A team of players erupt from the opened door of a live action escape room, setting a new record for display on the lobby television. At home, a different player watches the credits of an online room escape game scroll past, the light of the computer screen illuminating their scrawled puzzle notes. Cheers and high-fives are exchanged around a dining room table cluttered with cards as a different group stops the timer on a tabletop escape game. Elsewhere, two people pull off their virtual reality headsets and smile at each other, their work in the digital room finished. These escape games exist across digital and analog boundaries and feature widely different modes of interaction. But how are these games related to one another? This essay
presents a visual schema for understanding the escape game as a unified genre spanning multiple media. It also introduces the term genre adaptation to describe the genre’s expansion, a form of adaptation drawing not from individual works but from a set of genre conventions. Currently, there are four broad categories of escape games. The first version chronologically is the point and click escape game, a primarily browser-based subgenre of digital adventure games. In these games, players use a mouse pointer to navigate a digital space, gathering and interacting with objects with the goal of escape. The largest commercial category is the live action escape game. Commonly called “escape rooms,” these games share the objective of escape but substitute the digital space of the point and click games with a physical environment. Inspired by the popularity of escape rooms, the other two subgenres coincide with rising interest in virtual reality and board games, respectively. Virtual reality (VR) escape games come in two flavors: VR games for home PC and console platforms coexist with ones designed for dedicated commercial spaces. Escape games also appear as boxed products that can be played at home called tabletop escape games. Examples in this final category illustrate the variances in how escape games present their objects and spaces and also how conventions of the genre are adapted between subgenres.
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