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I would like to talk about the flow in an escape room. By this term I don’t mean the game flow but the psychological state of mind also known as being in the zone. When I played my first escape game 6 years ago – when this concept was quite new (see the blurry pic below) – it left me in awe. I couldn’t stop talking about it for weeks, I felt the urge to tell everyone about it. It made me wonder, what exactly has left such a deep impact on me and why? The game was ok, the room was pretty basic and our team was a bit random. So what then? After doing some research on good old Google, I came across the term ‘flow zone’ – an expression I was familiar with but not in relation to escape games.

In the psychological terminology flow is a state of mind where the person is fully involved with whatever activity or task is being carried out, in our case playing an escape game. They enjoy it and are physically and mentally completely engaged; focused. They’re motivated by the activity itself and that becomes the reward, rather than the result. The person is absorbed in the activity so deeply that basic needs such as hunger or need to sleep disappear and time seems to be flying by. The concept has existed before e.g. in certain Eastern religions but was first given a name by MihályCsíkszentmihályi, a Hungarian-American psychologist and is explained in this chart:

The vertical axis shows how difficult a puzzle/task is, the horizontal axis shows the level of our own personal skills. For example, if the customer is very skilled but the puzzle is too easy, they will get bored. If the puzzle is way too hard and they don’t have the right set of skills to solve it, eventually they will get anxious and frustrated.

To simplify this chart especially focusing on escape games, here is another chart showing the flow channel located:

So in the flow zone, the difficulty of the challenge is proportionate to the skill levels.

If it’s really such a great thing being in the zone, why don’t we do it all the time? Because one doesn’t just land in the zone or creates it; in order to be engaged in a state of flow, several conditions must be met. In the case of the escape games, these conditions come from 2 directions: both from the game (as in the actual puzzles and the room) and from the player.

Let’s quickly go through these conditions in reflection of escape games:

1) Complete focus and involvement

Ideally, the player is concentrating on solving the puzzles and only the puzzles rather than checking their phone, catch up with their teammates or trying to figure out whether the wall is real or fake brick wallpaper.

2) Clarity and immediate feedback

A bit of a tricky one here when it comes to escape games because if a puzzle is clear (how to be solved) it’s not a puzzle, it’s just a task. What clarity means here is that the player knows the main goal (escaping) and the immediate feedback would be coming from solving each puzzle one by one, taking them closer to the end of the game.

3) The perception of time or timelessness

Time is one of the main elements in escape games as its very limited and time flies when you’re having fun. When the player is in the zone, time feels like it’s flying by (or it could be slowing down) and this is always the case in an Escape Room. We all know the feeling of when you enter, check the time – 50 mins left – and when you check again, 15 minutes remaining and you don’t know how that happened.

4) Intrinsic motivation

The idea here is that when the team is in the flow zone, they are working towards a prize or a reward but doing the activity for its own sake. In an escape game, if our sole goal was only to escape, we could just get all the hints and quickly solve the puzzles. But in the flow zone solving the puzzle is so enjoyable it becomes the reward. A very typical question from teams coming for the first time: What’s the prize when you escape? (Oh but nothing!)

5) Effortlessness

When a puzzle proves to be too hard to be solved, the flow easily turns into stress. There is a very thin layer between a puzzle being too difficult or just hard enough to be challenging and not too easy to be solved. If I look around in a room and immediately know how to solve puzzles, I will fall out of the ‘flow zone.’ So in this case effortlessness means not too much effort but some.

6) Balance of challenge and skills

Whatever escape room and puzzles, there will always be teams who would find the room impossible to escape and there will always be teams who fly through the game in record time as if they’ve done the type of puzzles before. It’s pretty hard to set the level of difficulty when designing games without knowing the level of skills of the players but game designers can try by creating a wide and colourful variety of different puzzles and obstacles.

7) Action and awareness are merged

…meaning that the outside world is not only physically locked out but also mentally. The players are focusing so much on the puzzles that all the worry of the everyday world disappears. The only reality they’re aware of is right here and right now. Nothing else exists. As previously mentioned, in order to keep flow, teams must be completely invested but the immersion of the game is also relevant.

Experiencing this is great and it’s a rare phenomenon. Though it does make me wonder whether we’re trying to escape from the room or escape into the room?

8) Control

Let’s not get fooled by the word ’control’ here, all that means is that while being in the flow zone, we know that the task is doable therefore there is no fear of failing. Or, that is the idea behind it. I would bend this a bit by saying that the fear of failing could become a motivational element when it comes to problem solving or puzzle solving.

While the flow zone is mainly entered individually, there is such a thing as a team flow zone and I think it mainly occurs in a come-and-go pattern during a game. I hope you found this as interesting as we did at Escape Rooms. Do you get into the flow zone? Perhaps you have something you’d like to extend on! Do leave a comment below, we’d be interested in finding out more!

Whilst it’s customary on your birthday to receive gifts, we, at Escape Rooms, decided that this year we’d give back. As a company, we recently turned 5 years old and it’s not something we could have done without our customers and our incredible team. Since we opened 5 years ago at our London Bridge location, so much has changed. Our rooms have been redecorated, and we’ve a whole new set of staff (though some of our oldest are still with us). For 3 years, our games at London Bridge steadily grew more popular, which lead to us, 2 years ago, opening up a new set of games which we’re also very proud of. But what exactly did we do for our birthday, I hear you ask?

