The great escape
In escape rooms, you jointly solve problems with other people to win your freedom, said journalist Rachel Sugar in It’s not the room you’re actually escaping— it’s your everyday life.
THERE ARE FEW desires more deeply human than the desire to escape whatever reality you’re in. The problem is not the details of any particular life—and the nicer your life is, the more resources you have to escape it—but rather the limits of being a person. You are stuck with you. It is a precondition of existence, like the need to pee. We have spent the past several millennia coming up with ways to flee our reality, at least temporarily. “What is there in culture,” wonders the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, “that is not a form of escape?” As evidence, he cites glass-tower cities, suburbs, good books, shopping malls, movies, communal feasts, gardens, vacations, and Disneyland. To that you could add music, theater, video games, podcasts, theme parks, haunted houses, extreme sports, Instagram, pornography, and improv comedy. Also, escape rooms. For around $30, you and a handful of friends/colleagues/strangers are “trapped” in some kind of space together and must collaboratively puzzle through a series of challenges to win your freedom. The clock is ticking: You get 45 minutes, or 60, or 90, to escape, although if you fail, they let you out anyway. Usually, the game offers some kind of story to help explain why you’re solving puzzles in a room with a countdown clock. Often, it involves a serial killer.
Escape is big. There are, by the most recent unofficial count, at least 2,300 escape rooms in the United States. They are a new staple of corporate team building, which puts them in an elite category of activities you might be required to do with your boss to prove that you are a team player who loves bonding. Pop culture is so saturated with escape rooms that this past January, Columbia Pictures released the pulpy horror flick Escape Room, which should not be confused with either of the other two recent horror movies about escape rooms also called Escape Room. There is a sequel planned for 2020. It is called Escape Room 2.
But the room is not the important part.
It’s not the room you’re escaping. It’s reality. We didn’t use to trap ourselves in $30 rooms and now we do, and it doesn’t feel like an accident that the rise of escape
rooms in the first half of this decade corresponds almost exactly with a seismic shift in how we relate to technology (intimately, all the time).
Escape rooms are an antidote: They require you to exist, in real life, with other real-life people, in the same place, at the same time, manipulating tangible objects. But you only have to do it for an hour! High intensity, low commitment. You get the thrill of deep connection, but you don’t have to, like, talk about your feelings. Maybe we talk about feelings too much anyway. Maybe we should just do stuff. But who has time to do stuff? Don’t you have a job?
They are the opposite of first-person video games, and also the next logical step. In an escape room, it isn’t your digital avatar that’s the hero; it’s actually you, in your actual body. You don’t know what the pattern is, but you can rest assured there is one. For one hour, if you think hard enough, you get to live in a world that makes sense.
HE HISTORY OF escape rooms is a little bit dicey. Where do you begin? Is a 17th-century hedge maze a proto-escape room? Is geocach
Ting? Letterboxing? LARPing? The 1997 Michael Douglas thriller The Game? The 2011 choose-your-ownadventure, Macbeth- adjacent theater experience Sleep No More? You could trace them back for centuries, if you wanted to.
Or you could start in 2007, when Takao Kato debuted what’s generally considered the first modern escape room in Kyoto, Japan. A publisher and amateur puzzle enthusiast, he’d been obsessed with online escape puzzle games like Crimson Room— in which players click around an unremarkable room to find hidden, instruction-less puzzles—and wanted to translate them into the real world. The false promise of childhood, affirmed over and over in books and movies and video games, is that incredible things are going to happen to you, and the slow-burning letdown of adulthood is that, mostly, they don’t. “I thought I could create my own adventure,” Kato told The Japan Times, “and then invite people to be a part of it.”
At first he held Riaru Dasshutsu Ge-mu, or Real Escape Game, in clubs and bars around Japan, and soon his publishing company, called SCRAP, was an escape room company called SCRAP. In 2012, it opened what would be the first U.S. escape room, in San Francisco, “Escape From the Mysterious Room.” That was pretty much the premise. It had no story. One of the puzzles required players to disassemble a chair. Inside the chair was a screwdriver. Tickets sold out immediately, and when more were added, those sold out, too. Meanwhile, across the globe, a man in Budapest named Attila Gyurkovics got an idea: Wouldn’t it be cool to bring a digital hidden-object game to life? He opened Europe’s first escape room, ParaPark, in 2011. He’d never heard of SCRAP. A lot of history’s best ideas are products of simultaneous invention: calculus, chloroform, crossbows, color photography, the concept of gravity, escape rooms. Gyurkovics didn’t know it, but he and Kato were working from the same conceptual deck: a love of online puzzles, and a desire to take what’s pretend and make it real. From the beginning, people liked escape rooms. But they weren’t mainstream. You