Around the World: the Dark Ages

A monochrome image of a dark forestAround The World is an occasional series in which this site release its self-imposed general restriction of a focuses upon the UK and Ireland. There are have been a couple of really interesting stories about exit games in other countries recently, too good to miss, particularly when thinking about what exit games could be.

A news story about an exit game from Manila in the Philippines starts “Imagine yourself and a friend blindfolded, handcuffed and trapped in a room. You are being held hostage by a psycho killer who gave you an hour to solve his riddle so you can set yourselves free.” The images show the blindfolds are literal, though there is no evidence either way about the handcuffs.

This possibly should not come as a surprise, as another exit game from the country, Breakout Philippines, similarly blindfolds its players at the start. This site is not aware of any connection between Breakout Philippines and Breakout Manchester, or any other UK site that yet blindfolds its players, but never say never. That said, as it’s been in the Edinburgh Evening News, it’s probably not a spoiler to suggest that Escape’s Prison Break room sees teams start off quite literally in the dark, and the first challenge is to find out how to switch on the lights – a puzzle that has eluded some groups for up to 15 minutes.

This site also really enjoyed this New York Times article about exit games in Budapest; the latest count from exitgames.hu suggests that Budapest alone has 56 exit games – or at least 56 rooms, for there seem to be some sites with multiple one-room locations in the city. Either way, it’s a lot, and suggests how much room there remains for growth closer to home.

The New York Times article also lets this site put together more pieces of the jigsaw together that could be a history of the exit game tradition. Para Park (“Fear Park”) opened in Budapest in 2011, with this English-language article narrowing it down to June 2011 and claiming that Para Park was Budapest’s first. (It also suggests that founder Attila Gyurkovics was inspired by online room escape games, rather than directly by the original Asian in-person eit games that share the same inspiration.) A little further research on LinkedIn points to Istvan Rusvai opening the original, Hungarian, HintHunt early in 2012, before the London branch opened in April 2012. The rest is history.

The NYT article also provides another part of the trail by suggesting that many exit games have a Hungarian connection, either because they were started by an émigré, or because they’ve been designed and licensed by one. The Room, scheduled to open in Berlin in September, is one of the few exceptions; its chief executive, Jochen Krüger, is German. He got the idea from his partner, who had visited a live-action game in Tokyo. Together they went to Budapest, where, over the course of two days, they played eight different games. Sounds like a plan!

Around the World: the seamier side of exit games

Hungarian "SexyTi" exit game logoNews reaches this site of an unusual past event from Japan: er, it’s a singles party, held emulating the style of an exit game, entitled “R18 Real Escape Game: Escape from Virginity.” (Japanese-language site, of course.) RocketNews 24 explains:

In the event, participants assume the roles of “virgins” regardless of whether or not they are one in real life. Together they must engage in conversation with members of the opposite sex to solve puzzles and reach the next level.

In this game the levels consist of Gokon; After-Party; After-After-Party; and Love Hotel in which a final puzzle must be unlock so that participants may escape their virginity. However, this “virginity” is entirely symbolic and the event organizers are not promising any actual sexual encounters.

The reason this event is restricted to anyone over 18 is that it’s both held late at night and consists of riddles that can be “little kinky” at times. The organizers thought that this style of party may help singles loosen up and promote a healthier attitude towards sexual topics between genders in Japan, which could well be a good thing as a recent survey suggested that 40.6% of Japanese males in their 20s are virgins.

It’s difficult to comment on this without applying Western standards to a non-Western situation in the context of a local culture. Nevertheless, if people want to live in a world with an enlightened attitude to sex, which has to be considered in terms of identity as well as particular actions (and living in a country with such an attitude would be a good start; still, baby steps, mostly along the way) then this approach does not seem desperately… constructive; the whole notion of focusing upon virginity is something of an irrelevant red herring in the first place. It seems reasonable to criticise the event further for, apparently, awarding a souvenir that can only be used by one sort of plumbing.

Really, the only part of this story with a feature to commend it is that it provides evidence that Japan is sufficiently familiar with the exit game format, at large, that events of other types appear to consider it helpful to use an exit game as a metaphor.

The other half of this two-stop tour is signposted by the logo above. Our friends at exitgames.hu, the definitive site for Hungarian exit games, suggest that Budapest alone is now up to 51 exit games. One of them is called SexyTi and (as far as machine translation can tell) promises to present the normal exit game investigation and puzzle-solving activities with a theme of eroticism. Further than that, it’s not immediately clear whether the site attempts to properly represent the breadth of the human condition in this regard, or whether it chooses to focus more tightly. Certainly the site’s Facebook page depicts a range of parties, made up of various combinations of presented gender, appearing to enjoy themselves. Nice basement.

24 hour Puzzle Championship preview

Two clock facesI have long held a suspicion that Hungary is home to one of the coolest puzzle communities of them all, and this provides yet more evidence why.

Next weekend sees the 14th “24 hour Puzzle Championship” take place in Budapest, Hungary. In recent years this event has been annual in the autumn, but 2013 was a fallow year and the schedule seems to have sprung to spring. Between 10am on Saturday 22nd March and 10am on Sunday 23rd March, participants sit 13 individual 100-minute puzzle contests; the remaining 140 minutes of the 1440 are taken up with ten 10-minute comfort breaks and two 20-minute meal breaks between rounds. The contests are in culture-free language-neutral logic puzzles, and you can see the instruction booklets in advance to see what sorts of puzzles there will be.

In practice, there are 14 different papers sat over the 24-hour period. Many of the participants will have written, or at least co-written, one of them, so everybody skips one of the thirteen (very probably the one that they wrote themself) and solves the fourteenth instead. Each paper will feature typically around 20-25 different puzzles, normally of around 10-15 different types. Scoring is normalised so that unusually hard or easy papers do not have an excessive effect on the overall result.

This year, there look to be at least 31 participants from 12 countries, which is fairly typical. Four of them come from the UK, all veterans of top-level competition at the World Puzzle Championship. Liane Robinson has experienced the extreme exhaustion several times and has written about her experience in 2010. Sounds like a contest and an experience like no other. One for a future year, perhaps.

The other reason why this is particularly cool is that the Hungarian organiser is also a big fan of exit games, and indeed of taking the opportunity to participate in (presumably not all of!) Budapest’s 44 exit games. Gyorgy writesWe’re also please to organise your extended stay in Budapest e.g. if you want to visit some logical live-action games […] So, if you want to do some extra mental games, we’re more than happy to reserve a place in one of the dozen great places – and we can also delegate some Hungarian puzzlers if you don’t have enough friends to form a team for these games.” This might even be a way to get to enjoy the exit games of Budapest without speaking Hungarian, if you’re in the sort of company who would enjoy translating and interpreting the content.

It’s rare to trigger both the “puzzle event” and “exit game” focuses of this site, but the 24 hour Puzzle Championship is one of a kind!