On a Quest: Our NASAGA-connected Scavenger Hunt

By Lisa Boragine and Alex Suchman

What happens when two NASAGA board members get together in the same city? We play a game, of course!

In late January, we met up just outside the gates of Harvard University to play the outdoor escape room/scavenger hunt called The Mysterious Porcellian Club, a game on Questo. If you’ve never heard of them, here’s a short description:

Questo is a platform for immersive outdoor escape games written and designed by professional content creators, companies, and amateur storytellers around the world. With these role-playing games, you will walk around the city solving puzzles in your surroundings in order to discover new places and their fun history.

These kinds of place-specific games are a great way to explore a neighborhood or landmark. At their core, they are essentially a guided walking tour with some games and history along the way. 

Unlike geospatial games such as Pokémon Go, which encourage players to move around in the real world but not engage, this game required us to pay close attention to our surroundings. The game centered around the story of a student journalist (represented by us, the players) infiltrating and exposing a secret campus society. The app provided a series of clues to help us find each new location spread throughout the Harvard campus. At each location, there was a puzzle or riddle about a particular building or feature that we had to answer correctly to advance to the next part of the story and get the next clue. Some of the clues were more helpful than others, but we managed to solve them all. We had a great time and wanted to share a few of our highlights and insights.

Distractions might lead you on a wild goose chase (or in our case, a turkey?!)

We learned the hard way that the GPS-enabled function in the app meant that we could only access the location-specific puzzle and storyline once we were within 50-ish meters from the location. About ¾ the way through the game, we spotted our biggest surprise of the day: a wicked “smaht” wild turkey wandering around “Haavahd Yahd!” We took a short detour to follow the fowl (pictured) as he/she/they wandered through campus for a few minutes, and when we went back to the app it said that we strayed too far from the route to access our next clue. So we had to retrace our steps to get back on course.

The challenges might be easier than you think.

As two veteran game players, we WAY overthought the first few clues, assuming that the riddles were more complex than they actually were. Lisa was ready to go into cryptography mode on the first puzzle! It turned out we only had to look for the pattern right in front of us. 

It’s okay to set your own goals.

There was a timer component in the app that tracked how long we took to find each location and solve each puzzle, but we didn’t feel compelled to rush. Beating the times of anonymous teams listed on the app leaderboard wasn’t much of a motivator. Instead, we used the walking-around time to talk, catch up, and enjoy our surroundings. But a more competitive group might like the extra challenge of trying to set a new course record. 

Puzzles and stories don’t always connect smoothly.

Another thing we noticed was that there wasn’t a strong relationship between the storyline and the game components. The puzzles were tangentially related to the storyline, but if we were asked to find an object in the architecture, the story would just move on without mentioning that object. It would have been a stronger experience if the story and the game had been more closely related. Unfortunately, this lack of flow between puzzle and game is all too common in commercially available puzzle games, probably because it’s so hard to create puzzles that are truly integrated with the story.

Even though the story didn't connect to the puzzle, both the puzzle and the game were strongly connected to the history and the place. In this way, the game was still immersive in its own right. We had to be fully present where we were and explore our location to get the answers.

Overall, it was a really fun experience and a great way to make exploring a new location a bit more interactive. If you happen to find yourself in the same city as another NASAGA member, we highly recommend checking out one of Questo’s games. 

Lisa Boragine is a faculty member at Bridgewater State University, teaching college courses in communication and sustainability. She also writes about communication, sustainability and climate change games.

Alex Suchman is CEO and Cofounder of Barometer XP. Her mission is to foster thriving teams, so work can be a source of genuine meaning and connection for everyone. She uses games and play with her clients toward various learning and development outcomes in order to build stronger workplace cultures.