Imagine this: It’s 5 pm on a Wednesday evening. Your team decides to participate in an escape room after work, and before it begins, you are given the following scenario:
The Rock ‘n Roll Music Festival is starting in 60 minutes and your team’s goal is to become Ultimate VIPs. An Ultimate VIP status is only granted if your team is able to get on the registration list for each of the six concerts at the festival, but each concert registration list has a top-secret code that is needed for access. Your team must uncover these hidden access codes within the hour or you cannot be a VIP at the festival.
And your 60 minutes starts now.
If you’ve ever participated in an escape room activity, this scenario likely sounds familiar. But have you ever tried doing something like this in a virtual environment?
When the pandemic hit, everyone was forced to rethink how we conduct group activities, and internal events were no different. The absence of an in-person office environment makes fostering social relationships and mutual trust among team members more than a little challenging.
I don’t know about you, but I was getting tired of the traditional Zoom happy hours. They make it hard to interact with coworkers, especially when only one person can speak at a time.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to incorporate creativity and collaboration into internal events today. Not only does it set up groups to work together, but it allows us to celebrate individuals’ strength.
I knew there had to be a more exciting and engaging virtual internal event for us to do on the Splash sales team. Cue the idea: a virtual escape room.
A little bit about me: Growing up, I always loved the Hardy Boys, a book series about teenagers who solve seemingly impossible cases through creativity and teamwork. So naturally, I often dragged friends to participate in escape rooms around New York to get a similar experience solving seemingly impossible cases. They are so creative, and even if I don’t escape (which is actually about 75% of the time), I still have such a deep appreciation for the people who put together the clues.
With the shutdown of in-person activities, I caught myself constantly thinking about the events I missed attending, especially escape rooms. Escape rooms provide an outlet for problem solving, creativity, crafting solutions, and collaboration.
I began to realize: This is exactly what I am doing working with my clients at Splash. We spend all day crafting solutions on how to bring their events virtual and make them engaging. That’s when I dreamt up the idea to solve the seemingly impossible case of Zoom fatigue with an internal event called Escape the [Breakout] Room.
I knew it would not be an easy task. If it was going to work well, I really needed to think outside of the box. I began to ask myself a series of questions.
What will my virtual escape room concept be?
After attending numerous in-person escape rooms, I had a general idea of how they worked. You are given a scenario and the clues needed to advance participants, so I knew my escape room had to be, in a sense, relatively similar to that. The first concept that came to mind was a Rock ‘n Roll Virtual Tour.
Everyone participating in the escape room would be told they are going to attend the Rock ‘n Roll Virtual Tour and they can be a VIP — if they can get on each of the six concert registration lists in 60 minutes.
What will the game structure look like?
With the concept created, I got to work on the game structure. Since we were hosting this event on Zoom, I knew I could utilize the breakout room feature. I would start everyone in the main Zoom room, then separate everyone into their respective groups via breakout rooms. Once there, each team would have 60 minutes to solve for the six access codes.
Each team would have a designated team leader and a room moderator. The designated team lead would be the only one with access to the Splash event page, meaning the team lead would share his or her screen. This would make it like they were actually in an in-person escape room — all team players with only one set of information. The room moderator would only be there to assist with technical difficulties and administer hints (three total) if the team needed help. And once they solved each of the six access codes, they could escape the breakout room.
How do I create this virtual game?
No surprise here: Splash made creating the event easy. With the branded themes that exist in Splash, I quickly produced the Rock ‘n Roll Virtual Tour event page and used our designer tools to add some flair.
As I assembled my event page, I thought through places I could hide codes, create hints, and embed the different registration pages. I started to think … What does a concert series event page look like?
Typically, they have different sections like what to expect, featured musical performances, various concert stages, event location, sponsors, and event ticket purchase platform.
I decided that using each one of these sections would be a great way to embed registration pages and hide clues in the information provided. Using Splash, I enabled the privacy gate feature to password-protect the registration pages: a perfect place to enter an access code.
How do I build these clues and codes?
I hid clues on the Splash event page and other platforms that our teams use on a daily basis (like Slack and Salesforce). Teams really had to work together to figure out the passwords for each registration page and crack the clues.
One clue, located in the main stage description section of the event page looked like this:
Details: Check-in two this event starts at 8 sharp. So make sure you arrive on time — you don’t want to be the only one missing out on the fun. If you have any concerns ahead of time, please visit us at supportclue.splashthat.com or call our support line at 555-0822. Thanks!
Do you think you know the access code for this registration list?
If your guess is 2815550822, congratulations! Only five more to go.
The hardest clue in there leveraged our image carousel element and required the teams to match up the order the images appeared in the carousel with the order they appeared throughout the Splash event page. Very tricky, but in my defense, we did allow the teams to ask for three hints during their 60 minutes.
How do I prepare for this event?
Days before the event, I reviewed the gameplay with our leadership team, who were the moderators for the breakout rooms. They knew it was a cool idea, but we all really had no idea if this was going to translate as eloquently to virtual.
But once one of the breakout rooms solved their first clue, within the first five minutes, I thought to myself: “It’s working. It’s actually working.”
I know you’re wondering: Did any team get Ultimate VIP status?
Not this go around, but they did have a great time. Actually, it was such a hit among my fellow team members that we planned one with our entire revenue team early this year as part of our annual Revenue Kickoff.
Escape rooms inherently set up groups to work together and come up with creative solutions. Everyone approaches scenarios differently, so it fostered a team-bonding atmosphere where individual strengths were emphasized and put to use.
It was a great escape (pun intended) from the generic Zoom happy hour and produced fantastic team building within our virtual world.
