To ludically divert and delude

By Thomas Vigild 

CLANK! Behind you, the iron door slams shut. You have only an hour to escape from the room, using your ingenu­ity, your resourcefulness and your cunning.

I love such so-called ‘escape rooms’. Briefly, these are physical spaces full of challenges, mysteries and puz­zles, which the players have to solve together. The space might, for example, be the old headteacher’s study, where you can hardly move for weird paintings on the walls and piles of notes and papers on an old desk, or an untidy alchemist’s laboratory full of bubbling alembics, outland­ish ingredients and strange formulas scribbled down in thick tomes. No matter what the setting, spaces of this kind, with the setting, the puzzles and the stories they pro­vide, can edify us through a ludic cocktail of group dynam­ics, game theory, behavioural psychology, interaction design, story-telling and puzzles. How, then, can physical escape rooms become incorporated as part of pedagogical and didactic method, allowing us to use interaction and togetherness in a space as primary forms of communica­tion and (mis)lead students so that they can find learning and insights into life in new ways?

This is the question I shall answer in the story that follows.

In some ways, the escape room and the (folk high) school resemble each other – the latter simply takes place over a longer period of time and its aims are rather less explicitly formulated. But both spaces share the same principles, for in my view education and edification are all about (mis)leading people towards their own freedom. They are about gradually rendering the teacher superflu­ous, about encouraging a bubbling-up of curiosity about ourselves and the world about us.

Game as mirror

“The trick to education is to teach people in such a way that they don’t realize they’re learning until it’s too late,” wrote Harold Eugene Edgerton (1903-1990). He was profes­sor of electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a pioneer in the development of the stro­boscope, sonar and high-speed photos taken with cameras of, for example, humming birds, pistol shots and nuclear tests. What permitted Edgerton to make playful combina­tions that led to new insights was his unabated curiosity. A particular aspect of it was that he would not explicitly put into words what the objective was until suddenly that obje­ctive was reached. And he would divert and delude both himself and his students – though always with a benign agenda in mind. This may be a banal insight, but it is abso­lutely central to understanding why all types of games (and sports) are enthralling, engaging and entertaining.

And this means that the game provides the best pos­sible learning situation, one that feels like FUN. But since the meaning of the word ‘fun’ has been watered down into something so ambiguous and banal, I would rather boil down the good experience of play and say that it is an activity that always contains the following five elements: Surprise, Wonderstanding, Blunderguts, Frustration control and Blissful self-forgetting.

Surprise

A brief definition of a surprise might be “being, becoming or feeling entrigued by something unexpectedly or sud­denly happening”. In other words, it is a matter of being confronted with a situation in which our expectations do not match up to reality. A surprise always has a variety of valencies, or emotional effects, such as joy, fear or grief, or it can be ambivalent. However, used in relation to games and play, the sought-after valencies are uplifting, propul­sive and pleasurable. The central thing about games is that they need to surprise the player if they are to retain inter­est, because as soon as the game feels as though it has been ‘mastered’ and vanquished, it ceases to exert any interest. And an intrinsic part of the ‘fun’ of the game lies in the surprise element of never being able to predict which skills and qualities an experience of the game will require before players find themselves in the situation. The central idea has been succinctly articulated by the game designer, Raph Koster, in his phenomenal book A Theory of Fun for Game Design, “Fun is just another word for learning under optimal conditions”.

Wonderstanding

All games are about being active. In contrast to all other forms of communication, games demand that players actively make choices and prioritise as they play. This paves the way for the factor I call wonderstanding. If we define UNDERstanding as the outcome of planned learn­ing processes, which are primarily teacher-led and have clear aims in order to fit in with a specific syllabus, then WONDERstanding is what emerges from a form of teach­ing that allows revelation based on shared wonder and sur­prise. It is, therefore, pupil-led and engaging and it takes as its point of departure the pupils’ own preconceptions; it stimulates wonderment, initiates experimentation and exploration using pupils’ own hypotheses, and it is based on an attainment of knowledge that is self-owned. The word has been adapted from Mette Sanggaard Schultz. Her main point is that, in teaching aimed at WONDERstanding, the teacher no more knows the answers in advance than do the pupils. It is all about posing good questions and seeing what happens when we start answering them in different ways. Central to this is a view of play as wonderstanding, as arising from surprise, because the teacher would ruin the game if all the answers were preordained and if it was already decided from the start who the winner should be.

