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

Peleg, Ran, Bamberger, Yael and Wolenitz, Dorit (2024) A night in the museum: a museum exhibition that turns into an escape room by night. In Beyond the Lock: Innovative Approaches to Escape Rooms in Education, Culture, and Organisational Development.

Abstract

Escape room games are a genre of non-virtual game that have gained huge popularity in recent years as a pastime experience. With their rise in popularity, escape games have also been used more and more often in educational settings, both formal (schools and universities) and informal (museums). A few years ago we were commissioned by the management of a small natural history museum to build educational escape room games in order to attract new types of visitors to the museum. Until then the museum was normally only open during the morning hours and mainly catered for school groups. The aim of the project was to attract visitors who normally do not attend the museum. The escape game format was considered a good way to do so as it would attract young adults with whom the genre is popular.

The common models for escape games in museums are (1) a mobile kit that can be played in the classroom of the museum or (2) converting a classroom into a full escape room. Discussions with the museum management yielded an innovative third model in which the escape room will be built into existing exhibitions taking full advantage of their aesthetics. The result were two escape games “The Return of the Prehistoric Man” (focusing on the evolution of humans) and “The Great Bone Robbery” (focusing on the evolution of prehistoric animals). Each was built into the exhibition without affecting its function during the day. So the exhibition space functions as a museum by day and an escape room by night. The transformation was designed so that museum guides could easily with a few actions (such as opening hidden doors and engaging electromagnets) transform one into the other. In the poster session we will show examples of how we went about designing the escape games into the exhibitions. We will also show evaluation data on whether we succeeded in attracting new audiences and some insights based on this data as to which puzzles were most favoured and why

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Contributors

Author: Ran Peleg

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