Kailin Scott is an expert at escape rooms. She works in escape rooms, she creates escape rooms, she an artist and uses her artistic ability to create escape room images and puzzles. She has always been a huge fan of video games, and she came across a series called Zero Escape. It's an Escape Room Series featuring lots of puzzles. She really loved it and she wondered if this happened only in video games or if it was something that could be found in real life. Her boyfriend, who is from China, told her that in Asia, Escape Rooms are popular.
Most Influential Person
My boyfriend. He introduced me to Escape Rooms.
Transcript
Q: So Kailin, if there's someone listening today who is a little bit lost or unsure what we're talking about when we say Escape Rooms, can you fill us in and explain it a bit more? A: Escape Rooms are puzzle rooms where you are locked in and given an objective. There are two types: one where the objective is purely to escape and the other type where the objectives can be almost anything from finding someone's medicine to solving a zombie apocalypse to even trying to fight a fire.
Q: I imagine Escape Rooms are a mindful experience because once you're in there you really have to think about nothing else except getting out or solving the puzzle. Is this true? A. When you get in there you can only focus on the puzzles because you're in there with a time limit, so much so that you don't even know what time it is. You have to get an announcement at five minutes [before the end], or sometimes at about thirty minutes [before the end]. You are usually in there with a team of two to six people. It's a lot of teamwork, so it's thinking together.
Q: Are you usually in there with random people you've never met or do you usually go there with friends? A: It can work in a lot of different ways. There are facebook groups where you can meet random people to meet up with and do random escapes. A lot of the time you do plan this with your friends. Sometimes there are escape rooms that will set you up with random strangers to do the room.
Q: Does this mean that you could escape the room and nobody else will? A: It depends on the room escape really. Some of them do set you up in teams where you do battle against each other to see who gets out first. Other ones expect you to work completely as a team to all be able to escape.
Q: Do you have to be really good at solving puzzles to get out of the room? A: Not necessarily. As long as you can wrap your mind around the logic of puzzles or at least be able to bounce ideas off other people, you should be able to think your way through it.
Q: What are some of the most creative types of puzzles you've seen in Escape Rooms? A: One of my favorite puzzles so far has been a puzzle that was completely in braille. Usually, if they're going to make you learn another language, they will leave some sort of hint around. In this case, it was a complete wall of encyclopedias. You had to look at this and see that it was braille and one you had this figured out you can go through all of the books to try and figure out what was going on and then actually use the braille to solve the puzzle and open the lock.
Q: I understand there are Escape Rooms that just suddenly appear for a few weeks or months. Tell us about those? A: Those are Pop-Up Rooms. They'll appear every once in a while, and they're usually situated around a certain theme. The video game called Zero Escape does have a Pop-Up one that's currently going around in the U.S. It should be coming to Canada at some point. There are other ones such as Dracula's Library, Casa Loma (Toronto Ontario Canada), and other ones that do pop up but then have made permanent homes in big cities such as Toronto.
Q: Can you explain what you actually do in your role in creating Escape Rooms? A: In that role, I'm an artist. I'm brought in to help make the puzzles come to life. Someone writes down the puzzles on paper; they explain the puzzles to me and then I try to m