Game Theory

Okay, I'm going to cheat. This isn't something I wrote specifically for the blog; it's something I wrote a few months ago, for another venue, that wound up falling through. Also, it's not about looking closely at a text. But it's been a busy few weeks, and while nothing could be better than a proper post, this is better than nothing, so—therefore—this is better than a proper post. Right? Anyway, here we go:

In August of 2013, I participated in a game from SCRAP Entertainment called “Escape From the Mysterious Room” in San Francisco’s Japantown. The premise is simple: Eleven people are locked in a seemingly ordinary room—complete with tables and chairs, carpet, bookshelf, coat-rack, wall hangings, etc.—and are given one hour to get out. Almost no instructions are provided, but almost all of the items in the room hold secrets, and part of the game is figuring out what sort of questions to ask: Where are the clues that will lead you to the key that will ultimately unlock the door through which you entered?

I first learned of the game when a friend of a friend posted on Facebook looking for people to join him in his own attempt to escape. I was on the wrong coast at the time, but the premise seemed so odd that I decided to do a little research. The first “Real Escape Game” (“Escape from the Mysterious Room” is but one of several puzzles that SCRAP has put together) took place in Kyoto in 2007 and was masterminded by SCRAP’s founder, a 34 year old man named Takao Kato. He apparently was disappointed that real life wasn’t filled with the sort of adventures that he read about in novels and manga, and so he decided to create such an immersive real-life experience himself. The result was so successful that SCRAP now has five permanent Real Escape Games in Japan, along with one each in Shanghai, Singapore, and San Francisco. It surprised me that such an odd concept could spread so quickly, but I was even more surprised when I read about the low success rate; from the beginning the games had been designed such that fewer than five percent of participants would escape. It was a hugely popular game in which most of the participants happily lost. And that’s when I decided I wanted to play.

I’ve always been competitive; this isn’t a trait of which I’m particularly proud. We all tend to see ourselves, somewhat solipsistically, as the centers of our own narratives, and moments of exceptionalism, whether reached through skill or luck, only reinforce this view. Whether we beat a friend at chess or win a coin toss, the thrill is similar in kind if not degree. And the sense of loss can be just as meaningful, casting us as the heroes of tragedy rather than triumph. But the Real Escape Game was at least a cooperative experience; the reviews all promised that only teamwork would get us out of the room in time, and this seemed to make the promise of winning at least slightly less solipsistic a goal. So I decided to assemble a team.

At the time I played the game, only nine teams out of more than four hundred had ever managed to escape over the course of the nine months in which it had been running. I brought along seven friends, among whom numbered a musician, a cryptographer, a comic book enthusiast, a mathematician, a game designer, a statistician, and a last-minute wild card who had no idea what he was in for. Upon arriving at the building, we were joined by three strangers: a couple from Japan as well as another young American man, a game enthusiast, who had come on his own. We all introduced ourselves and donned lanyards with nametags, and then, after being led and locked into the room itself by a Japanese woman who provided us with one cryptic clue, we proceeded to work together and separately to find a way out.

Over the course of the hour allotted—overseen by two game administrators—the eleven of us flipped around in books, disassembled furniture, solved riddles, and rummaged through every conceivable space in the room in which a clue might be hidden. With perhaps five minutes left on the clock, we managed to make it through a locked door into a smaller, second room, where one final puzzle awaited us. Knowing we were running short on time, we frantically groped for solutions, making wild intuitive leaps, until—with about ten seconds left—we had the key in our hand and rushed to the exit, all ran out of the room, and gave ourselves a cheer as we were greeted by the woman who had ushered us in. She seemed shocked that we had made it. And then one of the administrators followed us out of the room and swiped a hand across his throat: “They didn’t do it right,” he told her.

