Escape rooms, also called escape rooms, are not just ordinary fun, but a real dose of various emotions. The fact that players usually only have 60 minutes to leave the room makes the experience even more intense and exciting. It’s like a race against time, where every second counts and each approach to the puzzle may be the key to success. Although the real key may be solid communication. There is no room for casual conversations here – you really have to listen to what others have to say.
You get to know a person best in action
Escape rooms are a bit of a simulated crisis situation. It’s not often in our lives that we have the opportunity to save space, discover the lost sarcophagus of a pharaoh or follow the footsteps of a criminal fugitive. And when is the best time to meet a person, if not in action? Thanks to such a situation, you often get to know another person better than during a coffee break on Fruit Thursday. You can say that you can work under time pressure, but when there are last 10 minutes left and the reactor is not yet protected against explosion, only then do we learn about the nature of others, as well as our own. There is no place or time here to pretend anything.
Troubleshooting without the Internet?
Escape rooms present players with various riddles and puzzles that require an unconventional approach and “out of the box” thinking. Participants must analyze situations from different perspectives, connect matching elements and draw conclusions based on available clues. And all this without the ability to Google a potential solution. This provides excellent training in problem-solving skills that are applicable to both everyday life and the workplace. We also cannot forget about focus and concentration. In the chaos of solving puzzles, you can sometimes lose the thread leading to the solution. The ability to focus on what is currently happening and maintain a clear mind in difficult situations are features that can be developed in escape rooms.
How to become a time master?
When you enter a room, you usually only have an hour to solve all the puzzles and get out of the room. It seems like a lot, but when you start thinking about the next puzzles, the minutes start to pass like crazy. This is where time management comes into play. In escape rooms you learn how to effectively plan and use every minute. You have to choose what to focus on, what to leave for later and how to best divide your time.
Good team
It’s hard to move forward in life alone, and it’s even harder to do it in an escape room. The essence of this experience is a close-knit team, even if the people who enter the room together did not know each other before. I had the opportunity to experience it from two perspectives – as a participant and as a Game Master. Once, during a job interview, my boss put the entire future team into a room to see how we would cope. I must admit that I have never gotten to know a group of people so quickly and so well that I didn’t know before. Thanks to this, we knew what strengths and weaknesses each of us had, which allowed us to create a thriving team. However, as the Game Master, I could see a little more – I saw teams introducing themselves at the entrance and patting each other on the back at the end, congratulating each other on how well they had done. But there were also groups of friends who turned into lone wolves in the room, running out of time before escaping the room.
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I hope I managed to shed some light on this mysterious topic, because in fact, complicated puzzles are probably the easiest part of this whole mess. It’s worth taking a risk at least once and seeing for yourself what it all really looks like. And of course, take advantage of your student status!