Escape Room Course Brings Together Game Design and Theatre in Amherst (Q&A)

We interview two professors at Hampshire College about their collaboration

Over the course of the past semester, students enrolled in the “Designing Escape Rooms” course at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts have been working on a multidisciplinary escape room experience under the guidance of Ira Fay, a professor of game design, and Peter Kallok, a professor of theatre design.

This week the public will be able to play through the fruits of their labor as the student-designed escape room Crime and Villainy in Pioneer City opens to the public.

We spoke to Ira and Peter over the magic of the Internet to find out more.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

No Proscenium (NP): Tell us a little about you and your background.

Ira Fay (IF): I am an associate professor of computer science and game design at Hampshire College.

Peter Kallok (PK): And I’m a associate professor of theatre design.

NP: How did the course “Designing Escape Rooms” come about?

IF: My background in escape rooms was really primarily from a player perspective. I certainly have enjoyed doing them and I have some experience with puzzle design but not specifically escape rooms. So this was a real opportunity to get to learn more and go on an adventure with Peter and the students.

PK: My background has mostly been in theatre design: lighting design, set design, a little projection design. I’ve had a few students that have been involved in and interested in immersive theatre. One student in particular was very interested in escape rooms, so that was my introduction to escape rooms. It was when Ira sent me an email about wanting to do a course in escape rooms that I began to research escape rooms and began to learn more about them.

I had a great visit and conversation with the owner of Bull City Escape in Durham so that was really helpful for my education of how escape rooms can work.

IF: One of the really fun things about Hampshire is that professors here have a lot of autonomy and freedom to to create new courses and to co-teach classes together. It’s been a real pleasure getting to collaborate with Peter. I just pitched him on the idea, he said yes, and we’ve been collaborating ever since.

NP: What kinds of students are enrolled in this course? Do they come mostly from theatre backgrounds or game design backgrounds?

IF: We’ve had a pretty even split of game design students and theatre design students and some number who happen to have both.

PK: It’s been wonderful to have that crossing of the disciplines so that the students can work with each other and also inform each other about their individual disciplines.

IF: We explicitly co-taught this class to bring those students together.

NP: How did you approach teaching escape room design from a multidisciplinary perspective?

IF: Because escape rooms are so multidisciplinary, it was a very easy subject to focus on and to bring students together. We’re having students develop skills in puzzle design or set design but also we’re focused on helping the students develop their skills in collaboration, teamwork, iterative development, playtesting, listening to feedback — a lot of those skills that will apply regardless of what particular type of experience they’re to design in whatever industry they’re in.

PK: We really focus here at Hampshire at allowing students to take a project and just run with it. We expect them to seek feedback from us but we also expect them to figure out how to work on a project. We are used to working across disciplines and bringing disciplines together. In this course in particular, things seem to mesh together really well.

NP: What’s surprised you so far about teaching the course? What’s been the most challenging part?

IF: This hasn’t been a “surprise” but it’s challenging to work on a 34-person team; we have 30 students in the class, two TAs, myself, and Peter. Anytime you’re trying to get 34 people going in the same direction, that’s challenging.

I guess I’m a little surprised at how much they were able to pull together. We had been limited by our access to the studio space in terms of when we could actually build. We were doing a lot of play testing and iterative development on the puzzles, we weren’t actually able to build the space until two weeks before the show went up. I have been very pleasantly surprised at how much they were able to accomplish in the last week and a half.

PK: I can attest to that as well. Looking at the skill level of the students from the beginning of the semester and thinking about how much we could really accomplish in physically building the space, it didn’t look real promising! But then as the semester progressed, the students really came together within these time constraints in getting the project up.

NP: Can you tell us a little about the escape room experience the class has created, Crime and Villainy in Pioneer City?

IF: The basic details without giving any spoilers would be: it’s an hour-long escape room experience. It’s free and open to the public, and supported by Hampshire College and our theatre program here. And it’s intended for four to five players.

For No Proscenium’s readers, I suspect it may be a little on the easy side. At the beginning, we talked about design goals we had for it and because we anticipated a lot of novice puzzle-solvers and a lot of people new to escape rooms, we decided intentionally to make it a high win rate. We’re aiming for about an 80% win rate for this. And the theme is hopefully clear: the players enter as henchpeople for a supervillain and they’re breaking into a superhero’s HQ to try and find their way through to steal an important item.

PK: Ira was focusing on the puzzle design and the idea of the escape room, and my focus was more on the design of the space.

IF: It may be little spoilery but I think it’s fair to say that like many escape rooms, the players enter into one space but then — through solving some puzzles — they make it into a second space, and then through solving more puzzles, they make it into a third space. That was one of the very few things that Peter and I mandated from the very beginning of the course, because we had 30 students and we knew it would be a really overwhelming for them to all try and work in exactly the same space the whole time. So we divided them into three 10-person teams that were able to function fairly autonomously and work in parallel.

Of course, there are connections between the spaces, but that was really important. Each of those three physical spaces is quite distinct from a set design perspective, which is, I think, fun.

NP: What do you hope your students take away from this course?

IF: At the beginning of any sort of course, we always think about what we want our students to get out of it and then design the coursework to support those goals. We had quite a few goals at the beginning. We wanted our students to develop their particular skills in game design or theatre design. From a game design perspective, that’s things like “I know how to run a playtest”; “I know how to do iterative development”; “I know how to listen to players and revise my work based on based on their feedback”; “I know how to collaborate with other people and work within design constraints for the materials or space that we have.” And similar ones matching those on on the set design side.

There were also some real goals related to collaboration and teamwork: working together on a big team, working with people from different backgrounds. We had a lot of students in the class and since this isn’t their only class, they were often working digitally and at a different times, so there was a lot of work around collaboration and communication.

The last thing is we really wanted them to have a useful, fun portfolio piece. I’m sure not all of our students will professional escape room design but they might do something related to game design or theatre design in some way or another. I think having a portfolio piece that they can be really are proud of was another one of our goals for the course.

PK: Coming from a theatre perspective, we did have that going into it, so the experience of a production and those organizational skills that are necessary. And some basic skills like construction skills and practical skills that the students learned all about and began to master. That in turn builds confidence in moving forward and realizing they could actually use their hands to create. Those skills are very important.

IF: We also want to shout out to Puzzled Escape Games, which is a professional escape room based in Easthampton. We sent all of our students to their rooms at the beginning of the course. Not everyone enrolled in the course had done an escape room so we wanted everyone to have the same foundation and one of the co-owners, Tom, was very thoughtful in giving feedback to the students. That was a really thoughtful and helpful mentorship and guidance.

Crime and Villainy in Pioneer City: A Superpowered Escape Room continues through December 8 in Amherst, MA. Tickets are free but currently sold out; interested patrons can get on the waitlist.

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This month we’d also like to thank The Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts for sponsoring our features.

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