By the time I realized the room was getting smaller, it was almost too late. The ceiling of the ancient tomb in which I found myself trapped was slowly collapsing in on itself, preparing to flatten me if I failed yet again to crack the pharaoh’s riddle. It all felt very Indiana Jonesian as the grating sound of rock against rock echoed through the small, dark room.
Time was running out. Each mistake meant the stone ceiling would move a few feet lower. My stomach clenched. Logically, I knew I was not in actual danger, but my claustrophobia from the tightening space threatened to take over all the same.
Tick, tick, tick …
This challenge was the first of many. Over the course of three days, I would escape from the clutches of a giant kraken, save an ’80s arcade on the brink of collapse, solve the mystery of a dangerously abusive asylum and race against the clock in a real-life video game.
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Not really, of course. But those were the quests I undertook as I navigated the universe of immersive escape games around the Washington area. I did this for an assignment. For work. But most people who undertake these adventures do so voluntarily. For fun. I wanted to understand why this form of “entertainment” has proliferated in recent years. And why so many people pay hard-earned money to get trapped in terrifying situations. Is life not already stressful enough?
My quest to try my hand at some of the best escape games in the Washington area set me on a path of adrenaline that, while illogical, permeated my week. Though escape rooms are perfectly safe, as they should always have a clearly marked exit and team members should be readily available for assistance, it would be difficult to deny the anxiety coursing through my body before every game started. Before the clock even started ticking.
Mission 1: Unseal the tomb of the pharaoh
I was in an Arlington mall. But I was also in ancient Egypt. And, when the game at 5 Wits began, I was also in the last place I ever wanted to be: a pitch-black room. Before we entered, through a heavy imitation stone door, I turned to the friend I had dragged with me: “Wait, I am actually scared.”
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Then, after a few minutes of eerie silence, ruby-red lights embedded in hieroglyphs on the wall began to glow and a voice boomed and gave us our mandate: Solve a series of challenges, both physical and mental, to free the spirit of a tortured pharaoh. Fail and face his wrath. (Not to mention our own code-breaking incompetence.) For the next 40 minutes, cortisol flooded my system as we moved from room to room and code to code, attempting to liberate our fictional pharaoh.
I have never been one to put myself through stressful situations if they can be avoided. I only do certain roller coasters. (No loops for me.) I refuse to watch most horror movies, and the ones I do watch, I brave at 10 a.m. so I can be protected by the daylight. I have never understood the appeal of cliff diving and its variations. And yet here I was, ready to face one challenge after another, each designed to test my capacity to solve puzzles against an unrelenting countdown.
Psychologists call the phenomenon that pushes people to seek out stress “hedonic reversal” or “benign masochism,” according to Ashley Doukas, an assistant professor of psychiatry and the clinical director of the Center for Stress, Resilience and Personal Growth at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The psychological terms, she said, describe what happens when “an experience that would normally be experienced as unpleasant and thus to be avoided is actually experienced as enjoyable and thus willingly pursued.”
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I am not sure “enjoyable” is the word I would have chosen as we struggled with the many missions to free the pharaoh, all meant to test our “bravery” and resilience. When one of the challenges proved nearly impossible, we feared we would never make it out. Thankfully, after what felt like an eternity trying to make a light reflect just the right way off a dull copper tile, the sarcophagus shifted. The pharaoh was free and, finally, so were my game partner and I.
5 Wits Arlington, 4238 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, (703) 997-9694. 5-wits.com. $35 per person. Minimum of two people.
Mission 2: Get research and escape kraken
A video from my mission leader, a top scientist, greeted me when I entered the cold submarine at the Escape Game in downtown Washington. Previous missions to retrieve information from the underwater lab of an experimental geneticist had been lost. I was the last hope for science. I felt claustrophobic as the submarine I was “trapped” in descended to the darkest depths of the ocean. The fear intensified when one of the puzzles required I remember forgotten lessons from my high school chemistry class.
