Escape rooms, in which participants are locked in a themed room and solve puzzles to escape, have become increasingly popular. As of August 2019, there are more than 2,350 escape room establishments in the United States alone (Spira, 2019). More than just entertainment, however, escape rooms have made their
way into classrooms and occupational settings, providing another medium to present educational content and other training materials (see Adams et al. (2018), Eukel et al. (2017), and Nicholson (2018) for examples). This paper provides a designer’s postmortem of our attempt to create an escape room game about ethics.
Ethical questions are often high-stakes and serious. People may feel that discussions of ethics are too theoretical to have relevant practical implications, defensive of their own moral worth when given ethical advice, or frustrated that others are not held accountable for unethical conduct. At face value, this does not
seem suitable for an engaging game. Yet, we see ethics and escape rooms as structurally complementary: both involve finding information, solving puzzles, and separating the details that matter from those that are just part of the environment.
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