5 lessons learned in escape rooms that you can apply in your everyday life.
Escape rooms have become one of the most popular entertainment activities all over the world. The inclusivity, flexibility, and affordability of the game have caused more and more people to choose it for not only simple gaming sessions but for several occasions. Whether it is a family game night, a birthday bash, or a date night, you can never go wrong with escape rooms.
Even beyond these, escape rooms have started to enjoy a special reputation in the field of corporate learning and development programs and general classrooms. Escape rooms are as great a learning method as they are fun. When designed correctly, escape rooms can impart a lot of practical, hands-on knowledge to players that can be very valuable for navigating through their day-to-day life.
Here are 5 of the best real-life lessons an escape room can teach you:
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- Time is invaluable:
The fundamental rule of an escape room is that the players must finish the game within a given period of time, which is usually 60 minutes. So, every minute spent inside the room matters. The better you are able to use your time and prioritize tasks, the higher your chances to escape.
An escape room basically places you in a situation where you have a lot of tasks scattered around, demanding attention. In order to win, you must adopt a logical way to organize and finish the tasks one by one to accomplish the bigger mission within 60 minutes. This is basically the structure of life as an adult. Tasks don’t come in neatly organized rows of color-coordinated daily to-do lists. In order to stay healthily productive, people need to know how to manage their time better. And an escape room game teaches you exactly that.
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- Teamwork makes the dream work:
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An escape room game is essentially a team activity (usually, the size ranges from 6 to 8 members). You need to know how to work with people and harness their strength to work efficiently. Escape rooms require players to get together, strategize, and divide tasks to finish the mission in time. So, the game creates a mindset where they are more open to collaborative approaches.
This soft skill comes in handy not only in corporate sectors but even in personal life. In your professional life, knowing how to work well with your colleagues to successfully finish any project while harnessing each individual’s expertise pushes your career in the right direction and makes you a valuable employee to have on board. In your personal life, this mindset will help you create and maintain any human relationship in a healthy way.
- Look before you act:
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The game structure involves a lot of observation. Since escape rooms hide clues in normal-looking objects, players need to look very closely and explore the room setting before leaping into action. But even when they have already started to execute their game plan, keeping an eye out for subtle hints is necessary. This helps you develop a keen eye for finer details.
Developing this tendency to gauge your circumstances before acting is a highly valuable skill since it helps you avoid hasty mistakes either in work or in life.
- Correlate and memorize:
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Escape rooms are great for exercising your brain’s correlation and memory retention capacity. Once the game starts, teams have to be vigilant in remembering the room layout, the props, any unsolved clues that they have found, and so on. Simultaneously, they also need to correlate the objects in the room with the room’s storyline so that the game can move forward.
If your brain learns how to handle multi-tasking like this, it significantly improves your concentration levels and ability to handle pressure. Whether it is at work or in other areas of life, there are several occasions when you have to consider multiple parameters of a single task to get it done without any errors. Escape room games help you condition your brain to similar, albeit much diluted situations, thus training you to extend your brainpower limits.
- Be creative:
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Escape rooms encourage the creativity of thought like no other activity. You need to think out of the box to discover clues and decode them. One of the most important skills you need to use when playing in an escape room is imagination. Sure, the atmosphere takes care of sensory immersion, but after that, it is all up to your imaginative and creative capacity to hold up the effect of the simulation. You need to be open to the concept and willfully engage with your creative side for your escape experience to be more wholesome. And the more you do it, the more it solidifies in you as an aptitude, rather than just a game strategy.
To summarise, escape rooms help us exercise our mental and cognitive capacities. The games are designed to take you into an alternative reality and test out how well you work under pressure. The challenges and tasks incorporate the theme and require quite an intensive amount of critical thinking and problem-solving skills that are necessary life skills. But these subsidiary benefits of this revolutionary game are just a few of endless possibilities.
Escape rooms became a very popular source of socialisation and comfort in recent times when people were locked inside their houses due to the pandemic. The stress-boosting qualities of the game made it a saviour for corporates and families. Virtual escape room games got people together to enjoy some quality time, put down their baggage, and escape into a world of simulation without the risk of becoming a harmful addiction.
More than anything, if you walk away from an escape room with just one lesson, let it be the fact that even amidst the worst of situations, adapting to your circumstances helps you thrive. The way the industry survived the blow of the pandemic by evolving on virtual platforms is really an exemplary phenomenon to learn from.
