What is an escape game?
As a reminder, an escape game is a real-life escape room. The goal is to get out in time of a space full of clues. The clues are hidden and gradually lead to the key that unlocks the exit.
We played as a team of 5! And we made it out in 59 minutes and 59 seconds, in time then, with a single second to spare! This escape game currently has a 35% success rate, so it’s fair to say we were pretty proud of ourselves! But what were the decisive factors that got us out in time? And which ones held us back so much that we nearly failed?
Those are the questions behind our little investigation.
These games are built on exercises in logic, searching, pulling data together and transforming it. An escape game asks the group to share out its resources and tackle those tasks together. All against the clock.
The setup also calls for cognitive strategies. Players find themselves in an environment that has a lot in common with certain operational situations heavily studied through the lens of human factors.
(See the study “The human factor: the critical importance of effective teamwork and communication in providing safe care, M Leonard, S Graham and D Bonacum, 2004”.)
So why not study this situation and draw a few lessons we could test on our next attempt to get out faster?
A look at how it played out
Reaching our goal, getting out of the room in time, takes logic, patience, communication with your teammates, and so on. Everyone’s individual skills have to serve the group as efficiently as possible. But when time is short and everyone wants to pitch in, settling on the right organisation and the right strategy can prove tricky.
Lack of group structure
Looking at it through the theories of performance and risk management in operational situations, we can see we lacked group structure. Carrying out a mission as a team calls for a structure shaped by the many factors that bear on how the group performs.
Putting a leader in place would have helped us handle the key decisions far better. We did, in fact, nearly miss the exit in the final minutes. The pressure of the ticking clock got the better of us.
“We all failed at a rather basic task (which we won’t go into further, to respect the confidentiality of the game) because we chose a very inefficient way of doing it, which we even repeated several times.”
Picking a leader would also have helped us keep a shared sense of the situation: what are the new clues? who has already searched where? how much time do we have left? how do we deal with the clues?
One person handles this part, another the one next to it. But the whole group has to understand and take in what’s going on. Everyone needs the same picture of the situation. In our case, we all have to be chasing the same goal. And to agree on how we work, and above all on how we see the process for getting through our investigation.
The emergence of a perseveration phenomenon
A parallel can be drawn with many case studies in aeronautics, especially those that look at perseveration. Frederic Dehais draws on a well-known example from aviation: the crew of flight AA-1420, who crashed the aircraft. Despite appalling landing conditions and other, safer options on the table, the pilots stuck with their choice. This “cognitive tunnelling”, or perseveration, much studied in the running of high-risk systems (nuclear power plants, aircraft), comes down to sociological, psychological and neuropsychological factors. Dehais describes perseveration as locking your reasoning and attention onto a single goal, even when that goal is dangerous. (Modélisation des conflits dans l’activité de pilotage, Frederic Dehais, 2004)
Sharing out the work usually saves a lot of time. We did split up the tasks. But at random, without ever saying “you look over there, we’ll look here, and then we’ll regroup”. Nope.
“We were all over the place, especially at the start, where we lost a lot of time before finding the first clue. And yet we’d all searched the very spot where it was hidden, just not the right way.”
Our tips for cracking an escape game
Here are the 2 key things we’ll put in place at our next real-life escape game:
1/ Appoint someone in charge
Next time, we’ll try to name a kind of “head of search”. Their job will be to share out the tasks, keep communication flowing within the group, and manage resources against the clock.
2/ Keep our cool to avoid perseveration
The team will also need to remember that even at the end, when time is running out, it has to keep weighing up every possible option, while staying as calm as it can to steer clear of perseveration. This approach draws on the techniques used in co-design workshops, where structured collaboration is everything.
These goals may look simple, but under stress they’re anything but. Now all that’s left is to put our design thinking-inspired methods to the test!
And how do you assess stress and workload from a UX point of view? Feel free to check out our other articles on the subject.
