## Locked in a room, as a service? In which industry are we to place Escape Rooms, as a business? There are tens of thousands of physical locations where human beings pay to be locked in a room, with strangers or with friends, and then spend an hour or more trying to figure out how to escape, with no instructions of how to do so. > _An escape room, also known as an escape game, puzzle room, exit game, or riddle room, is a game in which a team of players discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms in order to accomplish a specific goal in a limited amount of time. The goal is often to escape from the site of the game._ > > -The Dynamic Read-Writable Free Encyclopedic Repository of the Modern State of Human Knowledge These places aren't selling goods. But they're not quite services either. It's not as if there exists some subset of the population who would very much like to be locked in a room, and would lock themselves in a room if only they could, but instead choose to pay someone else to do it for them, either for the convenience, or because they've gotten tired of locking themselves in their own rooms at home and need a change of scenery. It's more service than good. But service isn't right either. A slightly better answer would be that escape rooms are best categorized as a form of entertainment. This is an understandable response. But it's also a lazy answer, and it fails to address the truly strange nature of this business. Is it really entertainment that draws our species to these places? > Players enter a room or area wherein a clock is started and they have a limited time to complete the game, typically 45 to 60 minutes, while some longer rooms can go from 90 minutes to two hours. During this time, players explore, find clues, and solve puzzles that allow them to progress further in the game. Some escape rooms, especially horror-themed variants, may also include escaping from restraints such as handcuffs or zip ties. Challenges in an escape room generally are more mental than physical, and it is usually not necessary to be physically fit or dexterous. > > -The Dynamic Read-Writable Free Encyclopedic Repository of the Modern State of Human Knowledge Entertainment is synonymous with amusement, enjoyment, recreation, fun. Is being locked in a room (entertaining as it is) really to be placed alongside arcades, movie theaters, roller coasters and mini golf courses, if we want to understand the human need that this business serves? To be sure, being locked in a room with some friends can be entertaining. But it can also be frustrating, confusing, or scary. It can reveal implicit attributes, hidden truths about the strengths and weaknesses of your teammates, or even of yourself, which is why these locations are a popular destination for team building activities and corporate retreats. Let's leave escape rooms uncategorized, and examine an equally uncategorizable type of business. ## Insulted, as a service? Dick's Last Resort is a restaurant chain where the wait staff insults you, treats you poorly, and throws all your food together haphazardly in a bucket with no regard for your comfort or aesthetic taste or culinary preferences. They have multiple locations. It's a chain. And they've been around for over 40 years. > _Dick's Last Resort is a bar and restaurant chain in the United States known for its intentional employment of an obnoxious staff who "purposely provide bad service". The chain was founded in Dallas, Texas, in 1985 by Richard "Dick" Chase and currently operates thirteen locations across the United States._ > > -The Dynamic Read-Writable Free Encyclopedic Repository of the Modern State of Human Knowledge Is this a good, a service, or a form of entertainment? Well the food is a good, though they don't attempt to make it "good." And the waiters provide "service," though they're explicitly trained to provide "bad service." And sure it's entertaining. Especially when they insult your family. But there's something much deeper going on here. And neither goods, nor services, nor entertainment are enough to fully capture which parts of human nature have kept this business alive for 40 years. ## The missing industry There is an entire unrecognized industry in the modern economy. Lacking a name, we've failed to recognize this industry for what it is. When it appears, though it rarely does, we mistake it for something else. It's not a good, though it sometimes sells them. It's not a service, though services are often provided. It's not entertainment, though it's closer to this than any other category. But there is an entire unrecognized and widely under-served industry in the modern economy. There are thousands of successful business models that do not yet exist. The missing industry in our economy is the industry of situations. ## What is a situation? A situation is a set of rules, norms, incentives, and (most importantly) _constraints_, within which other goods or services or entertainment may be offered. The defining property of this industry is that the latter three offerings are less essential to the business's value than the situation itself. An escape room is a situation with the physical constraint of a lack of freedom of movement, for a certain amount of time and with a certain group of people, in which freedom of