Room Escape Artist

USA Today’s 10Best Escape Rooms is coming soon, and before it comes out, I want to share some thoughts and criticism of USA Today’s system.

I want to discuss USA Today’s 10Best before any specific escape room companies are associated with it, because the issues that we here at Room Escape Artist have with 10Best have nothing to do with the nominated companies.

What is USA Today 10Best?

Every year, USA Today runs an extensive series of 10Best lists. They cover everything from Hotel Bars, to Escape Rooms, to Gluten-Free Pizza. It’s conceptually cool.

As USA Today describes it, “Nominees are submitted by a panel of experts. 10Best editors narrow the field to select the final set of nominees for the Readers’ Choice Awards. Readers can vote once per category, per day.”

Basically USA Today finds experts to nominate businesses within a given category, 10Best editors narrow down that list to 20 nominees, and then voting is open for a few weeks, and fans of these businesses are encouraged to vote repeatedly.

In the end, a list of 10 winning businesses becomes the 10Best cohort for the year.

Our Involvement in 10Best Escape Room

In the past, we have been experts for USA Today 10Best.

Initially, we were flattered to be invited, and excited to promote great escape rooms. However, the flaws in the system became apparent as soon as USA Today published their nominee list.

I cannot speak to the experience for experts in other lists, but in 10Best Escape Rooms, we sent out lists into the void, and felt like it was only nominally influential in USA Today’s editorial process.

This lead to a lot of folks asking us how the list got so weird. The answer was that we truly didn’t know… but we were listed as the experts who helped make the list.

And make no mistake about it, the lists have always been a weird mix of internationally recognized escape room companies, respectable escape room companies, underperforming franchises, and a strong dose of, “you probably run a good business, but it’s surprising to see you in the conversation about best escape room companies.”

After a couple of years of hoping that we could influence positive change and failing, we quit.

The Problems with USA Today 10Best Escape Rooms

There are three categories of problems with USA Today 10Best:

• Experts Lacking Expertise
• Opaque Nomination Process
• Insincere Voting Mechanism

Let’s break each of these down.

Experts Lacking Expertise

There are a lot of people in the escape room community who have a strong grasp on the American escape room landscape. And while no one has an absolute complete view into escape rooms in the US, it’s truly surprising to see that in 2023, 75% of the experts were, to the best of my knowledge, not of the escape room community.

It’s at this point that I will emphatically state: do not take any aggression out on USA Today 10Best nominators. It’s a tragic, thankless job.

Of the 4 nominators, only Christine Barger is a longtime and engaged member of the escape room community. She’s an owner, she’s a reviewer, and she’s played all over the country for the better part of the decade. None of the other 3 nominators even mentioned escape rooms in their bios.

When 75% of your nominations are coming from neophytes, that probably means that your data is low quality.

Opaque Nomination Process

Simply put, no one outside of the USA 10Best editors knows what was nominated. The data isn’t shared. This means that we have no idea how those lists are being used. We cannot reverse engineer or verify their work. It’s a black box. We have no idea what they are optimizing for.

It’s strange to hide the expert data that feeds the system.

Insincere Voting Mechanism

Voting in USA Today 10Best is insane. Everyone can vote daily for weeks. In fact, if you want your favorite company to do well, you pretty much have to.

Voting systems are hard… but the structure of USA Today 10Best does not feel like it is sincerely trying to find the best escape rooms in the United States.

USA Today 10Best’s voting system feels like it built around key performance indicators (KPIs) for an ad-served business. It feels like the goal is to drive inbound links pushed by nominated companies, to drive large amounts of traffic to USA Today, so that they can improve their SEO and serve more ads. Fine. This is their business, and escape rooms are just another small way that they can juice their KPIs. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but I also don’t have to support and endorse it.

The Top Escape Rooms Project Enthusiasts’ Choice Award, or TERPECA works damn hard to make a system that is fair. It takes a village and an overwhelmingly dedicated leader to make it all work. Is it perfect? No. Is it optimized around a mission of making an incredible list of escape rooms? It sure is, and that list is filled with hundreds of stellar games.

USA Today 10Best Reached Out Again

This year, USA Today 10Best asked us to be experts again. It’s years later. We are more knowledgable, skilled, and professional. Flattery isn’t something that we feel much these days, and we have a better sense of how to advocate for the escape room industry.

This is how we responded:

We have participated in 10Best in the past and found the process frustratingly opaque, and the aftermath of the supporting 10Best was damaging to our reputation for very little gain.

It was difficult to see our own influence over the selected companies, and far too many of the experts selected were not knowledgable members of the escape room community.

Additionally, it appears to us that 10Best prioritizes companies with large social media presences over quality, and that is unfortunate.

If 10Best was willing to share who the other experts were, what their lists are, and help us understand how those lists are turned into the published post, we would be willing to consider engaging with USA Today. In absence of this, we will have to decline.

Our requests in this message would not fix everything that’s broken about the system. We know that we cannot fix the bonkers voting process… but it is possible for USA Today to get experts with expertise, and create a transparent nomination process.

The response that we received to this was very kind, and emphatically rejected that the size of a company’s social media presence was a factor in the selection process… but it was also clear that they had no real desire to change their process.

And I get that. They run this nonsense hundreds of times per year, and escape rooms aren’t exactly an essential part of the process. Some stubborn escape room reviewers are irrelevant in the grand scheme of their goal to put ads in front of eyeballs.

Closing Thoughts

At the end of the day, USA Today 10Best is money in the pocket for 10 escape room companies. It’s not the worst thing in the world.

Many of those companies do incredible work… and at least one is bewilderingly bad at what they do.

The problem is that it’s an utterly chaotic list that sets really bad expectations for the less escape room-aware players who use it as a North Star. If you use this list, you could walk into some brilliant games… or you could walk into one of the most laughably bad games that I’ve played in a while.

It’s bad for escape rooms when new players walk out of terrible games and believe that they represent the best that the medium has to offer.

The tragedy is that USA Today could fix two out of three problems pretty easily if they wanted to. That last one problem would require a lot more dedication to craft and a shift in goals.

If they’re ever interested in fixing any of these problems, they have my email address.