Blunderguts

By putting together the words ‘blunder’ and ‘guts’, I have created this word because I lacked a term for the view of life that games demand of their players. Play, to use the definition given by the Danish game researcher Jesper Juul, is the ‘art of failure’. Games are by nature paradoxi­cal, because, even though we know from the beginning that we can lose in a game and feel frustration, we nevertheless expose ourselves to that risk. It could even be said that that very risk is what makes the game exciting, that there is, so to speak, something at stake. So, blunderguts is the courage to dare to make mistakes and, in so doing, to permit the space in which latent surprises and wonderstanding can arise. However, just like surprises, failures have a valency, so that the job of the developer in creating the game or the escape room is to design the best and most ‘delightful blun­ders’ – or failures that, while they unquestionably have to arouse frustration, must never discourage the player. These are, in other words, blunders that, just like the best forms of feedback, give players the guts to dare try again and again and again, and this, in turn, gives them the opportunity to use the learning gleaned from their mistakes to overcome the challenge. This means that the games that are most fun are, in reality, those that provoke new and unexpected blunders in its player and so firmly embed interaction as the crucial element of learning.

Frustration control

I have played in way more than 50 escape rooms right across the world from Seoul to San Francisco. There was not one in which I was not frustrated. But afterwards I have felt relief and a sense of ownership of blunders as successes, because a gamemaster has always kept an eye on the situation. This means that, as a group, we can ask for help to solve puzzles, so our frustration has always been under control. Even the term ‘frustration control’ stems from a pedagogical theory of scaffolding, and it describes elements that both games and learning have to include: opposition, conflict, disinclination and the feeling that something has to be vanquished. In this way, frustration control is linked to blunderguts but is more rele­vant to a game’s creators, since they have to consider how the game’s frustrations are created and resolved – either by the game, the players or the gamemaster in the escape room. The worst frustration that a game creator can give a player – or a teacher can give a pupil – is powerlessness and the feeling of lacking intelligence, which comes when solutions are dished up on a plate, or in other words when you steal ownership of a blunder and with it steal success from the player.

In games, therefore, we always need to ensure that frustrations caused by blunders are restricted or that at least we try to control them. A game that is never frustrating is no fun. A game that is constantly frustrating, on the other hand, is no fun either, so the balance lies in frustration con­trol. Each player has a different frustration threshold, so this is a factor that requires considerable empathy and the ability to appreciate the thought processes of others.

Blissful self-forgetting

The last crucial factor in a good gaming experience is whether the players forget themselves and the situation they are in. Simply by saying “Let’s go on an adventure and play a brilliant game” rather than “Now we are going to play a game about mathematics/leadership behaviour/group dynamics”, I am preparing the ground for wonder­standing and, as suggested in the earlier Edgerton quote, am not telling pupils what they need to be aware of in the gaming situation. There is nothing wrong with deceiving them so they can be motivated to self-forgetting. Because in self-forgetting the most amazing things happen. Pat­terns of behaviour change, and tone, discourse and power relations are realigned. This happens only because pupils enter into the game, because they find delight in it and blissfully forget themselves. They react directly and spon­taneously. I believe, therefore, that there lies in these sit­uations a huge potential for implicit and latent learning anchored in the pupils’ ignorance about what they are really learning.

The mirror of the game

When we construct games with students at Vallekilde Folk High School, we are basically seeing games as “interactive experiences in a system”. All games are a dialogical pro­cess, in which game and player systematically manipulate and are manipulated. At Vallekilde, the development of games is part of ‘the school day’, and development takes place in the students’ ‘teaching time’. But the extraordinary magic of edification that comes into play is that self-for­getting takes over. Sometimes during the development process itself but especially during the experience of the game, players become so immersed that they forget that they are in the process of learning because they find them­selves in the best possible learning situation.

I am in no doubt that games and escape rooms can be designed to include both explicit and implicit learning. Out of elements such as Surprise, Wonderstanding, Blunder­guts, Frustration control and Blissful self-forgetting arise com­munity, togetherness, communication, curiosity and col­laboration. We have only been able to scratch the surface of what play as a mirror image of ourselves and others can give us in the context of learning about life and of edifica­tion. But the urge to play is out there. Board games are fill­ing the shops; digital games are creating vast online uni­verses in which we can lose ourselves; and escape rooms are growing in popularity, quantity and technical quality. We are absolutely entering an era, in which the mantra is “Play it, don’t show it.”