"Will AI affect Escape Rooms?"

I got asked this the other day by someone not in the industry, and honestly I'm not sure. But it's presence is being felt in the industry.

Ultimately, the only true determining factor is consumer habits. I'm seeing these companies pop-up on platforms like Amazon and Etsy that are just generating literally hundreds of play-at-home games and flooding the marketplace. It's crowding out the genuine creators who only have a few games that they make from scratch.

For research purposes I did buy one of the play-at-home games that had clearly been done with AI and can confirm that the interior was also all AI. The art had the smooth and uncanny valley look, the text read like it was ripped straight from a ChatGPT response, and the puzzles didn't really hold together as a narrative. It was a complete waste of AI and I wish online platforms were clamping down on this.

But for real-life games it's a different story, AI is definitely creeping in!

I recently played (what I am very sure will be a no.1 contender on the escape room rankings) game in the Netherlands recently. In my Morty review, I praised almost every aspect of it. But did call it out for having AI art in one of the puzzles. I also stated that if I was wrong, I would remove that part of the review. I don't want to be spreading false information. The company responded and asked me which puzzle I thought had AI generated art, and I replied. The never confirmed or denied. Shame. For an exceptional room, it was a blemish. I feel bad, but I think it's important that we call it out. Don't let it be normalised.

But ultimately, consumer habits will be the deciding factor. If I see an escape room poster that is made by AI, I’m probably not going to play it. It's a sentiment that many people in my circle share. I know the argument can be made that “maybe all the money went into the game itself, and that’s the most important thing” but if you are willing to put something AI made as the first point of contact with a potential player, given the correlation between AI art and quality, you either don't know your market, or you don't care.

Anyone who argues with me on that point, I merely ask them to cast their mind back to the global fallout of the "Willy Wonka" experience, here in Glasgow. It was absolutely plastered with AI ads, promising a magical experience it did not even begin to deliver on. The organiser didn't want to pay for actual art, so he used AI. But we all quickly discovered, he also didn't want to pay for any of the sets, actors, lighting, props, or the experience. The outrage created a correlation between "AI art" and gross disappointment in the general public, and with more low-quality projects being shoveled out with wild abandon on Steam, Etsy, or what have you, all fronted with AI art, that correlation is only strengthening.

To me, the whole point of an Escape Room is that human collaboration within the team. To solve, deduce, and explore together is to be human, and that is what we as human creators, designers, builders, writers etc, leverage into gameplay. Can Artificial Intelligence replicate that?

I'll be the first to admit that it's getting harder to create new and exciting puzzles, mechanisms, or story ideas that haven't been seen a hundred times before. Especially when budgets are getting tighter. But the worry is that the next generation of escape room games end up cheap imitations of each other because lazy grifters use ChatGPT to write and design them.

There is a play-at-home company I quite like, who has been quite upfront about their use of AI imagery. They used it for their first game, because it was an experiment. When the project found an audience, the first thing they did was bring in an illustrator to redraw all the imagery, and keep the art human for subsequent games. The AI-assisted version still exists, but as a free prequel to their actual games. Fine. I can't say I love it, but I at least understand it.

Like video game platforms like Steam, I think Escape Rooms should disclose if AI was used in the process. But it is not a regulated space, so I'll probably get flak for that opinion.

Thoughts?