Doukas had explained that there are variations in the degree to which different people seek out thrilling or intense experiences. Whether someone ranks high or low in the sensation-seeking trait depends on “a complex interplay of biology, past experiences and personality,” she said. It also depends on how someone has already felt that day or that week: An amusement park might not seem as fun to someone coming out of a busy week at work, even if they normally would jump at the chance to be rocketed down a roller coaster.
Escape games and escape rooms, which first became popular in the 2010s, create an otherworldly environment — say, a pirate ship or a dragon lair — and then set visitors off on a challenge: break the spy code, save the hostages, escape the maximum security prison. They couple that human inclination to seek benign masochism with another (mostly) benign impulse: to feel smart.
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By the time I cracked the codes to unlock the secret research of the geneticist, a kraken threatened to crack the hull of the submarine, sending me to the same watery fate as failed missions past. Its giant eye stared me down as I guided the submarine, with the help of an Escape Game employee, back to the surface.
The Escape Game, locations in Georgetown and Penn Quarter in Washington. theescapegame.com. $32.99 to $37.99.
Mission 3: Save the arcade from collapse
My stint at Ravenchase Escape Room Arlington promised to be a welcome respite from the death-defying scenarios of the past two escape rooms. As I sat in the elegant gray-trimmed waiting room, I felt safe knowing that, while the other groups waiting with me, mostly young professionals and summer campers, would face cannibalistic doctors or comic book supervillains, all I would have to do was prevent an arcade from closing.
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It was the ’80s, and Guns N’ Roses blasted over the speakers. Neon lights reflected off a retro pinball machine. The next hour took my game partner and I through an endless array of lockboxes and codes in a last-minute quest to find the property deed of the previous owner and help the arcade see another day. Though the challenge was not dangerous, the digital countdown looming over our heads was anxiety-inducing on its own.
Share this articleShare“We have a need as humans for arousal,” said Greg Siegle, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. But he added, “Some people are sensation seekers who need to be skydiving all the time, and other people would like to be in a library.” Then he told me something counterintuitive: “The brain does not much differentiate positive from negative arousal. It just needs to get your heart pumping and needs to get your sympathetic nervous system kicking. And if we put ourselves in a situation that is somewhat stressful, it does all of that.”
What Siegle described is one of three major theories among psychologists for why we as humans might seek out stressful situations. The first is the idea that, while negative and positive emotional stimuli both work psychologically in a similar way, the arousal from negative stimuli, like the situations mimicked in an escape game, is greater than that of seeing a cute puppy or watching your favorite sports team win. “If you have a need for arousal, it is easier sometimes to dip into the negative side,” he said.
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By the time the clock was counting down its last minute, we still had several locks to open. The deed we had so painstakingly searched for in the annals of ’80s nostalgia, inside old “E.T.” tapes and Def Leppard vinyls, remained just out of reach. Too many four-number and five-number codes were swirling in our brains, and I had difficulty deciphering most of them. If not for the generous extra minutes bestowed upon us by the benevolent game master in our walkie-talkie, we would not have made it out.
Ravenchase Escape Room Arlington, 2301 Columbia Pike Suite C, Arlington, (703) 232-2546. escaperoomarlington.com. $32.50 per person. Minimum of $75.
Mission 4: Solve a mental asylum mystery
Insomnia Escape Room in Georgetown looks unassuming from the outside. A basement space nestled between a Starbucks and a row of houses, it is almost inviting. That is, until I entered the sterile waiting room, where the decor is largely limited to a water dispenser and a door forbidding access to anyone but “game masters.” Though the cheery air of the afternoon was stifled, I was more scared by the prospect of what I would find inside.
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Before we started this game, which we knew would include an electric chair and bloodstained notes from a doctor, my escape partner and I ran through different scenarios: If the room was too scary, or if one of the virtual patients escaped their screen and tried to trap us, or if the electric chair started buzzing menacingly from the corner, we always had the door. We were told it would be locked, but we would only have to flip a small white switch to disable it. It would be easy enough.
But my head did not seem capable of transmitting that message to my rapidly beating heart. The two other theories for why we voluntarily seek out stress both rely on a similar understanding of a human drive for arousal. One theory, represented by the work of University of Colorado psychology professor Tor Wager, argues that humans determine whether life is better or worse based on a baseline state.