Well, we started off by offering discount at both of our venues for any booking made in within a two-week time frame. What was great about this is that you could book for any date in the future available on our website with the discount, not just for the two weeks that the campaign was running for. We continued this at our Angel venue, the more expensive of the two, for a week onwards from this. We also ran a competition over Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for customers to win vouchers to both of our venues, London Bridge and Angel. So, in the end, we had 5 weeks of surprises with a fun, exciting offers and events happening each week for our customers.

Alongside this, during the second week of August, we started putting aside a percentage of every booking made at our London Bridge venue to be donated to charity. The charity we decided to support was Mind, as the incredible work they do has an effect on many people around us and was voted for by our Game Masters. Mind state that ‘[They] provide advice and support to empower anyone experiencing a mental health problem. [They] campaign to improve services, raise awareness and promote understanding. [They] won’t give up until everyone experiencing a mental health problem gets support and respect.’ The total amount that we donated was £450. If you’d like to know more about Mind as a charity and how you can help, follow this link: https://www.mind.org.uk

We also celebrated from within the company as well. We held a party for our staff, which included pizza, homemade cake made by Eszter, one of our managers, and dancing. We also held a race to see who could solve our Project DIVA game fastest which we entitled ‘The Project DIVA Olympics.’ This was a speed run of the game, as obviously we all know the answers here, and the quickest time came in at 6 minutes and 27 seconds, by me! We were all very out of breath by the end of this and the dancing slowed considerably. After filling ourselves up on food and catching our breath, we made our way over to a different escape room where we played, and completed, some fun games.

So here we are, 5 years after opening with an intelligent and fun team of workers and a wonderful unending number of customers – from first timers to polished escape artists. We’re extremely proud of all that we’ve achieved over the last 5 years and hopefully, in 5 years’ time, someone else will be writing about all we’ve achieved after another 5 years. So Happy Birthday to us, and thank you for your dedication. We were one of the first escape rooms to open up in the UK and with a bit of luck, we’ll continue on to new exploits. Perhaps a new room and new games! Feel free to submit your ideas to us about this via our Twitter page – we’d love to hear your thoughts on what we should do next!

Onwards and upwards – thank you for a wonderful 5 years.

I have worked in a café, garden centre, car factory, flour mill, pub, and escape game. Quite a variety, and each with their instructions in human nature. It was the last, however— ‘Escape Rooms’—that has, after four years, left the deepest imprint.

Just so we’re on the same page, an escape game involves being locked in a themed room full of puzzles, in which teams must work together to escape within an hour. Think Crystal Maze without the crystals, or Takeshi’s Castle without the brutality. The concept arose from phone apps before turning tangible. Our own company was, I think, the third such game in London. There are now dozens, attesting to their explosion in popularity. We are a small company of two venues, preferring quality to quantity, but there are now escape game companies from Dubai to Norway, Romania to New Zealand.

My interview involved playing one of the games. I was terrible, so they must have seen something else in me. I was soon officially a ‘Game Master’: introducing teams, telling back-stories about the game, and watching them on-screen, with a walkie-talkie to provide the occasional ‘hint’ (no more than three to make it on the coveted wall of fame). Two years later, we opened another venue, in Angel, with another two games. Trained on all four, I continued in this role before briefly becoming one of the managers.

I mentioned ‘instruction in human nature’. This was unavoidable—and equal parts funny and depressing. Observing families, colleagues, and friends stuck in a room together reveals among other things, for instance, dire levels of literacy. Bankers who strut it wearing Rolex watches frequently ask me to define ‘simultaneous’ without any evident embarrassment. Teachers—teachers!—have asked me to explain the difference between rows and columns. Given the hint to search for digits, teams often reply, ‘We haven’t found any letters.’ And the query, ‘Can I ask you a yes or no question?’ is self-evidently annoying. But teams may also edify. We have a Rubik’s Cube in the lobby, and it’s always children who manage to solve it. One team playing the Pharaoh’s Chamber claimed to be distant relations of Howard Carter, the man who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun.

I’ll miss this place. I’ll miss the unexpected variety and delightfulness of customers, from Waughian reactionary to Sheikh to builder to professional Rubik’s cube solvers (seriously). I’ll miss Martin Freeman and Woody Harrelson, both of whom popped in (not together) without notice or fanfare. I’ll miss the email we received, from out of the blue, from the actor who played Mike Teevee in the original Willy Wonka movie. I’ll miss my colleagues, who hailed from as far as Pakistan, the Philippines, Bermuda, and the north. I’ll miss the bald chap who walked into a door. I’ll miss the visitor who mistook us for a sauna. I’ll miss my old manager’s French bulldog, Malcolm, who baptised customers with his tireless tongue. I’ll miss our mascot Colin, literally a skeleton in the closet. And I’ll miss feeling at home here, belonging, being known.

This job has sustained me through my first years in London, providing structure, friendships, and of course rent money. But I shall never see it in purely instrumental terms. As I move on to the next job, I will not forget my time here. Je ne regrette rien.