Video Game Culture Seeps Into Interactive Lives: Escape Rooms and Novels Highlight Trend
Some of you aware of the holodecks and holosuites from the TV series "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "Star Trek: Deep Space 9," respectively. Now, video gaming culture is hoping to replicate the holodeck idea with "Escape Rooms."
Video game culture appears to be impacting the interactive lives and pop-culture of the mainstream. Even Neil Patrick Harris' upcoming autobiography is reportedly going to be written in the 1980s style of "Choose Your Adventure Book."
Escape rooms fuse digital culture with theater, giving the effect of being somewhere else as in a holodeck. Some escape rooms lock people behind a closed door and asks them to find a way out. According to The New York Times, the players, in some instances, must race against the clock to decipher clues to solve a mystery, to reveal a combination of a lock or solve puzzles. These escape room games get its origins from Japan and other countries in Asia after years of popularity.
Its influence has spawned at least three escape room games in New York: "Escape the Room NYC," which opened in February of this year not far from the Empire State Building; and "Real Escape Game," which contends that they invented the phenomenon in 2007 in Japan and came to Webster Hall in the East Village last weekend. "Real Escape Game" has plans to return this year.
Also "Trapped NYC," is scheduled to open on the Lower East Side later this month. "Trapped NYC" is scheduled to open in conjunction with "The Purge: Breakout," a promotion for the horror film "The Purge: Anarchy."
Sometimes the digital realm of video games is thought of as an imitation of the physical life, but many early video games were crude translations of existing physical games. Now in reverse, escape rooms are an example of the physical world mimicking the virtual one, The New York Times reported.
Even some video games are breaking boundaries by highlighting cultures. The first title from an indigenous-owned Upper One Games, called Never Alone, follows the adventures of an Alaska Native girl named Nuna, who must save her people from an endless blizzard. The game is very authentic in that it is based heavily in traditional Iñupiaq folklore. The people involved in this video game project primary focus is to have Never Alone share the "underrepresented culture" through a modern storytelling medium.
Upper One has partnered with E-Line Media for development. Both groups have been very conscious about portraying the story as accurate as possible. One of the main themes in the story is the typical Western notion of an individual hero. To showcase this theme, a pair of characters was created, Nuna and her Arctic fox, who would need to rely on each other to survive.
The culture of video gaming is spreading and perhaps touching more mediums than anyone realizes.
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