I’ve never been much of a gamer. Growing up, I remember playing card games, particularly poker, with my parents. I won often enough to believe I excelled as a poker player. Poker face? Sure. Only as an adult did I realize they probably let me win. I know I played other board games as a child because I still have some of them. eBay tells me that the vintage board games I own aren’t worth much. But I don’t recall spending a lot of time on any of those games. I categorize them as a pastime, not a passion.

My interest in games, lukewarm even when I was young, dissipated as I grew older. Even video games didn’t hold much fascination for me. Ironically, one of my children joined a gaming company after graduating from university and still couldn’t convince me to play the games made by his company. But escape rooms may reignite my interest. I find the process of constructing and playing with escape rooms intriguing. I’ve also realized that escape rooms go by different names. My local public library announced a “break-in” themed around the Winter Olympics with “special puzzles.” Wait, I thought. Who knew that escaping and breaking in were the same thing?

As an educational tool, games have great potential. Training in all forms could benefit not only from escape room activities, but other gamification techniques as well. How about “choose your own adventure” for teaching information literacy or data literacy? Games can bring home how to identify misinformation and disinformation in a fun, nonthreatening manner. Case studies, used extensively in business courses, could be considered early adoptions of games for learning.

Learning as a series of puzzles to be solved seems to me to be particularly applicable to courses for graduate library education. Puzzles, which could hide under the name of reference questions or even “stumpers,” lead students to develop research skills and gain in-depth knowledge of resources. Games played as a group reflect the collegial and collaborative aspects of modern work environments. Can the students, individually or together, find an obscure fact, retrieve an old scholarly paper, or decipher numeric information? If that sounds boring, rethink it as an escape room. Solving these puzzles to escape from a dungeon adds excitement. Even better, solving these puzzles lets students break into the world of professional librarianship.

Not everyone is enamored of escape rooms or, presumably, break-in puzzles. Pushbacks that librarians have reported include the time it takes to develop and set up, schools at all levels being hesitant about such a non-traditional approach to the curricula, a philosophical disagreement with encouraging competition among students, and the technology used becoming obsolete. Anyone set on creating escape rooms for educational purposes should have rebuttals to objections lined up and ready to go when proposing their development.

Puzzle me this, online searchers: How best could you add gamification techniques to your information professional toolbox? What escape room theme resonates with you?