Escape rooms: A breakout of social entertainment
Escape rooms. They seem to be popping up everywhere nowadays, with dozens competing in cities having spread out into countries across the world. Two recent, personal experiences of very different examples have inspired me to question: where did they come from and why are they so popular in today’s culture?
The origins of escape rooms are complicated but the idea appears to have been separately conceptualised in several places. The first live action escape game was Real Escape Game, created by Japanese company SCRAP Entertainment in 2007. Inventor Takao Kato was inspired by watching a friend playing a point-and-click game in a virtual room and uncovering clues in order to escape, and he transferred this experience to real life to create his escape room. However, Hungarian company Parapark’s founder Attila Gyurkovics apparently opened a game in Budapest in 2011 without knowledge of the then well-developed concept in Asia, focusing on it as a team building exercise and creating the franchise Hint Hunt. Following this was a continued spread of the format in Asia and further into Europe and America with Hint Hunt moving to the UK and SCRAP to the USA. There are now hundreds of escape rooms across the world with several dozen each in cities like London, Budapest and Moscow. The majority seemed to remain focused in Asia — including almost 200 rooms in Beijing alone — as of 2015, while some sources claim the USA has now taken the title.
The escape room concept seems to be a combination of many influences, discussed wonderfully in Scott Nicholson’s 2015 paper ‘Peeking behind the locked door: A survey of escape room facilities’. On first thought, one can think of similarities to Knightmare, The Crystal Maze and Fort Boyard, UK adventure game shows from the 1980s and 1990s which involved team-based puzzle solving, the former also being narrative based. This genre has now expanded into reality game shows like The Amazing Race, which functions in a similar way but on a larger scale and in the physical world.
The point-and-click adventure games that inspired Takao Kato were developed from text-based interactive fiction games hailing back as early as The Oregon Trail, and can be seen more commonly now in the form of Escape-The-Room games and mobile applications. This adventure aspect seems to merge with Dungeons and Dragons-inspired role-playing, treasure hunts and modern interactive theatre such as that of companies Punchdrunk and Les Enfants Terribles, to create the escape room genre. These all encourage engagement with entertainment environments and can involve the audience’s choices affecting the path or outcome of their experience.
But why is the combination of these influences such a popular concept in current culture? It has been suggested that it turns the video game from a typically solitary experience into one that satisfies ‘the human desire to play games that are both social and physical’, moving multi-player online game staples like Call of Duty into something closer to home. I personally think this is part of a wider ambition of the industry to bring games closer to reality and true interactivity, in particular with open world and virtual reality games. Escape rooms are a natural progression for the adventure-obsessed gamer to experience it in the real world. Furthermore, the idea of choices deciding the gamer’s fate and taking them onto different but ultimately the same paths echoes interactive, choice-driven games such as Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead series and Quantic Dreams’ Beyond: Two Souls and Heavy Rain.
Video games are now also being accessed and attracting interest from a wider audience — therefore increasing escape room interest — due to the rising popularity of YouTube video game culture where audiences watch playthroughs. Some of the most watched of these are narrative-based games like The Last of Us, which have been played by a variety of YouTubers with a variety of audiences. Names include popular gaming channels like Pewdiepie and Markiplier, to comedy channels like the Fine Bros’ REACT, to existing vloggers branching out into gaming like ThatcherJoe.
So how do escape rooms compare as real life experiences? I’ve had the opportunity to play two recently — Clue HQ’s Captain Riddle’s Forgotten Fortune in Birmingham and Enigma Quests’ School of Witchcraft & Wizardry in London. The former is pirate-themed, with a cleverly-designed set featuring a multitude of visible puzzles which take you aback upon entering. They take a mostly linear approach with solutions leading to the next puzzles, while the back-story is set by videos and clues from the gamemaster are displayed on a television. I feel these are both positive, accessible aspects and drawbacks, in comparison to Enigma Quests.
Obviously inspired by Harry Potter, while the game makers can’t use much from the source material due to copyright, they clearly appreciate and draw on it in a non-cheesy way while also inventing their own, magical elements. In contrast to Clue HQ’s common ‘escape the danger’ theme, the goal is not to escape but to pass as many wizarding exams as possible before the time runs out, by completing the puzzles. There are of a great variety — in plain sight and well-hidden — which can be started out of order by team members, offering better chance of good timekeeping and avoiding people standing around, confused by one clue! The set design is beautiful and detailed, only added to by optional costumes, and receiving clues over speakers from the in-character gamemaster adds a personal touch to the experience.
Both escape rooms had very evident, film theming influences, and heavily immersed you into the experience like the role-playing, interactive theatre and video game inspirations for the overall format. It is then clear that the format’s rising popularity is a continuation of the digital age’s integration of technology — through games — into society. So as long as we continue down our current route of striving for real life-imitable experiences in the video game industry, I believe escape rooms will both push their genre and play their part.
Edited by Cheyenne Abrams.
