You are here:
  1. DOOR
  2. Detail o:5778
Open in new window
Title (eng)
A night in the museum
A museum exhibition that turns into an escape room by night
Author
Ran Peleg
Author
Yael Bamberger
Author
Dorit Wolenitz
International Committee for Museums and Collections of Natural History
Description (eng)
Escape room games are a genre of physical games that has gained popularity in formal (schools and universities) and informal (museums) educational settings. In this pa- per we evaluate an innovative model of creating an escape room as part of an existing exhibition which in a way offers a refreshed curatorship of an existing exhibition. The context is a small Natural History museum in Israel that commissioned the au- thors to create two escape games within the exhibition space. Each was built into the existing exhibition without affecting its function during the day. So the exhibition space functions as a museum by day and an escape room by night. The transformation was designed so that museum guides could easily with a few actions (such as opening hidden doors and engaging electromagnets) transform one into the other. In this paper we focus on whether the model can attract new audiences, what education- al experience this model offers visitors and dig into visitors’ perceptions of the different game elements. Data were collected from visiting groups (108 players in 35 groups) and from gamemasters’ observations (32 groups) using an online questionnaires. Findings indicate that the model has indeed attracted new audiences to the museum and that this model affords an escape game experience not unlike ones reported in the literature. A deeper look into the different puzzles indicates that players enjoy hands- on puzzles that are also intellectually challenging. The puzzle that was most favoured was an experiment which includes both these attributes. A comparison of the visitor and gamemaster questionnaires seems to indicate that both perceive the gamemasters’ lev- els of involvement differently, suggesting the importance of training the gamemasters.
Keywords (eng)
Escape gamesMuseum educationCurationMuseum gamesVisitor experienceInformal learning
Type (eng)
journal article
Language
[eng]
Persistent identifier
https://door.donau-uni.ac.at/o:5778
DOI
10.48341/q7qh-j362
Is in series
Title (deu)
DAC - DIGITALES JOURNAL FÜR KUNST- & KULTURWISSENSCHAFTEN
Volume
2
Publication
Department für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften, Universität für Weiterbildung Krems
Date issued
2025-11-06
License
CC BY-NC 4.0 International