Escape Room And Psychology: Is There A Connection?

Escape rooms are a new trend where psychology plays a fundamental role. In Norway we use the English word, escape room, or escape room. In this game, a group of people are locked in a room and must find the key that allows them to escape. They do this by following a series of clues and solving various tasks. They have limited time to find the key.

In this playful adventure  , psychological processes will be combined with physical activity and social cooperation. In addition, this type of activity demonstrates how teamwork helps you solve problems that could not have been solved by a single person (at least in a reasonable amount of time). These tasks make us realize that we need to trust other people and to cooperate with each other.

What happens in an escape room?

Escaperom transports us to a parallel universe where we are detectives and detectives. We begin by listening to a story, different for each room. It only takes a few seconds before we feel like the main characters in this adventure. Suddenly, and almost without noticing it, we have a mission with our mutual teammates: to escape.

That’s when the game begins. We have to find a way out of the room in 60 minutes. The clues can be anywhere: under tables, hidden in books, inside drawers with false bottoms, etc. A good strategy is to distribute the tasks among the team members. Then you can write down all the clues you find to help the team progress.

Although escape rooms were originally made for adults, children from 14 years and up can join, as long as they are with an adult. This makes escape rooms a great activity for players of different ages that can be enjoyed together. There are also escape rooms made especially for children.

The origin of the escape room

Escaperom first came to PC games. As an alternative to the poor graphics in the first PCs, so-called conversation games were designed. Along with a single image, a situation or character was described in text. At the end of each show, different possibilities were revealed, which allowed the players to make decisions based on the situations described. And based on these decisions, the game took different directions.

Many of these conversation games were, essentially, escape games. You had to make the right decision to save your own life, save the princess’ life, escape from prison or kill an evil enemy. These games have evolved over time and, perhaps, they have also lost their essence due to the amazing graphics in today’s games.

Nevertheless, this game format gained new popularity with the rise of smartphones. In Japan, escape rooms took place in real rooms in 2008.

Escape room and psychology

The first escape room opened its doors in Budapest, Hungary in 2011 thanks to Attila Gyurkovics. This Hungarian made a game called Parapark, where a group of people had to find their way out of a room in a limited time.

Gyurkovics developed the escape room based on the flow theory of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Flow is a state in which a person is completely absorbed in an activity for their own pleasure. Time flies, and actions, thoughts and movements follow each other. Flow is when we strike a balance between the challenges of the task or activity, and our ability to solve them.

The flow theory says that if we do an activity for our own pleasure and experience a balance between our abilities and the challenges we face,  we enter a mental state where everything flows. In that moment, time seems to pass very quickly, and ideas jump around freely in our minds.

Move in escape room

Many people have said that they start to feel flow, as described in Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, by participating in escape rooms. Escape rooms are recreational places where the full objective is for the player to have a good experience and to accept the challenge. Therefore,  escape rooms are comfortable in themselves,  regardless of whether we succeed in finding the key or not.

Having to  go through a process where we feel immediate satisfaction at every success (finding a key to open a drawer, solving a task or opening a lock) satisfies us and encourages us to keep playing and focus on the challenge ahead of us while all our worries disappear for a while.