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Pretend for a moment you're in ninth grade, two weeks into high school and visiting the library with your classmates for orientation. The library staff tells you and your team of detectives-yes, they call you detectives-that a priceless statuette (i.e., action figure) from the library's art collection has been stolen, but fortunately the thief's M.O. is to hide the pilfered item in the very place from which it was taken. You have forty-five minutes to follow the thief's trail of riddles and puzzles and recover the statuette. After that, the thief-a stylish cat burglar known as Rayna Trix-has promised to return and steal it for good. A stopwatch projected against a screen in the library begins ticking.
"The thief left this," one of the librarians says. You open the proffered copy of William Messner-Loeb's graphic novel Journey: The Adventures of Wolverine MacAlistaire and find tucked in its pages a small square of blue paper on which "Hg" is printed.
What do you do?
From the description above, aficionados of liveaction, team-based games might recognize identifying characteristics of the escape room variant known as a puzzle room: the clock, the clue, the narrative. (Film buffs might additionally recognize in the thief's M.O. a reference to one of the plot twists in The Thomas Crown Affair.) Though the first escape room is often traced to Japan in 2007 (Nicholson 2015, 3), my introduction to the concept came via a June 2014 New York Times article that described the phenomenon as a cross between video games and theater (Suellentrop 2014). After reading several other articles about escape rooms and hearing of them on NPR, I started considering puzzle rooms in the context of our library orientation program, which I wanted to remake. In December 2015 I began gathering ideas for puzzles and riddles, intending to test a design during the spring 2016 semester with a single team of students and to fully implement a puzzle room-style library orientation in fall of the same year.
Puzzle rooms, for those unfamiliar with them, present players with a set of challenges to solve; they require "teamwork, communication, and delegation as well as critical thinking, attention to detail, and lateral thinking" (Nicholson 2015, 2). At their most elaborate, puzzle rooms offer a...