“I grew up on a horse farm in rural Oklahoma and so I would set up a board game, but no one would play it with me,” he says. “I would sit and set up the board game and play all of the positions myself, which is something I actually still do today if I need to learn or explore a game. But by doing that, that's where I learned game design.” He says that by playing games by himself, that’s where he learned about game systems and mechanisms. “You get to start to understand the design and the concepts of it.”

Nicholson followed his interest, getting involved in Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in college, but the biggest impact for him was when he started larping (live action role-play) with the International Fantasy Gaming Society. It was there that he learned the foundations of storytelling and character design.

“I learned how to engage with the world, I learned how to overcome my shyness and I learned how to take on characters,” he says. “Then I got involved in the design of these games and I learned how to deal with groups of people, how to create activities for groups of people to engage with together. So a lot of the skills I still tap today, I built through my years of larping.“

Part of the appeal of escape rooms is not only the challenge, but also the idea behind the game. For Nicholson, his best ideas come from his years of experience playing and designing games, and from thinking of the world as a game.

“I remember when I was up for tenure, the person who was working with me on my tenure case looked at me and said, ‘Scott, do you see all of this as a game?’ And I said, ‘Yes, it is.’ As I said, it's a center. We live in a space, it's got rules and rules are explicit or implicit and we can engage with those rules and not engage with those rules, but they're always running. It’s decades of having built up that body of knowledge is what I tap.”

Designing escape rooms for Red Bull is a lot of fun, but Nicholson’s passion is making escape rooms for museums and other cultural institutions. “Intergenerational escape rooms, where everyone gets to be a hero, are my favorite games to create.”

With one of Nicholson’s escape rooms, a family can put the screens away and work together to defeat a common challenge while learning something in the process. The trick, he says, is to use types of actions to appeal to different age groups. For example, a young child will like to hide or instructions might be given via audio. Older kids and adults get challenging puzzles to solve, and there might be the gamemaster, a character in the game who can help the family along by giving them directions that they may or may not choose to listen to as they play through the game. The goal of his games is to teach teamwork, learn a little history of the place and time where the game is set and, of course, to be challenged and have fun.

Mr. Nicholson surrounds himself with games, including the impressive library housed in BNGlab.

GALIT RODAN / THE GLOBE AND MAIL

For a man who designs games, you’d expect him to spent his downtime away from games, but no. When he relaxes, he relaxes with a console in his hands. That’s right, the game designer relaxes with video games.

“Analog games are games and escape rooms,” he says. “That's what I'm doing for work. Video games are things that I'm playing for fun when I'm playing. If I'm playing video games, then that's a time I can just shut off.”

There’s also the farm where he’s just moved by himself. Growing up on a farm, having some land and open space helps him recharge. “I'm finding getting back outside and engaging with the land and engaging with pottering around the barn and doing little tasks, all of those things are really helping me to recharge with the world around me.”