Since we're in criming mode here, a true confession: I'm not a big fan of escape rooms. Just never gonna be my thing. A few years ago, at a client's holiday event, we went to one. They split us up into teams, and I ended up on the uber-analytic team: complete and utter (over)thinkers. While the team in the jail cell next door screamed, yelled, and threw everything they had against the wall, we quietly sat there analyzing every option before we escaped. Unbelievably, the ranters and ravers beat us out of their cell by a couple of seconds. Sometimes thinking just doesn't pay.
Anyway, an escape room is not my idea of a good time. I had much more fun the next year when we went to a wine-and-painting workshop and all got to produce our very own version of Van Gogh's Sunflowers. It was actually quite interesting how the different results revealed the differ personality styles of everyone. (Sort of like the escape room did...) Some folks wanted to make exact replicas, others of us freelanced a bit. Mine was pretty good, if I do say so myself. I actually kept it around for a couple years before finally asking myself a key question: WTF do I want with this? And throwing it out.
It does make me kinda sorta take some sort of art class at some point or another.
I can guarantee I'll never do another escape room. Nothing kinda sorta about it.
But there's no escaping the fact that there are plenty of escape rooms out there. Perhaps a metaphor for today's society. After all, who doesn't want to escape the madness?
The escape room I went to was pretty vanilla. I don't recall any plot beyond "you're in a jail cell; try to get out." But I guess it's not enough to have a plain-Jane escape room. They now, apparently, have themes. Like the one that the Cobb County, Georgia Parks Department had scheduled that was set up as a make-pretend you've been "wrongfully sentenced to life without parole."
Nothing wrong with the Cobb County, George Parks Department trying to make a few bucks entertaining folks with an escape room. But, all things considered, I don't think the theme of "wrongfully sentenced to life without parole" is much of a winner. Here's the plot:
You've settled in, made a few friends, but everyone has their breaking point. While the prison is in chaos because of a riot in the yard, you have a tiny window of opportunity to explore the building and carry out a great escape. It's time to get busy living, or get busy dying.
I can't provide a source for this one. I saw it on twitter - sorry, tweeter, I lost the link - and the Cobb County, Georgia, Parks Department has had some second thoughts. They're still running the escape room, but now it's called "Race to Escape". No plot beyond get going...
I'm happy that the Cobb County, Georgia, Parks Department had a change of heart here, and escaped this terrible idea.
I mean, just think it through for a second.
If you were really wrongfully convicted and looking at life without parole, and you escaped, you had probably been, however wrongfully, convicted of a pretty heinous crime. The kind of heinous crime that involved violence. The kind of heinous crime that might make a poorly trained and poorly paid prison guard shoot first and ask questions later if they saw you trying to go on the lam. Especially if the tensions were hyped up by the prison riot.
Sure, there are probably worse ideas, but the only one I can think of is you're in the gas chamber at Auschwitz, and you've got 15 minutes before they drop the Zyklon B.
Me? If the life without parole scenario had been presented, I would have decided to sit this one out. And think things through.
Wrongfully convicted? There are any number of groups, like the Innocence Project, that take on cases. Sure, it's a long shot, and appeals take forever, but it beats getting gunned down while trying to escape. Or - just as bad - somehow making it out, but living in fear of recapture every blessed moment you're spending on the outside.
But maybe just me. Full of thoughts. Which, I guess, beats being thoughtless, which this idea pretty much was. At least in my humble but thoughtful opinion.
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