Escaping With the Family: Cooperation and Collaboration in a Single-use Boardgame

This paper describes the intergenerational play of an Escape Room-style boardgame in a family setting. Through analysis of five key moments during play, it shows that this style of game is congruent with the ‘core’ model of family leisure, and highlights the importance of naive operation to avoid privileging particular social and cultural knowledge as a prerequisite for successful completion of a game. This is important for the design of games that can be played by intergenerational groups, as it focuses attention on the play of the game rather than on prior, frequently age-dependent knowledge.