Short Story as a Narrative Model of Digital Escape Games

In recent years, digital escape games have emerged as an effective pedagogical tool, as their interactive and problem-based structure aligns with the needs of new ge­nerations of students. The central element of such activities is narrative, which, in order to achieve a didactic effect, follows specific storytelling conventions. Althou­gh these elements resemble those of the short story, digital escape games combine  narrative and gameplay mechanics in a way that transcends traditional literary mo­dels. Consequently, their structures are not directly comparable. In order to identify points of intersection between both forms of narration, the study was designed as a two-layered analysis. In the theoretical part, based on the findings of Andrej Blatnik (2010, 2016, 2020, 2024), the fundamental characteristics of the short story were defined and compared with the ludic and narrative elements of escape games as discussed in scholarly literature. On this basis, a coding scheme was developed, and in May 2026 an exploratory analysis of a small sample of digital escape games created in Google Forms was conducted. The aim of the analysis was to identify their core characteristics and to examine the extent to which their narrative structu­res correspond to elements of the short story. The results indicate that digital escape games largely follow the classical short story narrative structure. Their specificity, however, is primarily reflected in the second-person perspective, interactivity, and the possibility of multiple endings, which transform the narrative into a collabora­tive and branching storytelling experience.