If you are looking for an experience that is fun and exciting but also has more value to offer in terms of productivity and self-improvement, escape rooms are just the right choice for you. In the first place, it might seem that they are nothing more than light-hearted entertainment. But in reality, the world of escapades packs in many essential real-life lessons that help you navigate through personal and professional spheres of life.
Wondering how? Let’s take a quick look at how a simple activity like an escape game can help you with potential soft skills as no other activity can.
What are the life skills that escape games can help you learn?
It is scientifically proven that whatever we learn in a fun and interactive mode tends to leave behind a far more profound impact on us. Since escape rooms are essentially an interactive indoor adventure activity, it is no surprise that they come with a hoard of educational qualities, including but not limited to critical thinking, collaborative aptitude, and adaptive learning.
The best part about learning with escape rooms is that it occurs at a subconscious level. When you go out to play an escape room, you are not really seeking out a learning experience. But the activity, very subtly, incorporates important life skills into its players, all the while entertaining them.
Though the list can go on much longer, here are some of the fundamental life skills that escape games can help you learn:
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Understand the ways in which you can work well with your team
Teamwork is one of the most fundamental approaches to conquer the various challenges that you will face in life and in your profession. And escape rooms help you develop a teamwork mindset effectively.
When inside an escape room, you have to work with people of different natures without losing patience. You also need to acknowledge and utilize each of your teammates’ abilities to work out the tricky riddles and challenging puzzles in order to escape in time. To put it plainly, an escape room throws you into a situation where you have no choice but to find a way to get along with your teammates and find a way to be productive together. And that enhances your adaptability to such a mindset in real life as well.
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How to be a good leader?
If teamwork is the basic skill to win an escape room game, then leadership is the most significant catalyst of it. A team cannot navigate its way through a challenge if no proactive leader is guiding them through it. When you are inside an escape room, the ambiance and the challenging nature of the game organically bring out the leadership qualities in players.
You need to strategize and assign roles, as well as maintain constant communication to escape the room within the time limit. So, it is obvious that under the pressure of the time-sensitive mission, you will automatically feel the urge to step up and play the role of leading your team to the final escape door.
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Boost up your brain-working abilities!
Escape room games make your brain work in surprisingly interesting ways as you try your best to solve the riddles thrown before you. The game calls for logical reasoning and problem-solving capabilities.
In the escape room, there is usually a string of cryptic puzzles and riddles that are connected to each other through a continuous storyline. The clues are also interlaced in a way where you cannot proceed with the game if you cannot correlate the elements in the room. So, while playing the game, reasoning and critical thinking skills need to be on alert at all times to avoid wasting any time. Plus, you also need to use your creative mindset to try out unconventional methods of solving seemingly conventional puzzles.
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Make the best of your senses
Escape games fascinatingly deliver players right at the epicenter of the action, and you can feel a chilly sensation running down your spine. Pay attention to the slightest of movements or happenings around you, or you might miss out on crucial clues!
Escape rooms are full of sensory stimuli. Most escape games come equipped with a full-fledged set with relevant props and lighting. Some even go the extra mile to add sounds, visual effects, and even scents to the room set up to make it as realistic as possible. So, all your senses are simultaneously engaged while playing the game. This actually helps enhance your motor functions and trains your brain to be more present. While we often think sensory training is exclusively for kids, motor functions actually need to be constantly engaged in order to keep it effectively active, even in adults.
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The niches of time management skills!
Time management is yet another area in which playing an escape game shall be of help to you. Escape games have a stipulated time limit (generally an hour) within which players are required to finish their games in order to win.
So, the game pushes you to prioritize tasks and adjust your pace according to the time left on hand. You need to make sure that none of your team members end up spending far too much of their time trying to solve one single puzzle or riddle. Punctuality thus becomes an essential skill to win the game.
And this translates into the real-life skill of time management and flexibility, which are essential to thrive not only in your career but even in the domestic aspects of life!
Conclusion
Escape rooms are a great tool for learning real-life skills that are hard to enhance through textbook teaching methods. With hands-on experience, you subconsciously gather knowledge that helps bring out the best of your essential soft skills and gives you plenty of opportunities to hone them. We can’t say that you will walk out of an escape room with all your life problems solved, but you will surely be more ready to take on real-life curve balls like a pro!
