Buckingham Palace has an escape room. Closer to home, so does The Diefenbunker, which is a venue worthy of a post on its own. And a visit.
The Elder Boy has been talking about doing another escape room soon, despite the fact that the one he did nine months back scared him (it wasn’t zombie- or post-apocalyptic-themed, it was set in a horse stable, and the sound of horses neighing without the site of an actual horse apparently got weird for him. Again, 9 months ago, which is a significant percentage of his time on this planet.)
Unfortunately, the best window for him to do one, e.g. the time period where the family escape expert is in town, happens to coincide with his first week of overnight summer camp. Which I’m sure will be awesome and take his mind completely off of the topic.
Or will it? Apparently escape room summer camps are a thing now, because in the age of the internet, everything is or will soon be a thing. I don’t think his camp will have one, but hear me out, because in the “will soon be a thing” vein I can see something like the following happening soon, somewhere:
Hacker camp. Take your basic learn to code curriculum, wrap it in some kind of spy theme, and then put escape room elements in the dorm rooms. Of course, when one thinks “camp” one thinks cabins, and this kind of setting (the setting is key, I think) would work best in an urban area, which could take away the whole sleepover aspect (though for the right camp, I assume people would come from miles around.)
But the setting! Getting the right environment is key, and it always has been, but maybe more so in recent years. Without getting all “when I was a boy,” I can’t help but feel that our imaginations got more of a workout back in the day. There just wasn’t as much media out there to consume, and what there was had to be physically brought in from a library or book store. I used to binge on Tom Swift (Junior) novels, not because they were new, but because they were the closest thing to the world I wanted to be in.
It wouldn’t take much back then to create an ambiance that our brains could fill in with details. A “control panel” with two switches, a dial, and a light would have been enough to launch a rocket to Mars. Today, I’m not so sure, because the vision in your head has been replaced by the vision provided by umpteen movies and episodes, but on the flip side, the parts to make something really cool are so much cheaper and more available, so maybe there’s a balance to be had.
Still, when I hang back in the room and quietly watch the boys create an epic space battle with whatever bits of plastic and metal happen to be around the blast area of the toy chest, I have hope. They’re going to be in charge of inventing the future, and with any luck the raw materials they ingest today are going to make for richer dreams to come.
(Image via thevaultoftheatomicspaceage)