If the baseline is an average day, then the average day will not register as particularly great. “On the other hand,” as Siegle explained to me, “if we get a really good baseline for what being super stressed out is, then an okay day is comparatively terrific.” Seeking out stress, then, can be beneficial in that it makes nonstressful situations seem better by comparison.
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The final theory argues that, whether the arousing stimulus is negative or positive, high-arousal situations register similarly in both the brain and the body. While positive and negative stimuli do feel differently at low arousal, those differences become harder to distinguish as situations get more intense.
It turned out this room was not scary at all. Maybe it was the fact that everything was laminated, or that we had so many locks to get through that my brain just spun with combinations of numbers and letters. I realized the rooms that were most immersive, like the tomb and the underwater submarine, were the ones that ended up being the most fun. They were also the ones that had provoked the most fear.
Insomnia Escape Room, 2300 Wisconsin Ave. Suite 200, Washington, (202) 838-3258. insomniaescaperoomdc.com. $29 to $44.50 per person. Minimum of two people.
Mission 5: Beat blast of a giant paint bomb
I dragged three friends along on my final quest at Beat the Bomb, one of the newest escape games in the District. I hoped they would still be my friends by the time it was over. The four of us were suited up in white hazmat suits and told we had to race against the clock in four rooms inspired by video games before making it to the final challenge.
In one of the rooms, we had to crawl through several lasers, like international men of mystery. In another, our musical skills were put to the test as we re-created increasingly complicated melodies by ear. It was not until the final challenge that we came face to face with the titular bomb. “If you fail to beat the game before the time runs out, you will be blasted at 25 miles per hour,” with the “largest paint bomb” in the world, the employee in charge of operating said bomb informed us.
Staring down the belly of the beast, an array of large PVC pipes connected to tanks of fluorescent paint, we had to use rudimentary remote controls to guide a robot on the giant screen in front of us. If the robot failed to reach all the targets in time, the paint would explode. We were told we would have to hold down the plastic shields covering our faces so that they would not fly off our heads on impact. We completed the mission with a few seconds to spare.
Relieved, my team took a collective sigh of relief only to look up at the screen and see a timer ticking down the seconds: Three. Wait. What? Why were they blasting us when we had completed the game? I thought our prize was to come out unscathed. Two. My heart was beating out of my chest as I held tight to the bottom of the face shield, my body rigid. One. The explosion of paint was so quick that I felt the paint hit the plastic suit before I realized what was happening.
When we asked the game operator why we were blasted, he assured us that feeling the anticipation of the paint bomb was half the fun. I could not blame him. The extreme exhilaration was undeniable, as was the feeling of relief that flooded me afterward. It was clear I could not have one without first facing the other.
Beat the Bomb, 2005 Hecht Ave. NE, Washington, (202) 849-6474. beatthebomb.com. $44.95 per person. Minimum of four people.
“When you think about it, a lot of the games and activities we enjoy involve some level of stress, or ‘stakes,’” Doukas said. They “create conditions around loss and gain that are actually inconsequential to our ‘real’ lives, yet they still activate the parts of our brain that care about winning and losing for survival.”
Though humans rarely find solving real-life problems and challenges enjoyable, partly because we can never be sure of the outcome or our control over it, simulated problems in games allow an opportunity for satisfaction, Doukas added.
“Escape rooms, for example, are kind of like puzzles mixed with the excitement of a fundamental human fear of being trapped, all with the knowledge that even if we fail the puzzle, we still get out at the end,” she said. “If you win the escape room, then you also get a big surge of excitement and maybe other positive emotions, like pride.”
As my paint-covered friends and I high-fived, I got what she meant. After a week of nonstop escapes, I felt pride. I also felt a lot of exhaustion and a reluctance to try to open a lock ever again. But it was all worth it after the rush of finishing each room, the customary celebration with my game partner and the knowledge that I completed a task that an hour ago had seemed impossible. Maybe I will find my way back to an escape game someday, but probably not anytime soon. I still find real life stressful enough.
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