How to play?:
The aim of the game is to get students engaged in schoolwork during literature class. Through elements woven into the room’s puzzles and imagery, participants have the opportunity to create individual and group interpretations. The base of the story, written by Géza Csáth, is that our little team broke into a mental hospital in search of information regarding the main character, but during their search they triggered the alarm system. The players must reconstruct the story and break free from the trap they got into. The game can be played by 6 people at once, optimal playtime is around 30 minutes.
Skills improved
The game motivates players to interpret the novel by their own means. The room – from a methodological point – builds on cooperative work where the main motivation is to solve the mystery via communication and cooperative problemsolving. As a result, it is nearly impossible to complete the room without these skillsets and attitude: everyone must
select a role which suites their personality and abilities in the process (subconsciously) to be able to reconstruct the story and finish in time. Each individual player must work and solve tasks that are most suitable for them.
Background
While planning we wanted to build a game that is somewhat modular in its structure: these modules can be entertaining and educative at the same time, adding other literatures, too. The whole game is based on one specific novel, but the modular structure makes it possible to swap out the original literature with another one without losing any of the elements mentioned above. The game was ntroduced during the 5th Vision of Tomorrow Workshop of CASSI, later versions were held during the Ördögkatlan (The Devil’s Den) Festival in 2019 and at the Social Sciences Library of the University of Pécs on multiple occasions.
The creators
The game was designed by István Ábrahám Bálint, Viola Horváth Ádámné Rőmer and Ramóna Sütő. Designing the first version of the game was smooth and quick, hence the developers knew each other well, all three of them studied library science at the University of Pécs. The joint product was fit together by research from every member. Ábrahám was most interested in the mechanism and ethodology of escape the rooms, Viola conducted research on how to increase the will of high school students to read literature, also she was interested in the methodology of escape the rooms and Ramóna, who was most interested in gamification and the possibilities it provides in the classroom.
