The Center for EMDD Presents: The Great Escape

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Last week, the Center for Emerging Media Design and Development launched its spring low-residency workshop at the Ball State Fishers Center. This immersive four-day event provided team building, networking, educational components for EMDD 630: Nonlinear & Interactive Storytelling and EMMD 640: Transmedia Storytelling & Publishing, and fun!

The week began with a pit stop at EscapeUSA Fishers’ The Race escape room, which is best described in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle via ChatGPT:

“In the dimly lit Vintage Race League garage, motor oil and adrenaline thick in the air, a mysterious veil cloaked the season’s final race. High stakes, higher tension – you and your rival teetered on victory’s edge. A clandestine caller, night-shrouded, delivered an ominous message – both race cars sabotaged, carburetors damaged. Fate’s gears took a sinister turn.

“Race rules demanded inspection two hours before engines roared. Within 60 minutes, navigate the labyrinth, find a spare carburetor, or face a penalty. The Parts Department key was left at the track; a security code guarded the crucial bastion. Unravel the mystery, find the code, secure the carburetor – destiny’s race against time: triumph or bitter defeat, the final race hung in the balance, a spectacle of cunning deduction. The game was afoot!“

At the workshop, Dr.’s Kevin Moloney and Joshua Fisher created a novel experience for their classes. Competing against one another in two identical escape rooms, the students created narratives that will inform the stories they tell via their coursework in the upcoming semester. Dr. Fisher said, “the escape room allowed students to gather story data to put theory into practice in the emerging discipline of interactive and digital storytelling.”

Students used a series of user personas to select their escape room type and sorted into two teams of five: The Perfect Mix and The Wrecking Balls. These teams raced against the clock and each other to see who could escape first. The Wrecking Balls crushed The Perfect Mix’s hopes of winning with a well-timed, if accidental, bit of sabotage, but in the end, both teams escaped with the spare carburetor!

After receiving the checkered flags, students took a pace lap and met with faculty and alums of the EMDD program at a dinner mixer at the Fishers Test Kitchen before heading to their respective homes and hotels.

The rest of the week featured morning sessions of storytelling theory and afternoons of story creation. Dr. Moloney’s course focused on how to build stories, “we used the escape room experience to seed discussions of how to structure a story. The students chatted with me as they developed nonlinear stories about how the points on a variety of story arcs could work in nonlinear form.” Dr. Fisher worked on fleshing these stories into an interactive form via Unity and Twine.

Would you like EMDD to be part of your story? Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Visit our Ball State University webpage for more information or to join our program.