Brands like HBO and Ford have been creating promotional escape rooms for years now Red Bull runs a whole Escape Room World Championship (the Slovakian team Brainteaselava holds the current title). 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. There are, by the most recent unofficial count, at least 2,300 escape rooms in the United States. Often, it involves a serial killer.Įscape is big. Usually, the game offers some kind of story to help explain why you’re solving puzzles in a room with a countdown clock. The clock is ticking: You get 45 minutes, or 60, or 90, to escape, although if you fail, they let you out anyway.
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 experience is escape, both literal and metaphorical. To that you could add music, theater, video games, podcasts, theme parks, haunted houses, extreme sports, Instagram, pornography, and improv comedy. “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. We have spent the past several millennia coming up with ways to flee our reality, at least temporarily. It is a precondition of existence, like the need to pee. 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. There are few desires more deeply human than the desire to escape whatever reality you’re in.
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