Designing an escape room in the city for public engagement with ai-enhanced surveillance

Abstract

Escape the Smart City is a critical pervasive game that uses an escape room format to help players develop an understanding of the implications of urban surveillance technologies. Set in downtown Amsterdam, players work together as a team of hackers to stop the mass deployment of an all-seeing AI-enhanced surveillance system. In order to defeat the system players need to understand its attributes and exploit its weaknesses. Novel gameplay elements include locating hidden surveillance cameras in the city, discovering and exploiting algorithmic biases in computer vision, and exploring new techniques to avoid facial recognition systems. This work makes two distinct contributions to the CHI community: first, it introduces critical pervasive games as an approach to engage the public in complex sociotechnical issues, and second, it experiments with the escape room format as a platform for critical play.