Ellyssa Kroski - Escape Rooms and Other Immersive Experiences in the Library

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ELLYSSA KROSKI is the Director of Information Technology at the New York Law Institute as well as an award-winning editor and author of thirty-seven books. She is a librarian, an adjunct faculty member at Drexel and San Jose State Universities, and an international conference speaker. She has just been named the winner of the 2017 Library Hi Tech Award from the ALA/LITA for her long-term contributions to library and information science technology and its application. She can be found at: http://amazon.com/author/ellyssa.

2019 by the American Library Association

Extensive effort has gone into ensuring the reliability of the information in this book; however, the publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein.

ISBNs

978-0-8389-1767-1 (paper)

978-0-8389-1790-9 (PDF)

978-0-8389-1789-3 (ePub)

978-0-8389-1791-6 (Kindle)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kroski, Ellyssa, author.

Title: Escape rooms and other immersive experiences in the library / Ellyssa Kroski.

Description: Chicago, IL : ALA Editions, an imprint of the American Library Association, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018025713 | ISBN 9780838917671 (print : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780838917893 (epub) | ISBN 9780838917909 (pdf) | ISBN 9780838917916 (kindle)

Subjects: LCSH: LibrariesActivity programs. | Group problem solving.

Classification: LCC Z716.33 .K764 2018 | DDC 025.5dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025713

Cover design by Krista Joy Johnson.

PART I
Introducing Escape Rooms and Immersive Experiences

PART II
How to Create, Organize, and Run Eleven Project Types

APPENDIXES

E scape rooms and immersive experiences have become an outrageously popular pastime for people of all ages, intriguing young adults and seniors alike. They have been featured in television shows such as The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Race to Escape as well as films like Escape Room (2017). They have been adopted by libraries worldwide and have exploded from 2,800 rooms throughout the world in 2015 to over 7,200 in 2018.

These immersive, interactive games that challenge players to solve a series of mental or physical puzzles within a time limit are a fantastic way to engage patrons with the library and pass along information literacy skills. This book will introduce you to the exciting world of escape rooms and immersive experiences and provide you with hands-on, practical instructions for how you can plan, design, and host these events yourself. Youll learn all about how you can design your own escape room games, run pop-up escape rooms, create clubs in which kids can create escape games, create digital and high-tech escape rooms, use these events for team-building and training, and more for your library!

As I saw libraries create escape room programs, I was thrilled. I am not only a librarian who is always on the lookout for new and exciting ways to involve patrons with library resources, but also a lifelong gamer. I got started with the greatest adventure game of all time, The Legend of Zelda, on my Nintendo system, and quickly moved to PC gaming in the early nineties. Armed with a boot disc, I played a slew of point-and-click and graphic adventure games that have served as major inspiration for todays escape room games such as Maniac Mansion, the Quest for Glory, Kings Quest, the Legend of Kyrandia series, Myst, Roberta Williamss Phantasmagoria, the Fable series, Syberia, and one of my all-time favorites, Zork Nemesis. When I first encountered escape rooms and immersive experiences in 2015, I experienced a nostalgia that brought me back to those early gaming days that led me to start playing these games whenever I could. I even flew to Europe to participate in a four-day Harry Potter-inspired live action roleplaying (LARP) experience in a thirteenth-century Polish castle.

As the reader will discover, escape room games and immersive experiences programming have incredible potential for many library types including public, school, and academic libraries. These types of games and events are actively being used in libraries and education as a vehicle to provide valuable STEM, information literacy, and critical-thinking skills through game-based learning activities. They are a potent library advocacy and outreach tool that is being used by libraries at conferences and events as pop-up escape room or breakout experiences. Library staff and educators are also digitally designing them to support curriculum. Additionally, they are being customized for internal staff training as a more creative approach than traditional PowerPointbased workshops as well as for team-building among sometimes widely dispersed library staff. In sum, these entertaining, interactive experiences have a vast array of imaginative applications for libraries, many of which will be discussed in this book along with detailed instructions for how you can implement them in your library today.

I would like to sincerely thank all the librarians and industry professionals who were interviewed, contributed projects and essays, and shared valuable professional advice.

NOTE

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E scape rooms and immersive events are exciting new opportunities for libraries to engage patrons by making them a part of an experience. By combining elements of entertainment such as theater, video games, and movies, these new forms of leisure activities are capturing the attention of people throughout the world.

Escape rooms are live interactive adventure games in which participants must team up to solve a series of riddles, puzzles, and challenges to win. They have become immensely popular in recent years and have been featured on many television shows, including the Science Channels Race to Escape series. According to CNN, Theyre the No. 1 local activity for a number of cities around the world, and there are currently over 7,200 rooms in 1,445 cities in 105 countries. These games are set in a variety of fictional locations with themes as diverse as escaping the clutches of a zombie; breaking out of prison; or, in the all-ages Kingdom of Cats, avoiding capture by a society of felines. This new and wildly popular activity is already being embraced by libraries as a way to immerse patrons in critical-thinking exercises and much more. According to American Libraries magazine, escape rooms have become a breakout trend in youth programming.

This new and intriguing form of entertainment (and education) is continuing to evolve and develop as time goes on. Already we are seeing escape rooms designed for varying levels of participant experience, rooms designed for a specific number of players, games utilizing advanced technology such as Microsoft Kinect and Arduino boards to incorporate special effects, and rooms designed for repeated play with different puzzles for returning participants. And the growth of the industry has not yet shown signs of slowing down. According to the