http://www.universityxp.com/blog/2020/8/20/what-is-player-agency
Eng, D. (2022, March 1). What is Player Reflection?. Retrieved November 26, 2024, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2022/3/1/what-is-player-reflection
Eng, D. (2024, August 20). Game Goals vs. Learning Outcomes. Retrieved November 26, 2024, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2024/8/20/game-goals-vs-learning-outcomes
Nicholson, S., & Cable, L. (2020). Unlocking the potential of puzzle-based learning: Designing escape rooms and games for the classroom. https://www.torrossa.com/gs/resourceProxy?an=5018924&publisher=FZ7200
Technical Grimoire. (2019, November). Parsely: An adventure party game. Retrieved from https://www.technicalgrimoire.com/david/2019/11/parselyreview