Where is the line between what we will and won’t cover on Room Escape Artist?
We’ve grappled with this quite a bit over the years. Sometimes it’s really simple and straightforward. Sometimes it has required a lot more thought.
Escape Rooms
Ok, this one is a no-brainer. If it’s an escape room or relevant news about the industry, it’s our bread and butter.
I’m not going to belabor this.
Experiences
We love immersive theatre, conventional theatre, and magic. We don’t write up these experiences, however, unless they meet some specific criteria.
The questions that we ask ourselves are:
- Did we have agency?
- Was the experience different because one of us was in it, instead of if someone else had bought that ticket?
- Should the escape room community be aware of it?
If we don’t have agency and the experience was so on rails that substituting different participants would have zero impact on the show, then it’s not for us… unless we feel that the experience is doing something that escape room people should know about.
If it’s purely immersive theatre, then it’s the territory of our friends over at No Proscenium.
Puzzles
If it’s puzzley, we’re interested. We might not cover it, however, because there are lots of puzzles in the world, but we’re down to investigate it.
That said, we tend to steer clear of some of the more extreme or specialized puzzles and experiences. We might occasionally write about this kind of stuff, but there are more knowledgeable and experienced people writing about crossword puzzles or puzzle hunts like The MIT Mystery Hunt.
Tabletop Games
We’ll cover tabletop puzzle experiences… or tabletop games that really feel like puzzles. We also cover tabletop escape games, a growing category of tabletop games.
We’re big board gamers, but we don’t write about them often unless they meet the criteria above.
Video Games
Video games are great… but whether or not we will cover them comes down to how much puzzle content is in them.
Sensory Mysteries
We started reviewing mystery flavor stuff mostly as a joke… but people seem to enjoy the content. While we usually hate the flavors of this stuff, we do have a lot of fun writing about them.
All Subject To Change
We’ll continue covering what we enjoy writing about and what people seem to respond to when we publish it.
We’ve evolved quite a bit over the past few years. I’m quite confident that much of this will change over the coming years.
It’s important to define what we are and what we aren’t. This is where we are today (1,222 blog posts over 4.5 years).