movement can be regained through the use of one's mind, and the minds of one's team. Through this constraint, we can better learn the value of our own mind within the context of a team, and discover the hidden strengths and weaknesses of our teammates that would otherwise not have been discoverable in a more everyday situation. The entertainment value of this situation is entirely secondary. The value of these businesses is not in what they add, but in what they subtract. And in the experiences that can only exist once a certain set of options are removed. They take away your ability to do what you'd normally be doing, until you (and your teammates) figure out how to get it back. Once you regain your freedom, the experience ends. It's as if a movie theater played a new kind of film that you enjoyed precisely because of how hard you were trying to make it end. If you make it end earlier, you've won. But you'll most likely enjoy it less if you do. The only way to understand the bizarre semantics of this business model is to recognize that what is being offered is _a situation._ And a situation is about the incentives and constraints that it imposes on you, and more importantly, _on everyone else in it._ Situations are not like video games. They're not abstract puzzles or games of skill that one plays in a virtual form of reality to escape the tedium of actual reality. In a situation business, like an escape room or Dick's Last Resort, you are placed into a novel and unusual set of rules that apply both to yourself _and to other real people,_ in actual reality, and through that experience you learn more about yourself and the other real people with whom you shared the experience, and (in the more well designed situations) come away with a more intense and meaningful kind of human relationship with some subset of your co-participants than you could have built in the normal conditions of the outside world. Situation businesses are fundamentally social. Skydiving is a situation of sorts, but it more naturally fits the description of entertainment. Horror movies are similar to skydiving, in the sense that one gains exhilaration and enjoyment in certain circumstances from a limited form of negative emotion. Fear, in the case of horror movies and (as I can attest from multiple experiences) jumping out of an airplane. In other words, to propose a sort of Rough Draft Unified Theory of all business by mapping each industry onto some core piece of human nature, we can make the following categorizations: Goods Business: - I want a noun. - I could get that noun myself. - But that would take longer and be harder, so it's worth the money to get the noun from someone else. Service Business: - I want a verb. - I could do that verb myself. - But that would take longer and be harder, so it's worth the money to have someone else do the verb for me. Entertainment Business: - I want an emotion. - I could seek that emotion myself. - But that would take longer and be harder, so it's worth the money to have someone else cause the emotion for me. Situation Business: - I want a social situation. - I could create that situation myself. - But that would take longer and be harder, so it's worth the money to have someone else create the situation for me. With these categories, we can more clearly see other businesses in the situation industry. Night clubs with loud music and dim lighting may have goods (alcohol), and offer services (pouring it), and arguably there's some entertainment value in being in a slightly too loud and too dark place (really though?), but that's not what these businesses offer. The value of these businesses lies precisely in the situation they create, not in what they add, but in what they remove. The situation they offer is precisely one in which the music is too loud, the lighting is too low, and the only "goods" on offer are variants of the ancient social lubricant known as alcohol. These places are perfectly optimized, as a situation with specific constraints. Namely the constraint that you _can't_ hear what your date is saying without leaning in close, you _can't_ see much except what's right in front of you, and the only noun on offer is designed to lower inhibitions. These locations are understandable only when we grasp that what they offer is a situation: specifically a situation where you and your date _can't_ communicate without upgrading to a closer and more intimate definition of personal space. > _The value of a situation is the problem it creates._ It creates a problem for you, which is why it's not quite a service or entertainment. But it also creates the same problem for everyone else, and this is the essence of the industry of situations. Only by creating a well designed problem can an arbitrary social outcome be effortlessly obtained. The Situations Industry is precisely the Social Industry. And the sense in which it is "social" is the sense of social engineering, specifically the creation of engineered social spaces. Once we recognize this industry for what it is, we immediately see how many valuable situations are not yet offered by any existing part of modern social life. This is the problem we aim to solve, starting from the most fundamental and unaddressed human needs. The most fundamental such need is a solution to [[The Big Four]].