Back when I was a high school senior, I was the captain of our Science Bowl team, and during the regional finals we found ourselves playing against a team that seemed to be at least our equal. It was a double-elimination competition, and though we hadn’t lost a single match going into the finals and the other team had, they managed to beat us in the first round. And, halfway through, the second round seemed as if it was going to go the same way. Forget beating them, we were having a hard enough time buzzing in before them. My teammates were growing disheartened, and though I knew it might seem like a desperate move, I also knew we needed a change of momentum: on the next question, I buzzed in as soon as the moderator said “Multiple choice.” He cleared my buzzer before proceeding, but then I buzzed in again, and I told him that I wanted to answer. After a brief consultation with the judges, he allowed me to respond, though no question had yet been asked. “C,” I said. The moderator reviewed the question and found that “C” was, coincidentally, the correct answer. I never found out what the question was, and my answer didn’t in itself win us the game;—but it did grant us a bonus question that put us in the lead, positioning us to go on to the national finals, which we eventually did. Even so, I still question whether it was fair.

More recently, I found myself engaged in behavior that was even more ethically questionable. A few years ago, I divorced, but I started playing poker on a semi-regular basis with a guy whom I knew through my ex-wife. I hadn’t played cards in years, but at the time I was mostly just looking for an excuse to see people, along with an excuse to drink. But then in the middle of one otherwise normal game, realizing how easy it would be among such friendly and unsuspecting opponents, I decided to cheat. I’m not sure where the motivation came from. I’m not the best card player, but I was generally able to break even on the average, and this was a small-stakes game, so it definitely wasn’t about the money. I wondered for a moment if it could somehow be rooted in my divorce, but the correlations were tenuous at best. The best answer I could come up with was that I was bored, realizing that beer and poker weren’t as fulfilling as I’d hoped to find them, and I wanted to see if I could get away with it. And I did. When the deal came to me, I quietly stacked the deck and managed to take a hand large enough to make me the clear winner for the night.

I tried to avoid poker for a while after that for fear that I’d be compelled to cheat again, but when my friend called me up and pled with me that they needed one more player to make a game, I gave in. And I did indeed cheat again, though with less success; I may have been reading too much into the conversation, but I became convinced that one of the other players was suspicious of my luck, and I left the game feeling low. The feeling persisted over the following week until I eventually decided to come clean about what I’d done, returning a rough approximation of my winnings to those I’d taken the most from. But rather than stemming from any sense of responsibility to those I’d wronged, I now think this admission came from a sense of having failed myself: that I hadn’t cheated well enough. As if I’d answered B instead of C during the Science Bowl.

Back in the escape room, everything seemed so much clearer: we’d escaped the room in under an hour. But according to the proctors, the game wasn’t just about escaping; it was designed to make you solve all of the problems in order to escape the room. And that’s what we didn’t do: We’d failed to solve the final puzzle. In fact, we weren’t even close. As our collective euphoria settled into some sentiment between confusion and disappointment, one of the game’s designers came out to meet us and discuss what had happened. We explained how we escaped the room, and he explained how we were supposed to have escaped the room, and then an awkward silence ensued.

Without giving too much away (the designers of the game understandably want to keep as much under wraps as possible), we made a huge mistake, reversing one of the means by which we were supposed to come to the solution, and then we used our nonsensical answer to come up with a four-digit lock combination that was coincidentally only one digit away from the correct combination and which caused the lock to pop open as we passed the correct solution on the way to our incorrect one. But as the comic enthusiast put it, “Isn’t luck always part of the great narratives?”

The designer told us that two groups had escaped “incorrectly” before, but they had both used brute-force calculation, systematically trying every combination on one of the room’s four-digit locks, rather than even attempting to play the game. Their escapes hadn’t counted, but he left the question up to us if we really thought that we deserved to be added to the record as the tenth group to have escaped the room. We decided to put it to a blind show of hands; despite the odd number of us, it was a tie; after a brief moment of confusion, one of us admitted that he had abstained. There seemed to be no clear answer to the question: Whether we had won or lost depended on each of our definitions of winning and losing. A brief discussion made it clear that the abstainer had no intention of changing his mind, but even so we eventually decided to vote again. The first time I had voted that our escape should count; the second time I changed my mind. The game designer obviously didn’t want it to count, and anyway, I got what I came for: not only the sense of elation I felt when we left the room, but the sense that I’d done it as part of this group of both friends and strangers. Whether we all felt we deserved our place in the statistics was beside the point. I figured I'd won the game I was playing, so why not let the designer win the game that he was playing too?