A night in the museum: A museum exhibition that turns into an escape room by night

Abstract

Escape room games are a genre of physical games that has gained popularity in formal(schools and universities) and informal (museums) educational settings. In this pa-per we evaluate an innovative model of creating an escape room as part of an existingexhibition which in a way offers a refreshed curatorship of an existing exhibition.The context is a small Natural History museum in Israel that commissioned the au-thors to create two escape games within the exhibition space. Each was built into theexisting exhibition without affecting its function during the day. So the exhibitionspace functions as a museum by day and an escape room by night. The transformationwas designed so that museum guides could easily with a few actions (such as openinghidden doors and engaging electromagnets) transform one into the other.In this paper we focus on whether the model can attract new audiences, what education-al experience this model offers visitors and dig into visitors’ perceptions of the differentgame elements. Data were collected from visiting groups (108 players in 35 groups) andfrom gamemasters’ observations (32 groups) using an online questionnaires.Findings indicate that the model has indeed attracted new audiences to the museumand that this model affords an escape game experience not unlike ones reported in theliterature. A deeper look into the different puzzles indicates that players enjoy hands-on puzzles that are also intellectually challenging. The puzzle that was most favouredwas an experiment which includes both these attributes. A comparison of the visitor andgamemaster questionnaires seems to indicate that both perceive the gamemasters’ lev-els of involvement differently, suggesting the importance of training the gamemasters.

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ORCID for Ran Peleg: orcid.org/0000-0002-9184-6030

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