In 2008 I worked at a company called SCVNGR and we had a mission: we were going to make the world into a game. My specific job was to make people play games at museums and in our minds, everybody was going to want to play casually with every spare moment of their day. These were the early days of apps and location-games like FourSquare, Loopt and Gowalla but the world-as-a-gamemap experiment failed and all of these location-based gaming companies closed or pivoted. Each of them made a fatal miscalculation: people who are in public are not bored, they’re busy and they have somewhere to be. Casual, pervasive location-based gameplay didn’t seem to catch on. Fast forward to 2014 and Escape Rooms come onto the scene. I expected the failures of 2008. People are busy! Sure, you can capture their attention for stolen moments on mobile games. You can have their attention for hours playing video games in the quiet privacy of their own living room, but in my experience, games in the real world didn’t seem to take. Escape rooms did something different from all of these location-based game apps. They sanctioned playtime. They were not pervasive and casual, they had a specific hour in which you were in the location-based game world and once that hour was up either you had accomplished your task or you had not. The escape room hour didn’t squeeze yet another task into a player’s busy daily world, it gave them a full sixty minutes of respite where nothing in “the outside world” mattered. The sixty minute, finite time slot mattered.
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