UNCENSORED: Banned Books Scavenger Hunt in Washington DC – #UncensoredDC

400 hundred books are in hiding.

To celebrate Banned Books week in September, libraries across Washington DC have planned a scavenger hunt.

Since last Tuesday, books that were once censored or challenged due to their content are being hidden around the city.

If you find a book, you get to keep it.

These hidden books are easily identifiable with a black cover and bold white text which state the reason why the book was banned in the first place.

The best places to find these books are businesses that participate in Made in DC or “… our partners Mess Hall, Zaytinya, Proper Topper, Petworth Citizen, Politics & Prose, as well as various bars and coffee shops throughout the city.” – DC Library

Plus clues for the banned book scavenger hunt can be found on social media using the #UncensoredDC hashtag.

If you find a hidden book and post about it on social media using the hashtag, people can win tickets to UNCENSORED: The Cocktail party, a fundraiser for Washington DC libraries being held on September 30^th.

This year’s banned book theme is diversity and here’s the list of six books that can be found as part of this year’s scavenger hunt: Catcher in the Rye, The Color Purple, Slaughterhouse Five, A Separate Peace, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Native Son.

Banned Books week officially takes place from September 26^th to October 1^st this year.

Links
– Official Website
– Washington DC Library Twitter

 

// Other Escape Room News
– Happy second escape room blog anniversary to the team at Escape Games Review!
– You might have seen that the navigation bar on this site has changed! The escape room directory on this site has been taken down and been replaced. There are now links to other major escape room directories – check it out here.

– Essa 🙂

A late Merry Christmas from Intervirals

Have been enjoying the long Christmas break this week which has led to the ongoing procrastination before this blog post went up. 🙂

1) Merry Christmas from Intervirals! If you want to get to the site quicker, try www.intervirals.com and this WordPress blog will appear. Definitely thought about changing the site’s website to the .com ending but instead decided to stick with WordPress for the long haul.

2) Essential escape room holiday reading:
– ExitGames UK was interviewed by BBC in December – here’s a neat quote from Chris about puzzles in escape rooms,

“A good puzzle will look impossible at first, but is designed to be solved. If you find a way to solve it you’ll feel good about yourself. And perhaps you can crack other problems in your life that look impossible at first glance as well.” – quoted from BBC

– Earlier in December – Dan from Escape Room Directory, Escape Reviewer, Professor Scott Nicholson and Room Escape Artist were interviewed for Dallas News in the US. One of the big questions asked – What were their views on the escape room industry leading into next year?

“Next year, are these all going to be gone, and everyone will have gotten tired of it?’” [Dan] Egnor asked. “That’s the big question that everyone’s making guesses about.”

Wright [from Escape Reviewer] shakes off the skepticism.

“Back in 1987, they said video games were going to be a fad,” Wright said. “It’s one of the most popular types of entertainment right now.”

David Spira, who runs Room Escape Artist, is optimistic.

“They’ll all help each other grow,” he said. “These companies, even if they operate within a mile or two of each other, they’re not necessarily in direct competition with each other, because people who will have a good time in these will want to play more.” – quoted from Dallas News

3) Last thing to wrap up, is the escape room panel that was held at PAX Australia in Melbourne a while ago. Have posted it on Facebook and Twitter before but haven’t shared it yet here on the blog – check it out if you’re curious about where the escape room industry is heading in Australia. The footage of the entire panel goes for about 45 minutes.

Essa 🙂

A history of room escapes – terminology and the different names that a room escape is called

Room escape. Escape room. Exit Game. Real life room escape. Escape game … are some of the different names that refer to the overarching idea of a team of people being locked in a room, then searching through their environment in order to find clues and a way out of a room before the time limit runs out.

Let’s have a closer look at the different names a room escape is called.

Early room escape pioneers
To start, the Wikipedia page that covers this idea is called “Real Life Room Escape”, while other notable sources include SCRAP Entertainment calling their concept a “Real Escape Room” and “Real Escape Game”, while Parapark in Hungary refers to it as a “Room Escape Game”.

Other early room escape pioneers refer to the room escape concept in their own ways as well. For example, HintHunt named it “live escape game”, while AdventureRooms calls it “real life escape game” and finally Exitgames Romania which uses the term “live escape game”.

An interesting summary to draw from this data is that the early pioneers of the concept generally made reference to it as an “escape game”. Would this fact remain the same if other early room escape pioneer websites were looked into?

The name a room escape business trades under
A different viewpoint one could take is to look at what the owners of room escape places actually call their business. A business owner would usually consider that the name of their business actually describes the service they are offering, for example: Kentucky Fried Chicken, the fast food business. In addition a business owner may name their business in a certain way to attract business from their competitors who may use the same room escape term.

To get access to a large sample set of data on the business names of room escape companies – Intervirals looked at Escape Room Directory’s data that is available via a Google spreadsheet. From here, a standard set of room escape terms that a business may use was developed and searched for in the spreadsheet. Any duplicate business names were removed before the final results.

Keywords (plus number of references on Escape Room Directory)
– Room Escape (14 results)
– Escape Room (35 results)
– Real Life Room Escape (0 results)
– Live Escape (2 results)
– Live Escape Game (0 results)
– Exit Game (3 results)
– Escape Game (10 results)

While the term “escape game” is popular among room escape operators to name their business, it comes in third place behind the other terms, room escape (second place) and escape room (first place).

A concept that is of particular interest to this blog: Do particular geographical areas in the world favour a particular room escape term? I think the answer to this is yes. However this is probably a large concept to look into and to save time probably only major room escape hubs (Japan, Budapest, Canada, Singapore etc.) should be looked into. If anyone ever decides to look into this, please let me know.

Googling keywords
The final viewpoint to consider for this blog post is to see how many results arise from inputting into Google our particular set of room escape keywords. Note: One must consider that the returned results may actually not be relevant to the concept of an actual physical room escape place that one can visit.

Keywords (with Google results)
– Room Escape (26.9 million results)
– Escape Room (299 million results)
– Real Life Room Escape (33.1 million results)
– Live Escape (81.3 million results)
– Live Escape Game (69.8 million results)
– Exit Game (223 million results)
– Escape Game (245 million results)

Who wins as a result? It looks like a close tie between the terms “escape room” and “escape game”.

What are your thoughts? Feel free to leave a comment.

Essa 🙂