Escape Rooms and the Seductive Ubiquity of Capture

Escape games as a form offer a provocative object of study because of their place at this intersection of theater and gaming. Because gaming itself is often regarded as a form of escapism, what does it mean when a game encourages you to escape itself? In fact, the titular “escape room” marker is only ironically applicable: the party pays for a room of enclosure only; the escape is not guaranteed. Instead the performance space fostered by escape games generically fosters theatrical and narratological tropes of tragedy while creating a “safe” space for the curiously suburban masochistic fantasy of limitation, entrapment, and struggle. In this space, gamers play at “real”-world scenarios of masochistic entrapment, but in doing so, ironically become complicit in affirming the outside, real, world as the normative state of “freedom” to which the gamer must return.