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.

Real Escape Game TV

Television set
(Tip of the hat to our friends at Clavis Cryptica and Bother’s Bar; this post is something of a team effort.)

Real Escape Game is the English-language brand that SCRAP, the pregenitor of the genre, use for their exit game activities. Their games have proved so popular, and so well-established, that they have extended the brand into the world of TV. My Japanese is not great, but Google Translate and the Wikipedia page suggests that 2013 (and the first three days of 2014) had four episodes of “Real Escape Game TV” broadcast in Japan. An English-language press release from TBS, the network on which the shows were broadcast, suggests the show “has been nominated for the 2014 International Digital Emmy Awards“.

The press release describes the show as “a real time viewer participation telemovie”, which is an unwieldy but accurate description. Imagine a race-against-time action drama in the style of 24, with a heavy emphasis on puzzles. Viewers can solve the puzzles, in real time, on a web site, hopefully before they are solved on-screen as part of the story. Solving early puzzles leads to later ones. A frequently-upated real-time display counts the number of participants and the much, much smaller number who have solved all parts of that episode’s puzzle.

A spin-off drama (again, use your favourite online translator on the Japanese Wikipedia page) details the progress of five girls through a series of much more literally-interpreted locked rooms, with much less time pressure on the play-along-at-home puzzles.

I speak little more Japanese than I speak Hungarian, by the margin of “a year of night-school classes long ago” to zero, but you may get a feel for the sense of event in the first episode, even if you – like me! – cannot crack the puzzles.

It’s delightful to see the TV companies of the world giving this sort of show a try at all!