Enabling the creation and hosting of cooperative online escape events in M.O.R.S.E. without programming experience

Abstract

The M.O.R.S.E. system is a tool for creating and managing large escape events, mainly used for local escape events. The tool is designed for only a limited range of puzzle types and styling options because most of the puzzles require physical items in order to solve a puzzle and only the answers have to be entered in M.O.R.S.E. Because of this design, it is really difficult to create online escape experiences, especially rich and immersive ones. It also requires a lot of programming outside of the M.O.R.S.E. system to do so. Raccoon Serious Games , the client, does not have many employees with programming experience and, therefore, it is not feasible for them to create the rich and immersive online escape experiences they want. To be able to create such immersive experiences, we are extending M.O.R.S.E. with editable domains and web pages. Game designers can add domains and web pages to the existing event schedule and then puzzles can be created for web pages. Players can view one or multiple of these domains and for each domain, the active web page will be served. Web pages can be created and stored in the domains, but the actual contents of the web pages still have to be made. Because making web pages is often a programming intensive task, a page builder has been created in M.O.R.S.E. This page builder allows the user to load and save web pages created in the M.O.R.S.E.
system. It uses a drag-and-drop system to place building-block elements inside the web pages and allows for directly visible styling of those elements. Because of this, the user does not need programming knowledge of the underlying implementation of the web pages. It also facilitates the linking between M.O.R.S.E. features and the domains such as puzzles and triggers for buttons. Using the import and export functionality, users can easily copy previous web pages created with the page builder. This is not only limited to internal web pages but can also be used to import external code from outside the page builder. With user-friendly features such as the ability to undo and redo changes, the page builder tries to make creating web pages as easy as possible. An important aspect of the escape games hosted by Raccoon Serious Games is team building. We extend upon this notion by adding roles and a leaderboard screen to M.O.R.S.E., both of which increase the need and opportunity for interaction between players. The addition of roles allows game designers to enforce cooperation in their escape events, by restricting the access to resources required for solving a puzzle to only a subset of the players in a team. This way they have to cooperate and combine their information and resources to solve all puzzles. The addition of leaderboards is also an extra incentive for a player in a team to work together efficiently because this will positively impact their score and, therefore, ranking on the leaderboard.