(Re)reading the room: The literacies of escape rooms

Abstract

Building a more comprehensive understanding of gaming literacies, this article explores the kinds of literacy practices that emerge through participation and play within escape rooms. Based on a dataset of video recordings of participant interactions within an escape room, we perform side-by-side analyses of play based on two theoretical perspectives. In so doing, we propose alternative apparatuses for analyzing the gaming literacy practices and indeed the hidden and intended curriculum of escape rooms. This polyphonic rendering and reading are done not to argue that these are discrete phenomena within the flurry of the activity space of an escape room. Instead, it illustrates how these practices are interwoven with one another as well as with the tacit and collaborative knowledge of team-based cooperation, personal histories, and felt resources of play. Not simply noting how literacies mediate interaction in these gaming spaces, findings emphasize how learning, affect, interaction, and analog play are purposefully designed, entangled, felt, and understood.

Acknowledgments

Jon Wargo would like to thank Alex Corbitt, Joseph Madres, and Melita Morales for their assistance in generating data for the larger “Learning to Escape” project.”

Notes

1 We follow Fine (1980) here when he used the term “gaming” to distinguish between the game itself and what real players do in constructing a particular instance of that game.

2 Game-based literacies, according to Squire (2008), underscore that “texts are spaces to inhabit, learning [is] a productive, performative act, knowledge is legitimatized through its ability to function in the world, participation requires producing as well as consuming media, expertise means leveraging [digital] spaces to further one’s goals, and [that] social systems have permeable boundaries with overlapping trajectories of participation” (p. 667).

3 Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe assemblages as tetravalent and operating on two axes: a material-discursive axis of “content and expression” and an axis of “territoriality and deterritorialization” (p. 505).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jon Wargo

Jon M. Wargo, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Lynch School of Education & Human Development at Boston College. His scholarship examines how media and technology mediate contemporary conceptions of minoritized children and youths’ social and civic education and how these practices facilitate youths’ critical literacy learning as well as broader cultural change.

Antero Garcia

Antero Garcia, PhD, is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. His work explores how technology and gaming shape learning, literacy practices, and civic identities. Antero co-designed the Critical Design and Gaming School–a public high school in South Central Los Angeles.