The ETC Press is proud to announce the release of Well Played, Vol. 10, No. 1: A Special Issue on Escape Rooms, edited by Clara Fernández-Vara and Ira Fay.
Though often viewed as special category of games, sports is really an approach to play. The popular conception of the sporting mindset puts certain values ahead of others, and positioning games as a means to an end rather than an experience unto itself. Sometimes, the sporting mindset brings out the best in us; sometimes, the worst.
Escape the Room games are popular all over the world, from New York to Kuala Lumpur, and have been created for all kinds of spaces. Although they are now thought of as a popular activity to do with friends, their origins are actually digital—its conventions derived from interactive fiction and point-and-click adventure games, and became its own genre of web games in the early 2000s. Their non-digital incarnations have taken the form of real rooms that invite participants to solve their puzzles to get out, and then have expanded to board games. This makes the escape the room genre a fascinating area of study and design, given how its history spans both videogames and physical games.
This special issue includes analyses and studies of escape the room games, either digital and non-digital, from all over the world.
About Carnegie Mellon University’s ETC Press
ETC Press is a publishing imprint with a twist. We publish books, but we’re also interested in the participatory future of content creation across multiple media. We are an academic, open source, multimedia, publishing imprint affiliated with the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and in partnership with Lulu.com.
ETC Press publications will focus on issues revolving around entertainment technologies as they are applied across a variety of fields. Authors publishing with ETC Press retain ownership of their intellectual property. ETC Press publishes a version of the text with author permission and ETC Press publications will be released under Creative Commons licenses. Every text is available for free download, and we price our titles as inexpensively as possible because we want people to have access to them. We’re most interested in the sharing and spreading of ideas.