What is real?
Escape rooms aren't real, but sometimes they feel that way. If it's a good escape room, you forget the real world, your worries, the daily grind, and for a while you lose yourself completely in an alternate truth. When that happens, it feels like pure magic. For a moment, you believed in a fairy tale. You forgot reality.
Years ago I learned that I couldn't both build escape rooms and then run those escape rooms myself. In the beginning I found it pretty hard to hand my carefully built works of art over to staff, to leave my baby in someone else's arms, but by now we have a team of extremely committed and experienced escape room lovers at DarkPark, and I can leave the care of what I dreamed up in their hands without a second thought.
So I haven't run escape rooms myself in years, but some visitors think that's a shame, and I get that. I am the face of the company, after all. Recently I found out that visitors sometimes even ask where I am when they come to play an escape room. The standard answer my staff gives is both hilarious and disturbing.
“Gijs? He's in a straitjacket, somewhere in a locked ward.” So that, apparently, is what my staff tells our visitors. Well, thanks a lot. You spend day in, day out building something you hope will give people a special experience, and you get written off as a deranged maniac who needs protecting from himself. And here I was, just bragging about how committed and professional my team members are.
Sick mind
Or are they right? Back when I still ran escape rooms myself, years ago, visitors would sometimes remark that you must have a seriously sick mind to come up with all the horrors in my escape rooms. Were they right, maybe? Do I actually belong in an institution?
Sometimes, and now I'm going to go pretty deep for a moment (there's that sick mind again), I imagine that the world is a computer simulation. An experiment, maybe even a game. Just imagine that every memory you have was written by a computer programmer only a few minutes ago. Everything you're convinced you've lived through was in fact only just uploaded to your internal chip, which is why you think you already have a whole life behind you. In reality, the computer has only just been switched on and it's up to you to complete a task, to finish the game. After that the computer goes off again, but you won't notice a thing. Dying? That's a myth, it doesn't actually happen at all. The computer simply switches off. The memories you have of death were all programmed in. None of that ever really happened.
Hey, I warned you we were going to go deep.
A simulation?
“But there's no chip in my head that everything I think is true gets uploaded to.”
How can you be so sure? Have you ever looked inside your own head? Have you ever picked up a knife and split your skull open to check whether there's really a brain in there and not computer parts? Sure, maybe you've seen it in other people, or you've read about it, heard about it or seen it in a film, but who says those memories are real? Maybe all of that was uploaded to your brain too.
Don't worry, I don't actually believe this. I'm not going to take a knife to my skull (or anyone else's) to see if there's a brain inside. Leave that straitjacket in the closet just a little longer.
But just imagine. In theory, it could be. Imagine we're living in a simulation. Maybe you're not the main character at all; Super Mario. Maybe you're just a passer-by, one of those mushrooms with little legs wandering past. Even then, everything has to add up. You have to believe you're the main character, so that when the real main character runs into you, neither of you realizes it's only a game, an artificial world that was only just created and might be switched off again any minute. Everyone walking around here has to think they're the center of the simulation and must never work out that none of it is real. So it has to be a perfect simulation, for everyone inside it. Main characters and supporting characters alike.
The real world
Back to the here and now, the real world. Reality.
Everything I just described is made up. Comes from my sick mind. But it could be true. How would you ever find out, if everything we believe in is nothing but a fabrication? A brilliantly constructed alternate reality. With the lightning-fast rise of AI, something like that is no longer unthinkable. Already it's sometimes pretty hard to tell the difference between a real photo and one made with AI. Imagine what that will be like in a few years. Maybe it will actually become possible to upload people to the cloud. Will we one day live in a world that isn't real, without knowing it ourselves? And who can tell us with any certainty that this isn't already the case?
Does it matter?
So the question that remains is: does it matter? If you don't know whether the truth you believe in is actually the truth, what difference does it make whether it's true? It's true for you, and isn't that enough?
But if it doesn't matter whether the world we live in is real or a computer simulation, then one question remains: which reality makes us happiest?
What if everything stops tomorrow?
Suppose there's no reason for our existence on earth. Suppose everything we believe in turns out not to be true. Suppose the computer could suddenly be switched off tomorrow. What would you do? Which of the limits you've set for yourself would suddenly fall away? If you knew the computer would be switched off tomorrow, would you still go to work today to earn money to pay off that far too expensive house? Would you still argue with the one you love about the things that get you so worked up right now? Would you still worry about your children's future? Or would you just go and enjoy life? Make it a beautiful day? Play an escape room, give someone a compliment, declare your love, dance down the street?
Maybe tomorrow
“But the computer isn't going to be switched off tomorrow, Gijs. I simply have to earn money to pay for my far too expensive house, and if I go dancing down the street, the neighbors will laugh at me for the rest of my life.”
But you don't know for sure. Maybe that computer does go off tomorrow. Maybe everything we believe in isn't true at all. I still regularly discover that things I've been utterly convinced of my whole life turn out to be complete nonsense. And when I let go of one of those so-called truths, it brings freedom. Another weight off my shoulders. Another thing I no longer have to believe in.
Dancing through life, who cares what the neighbors think? They were only just uploaded from the cloud themselves. What do they know?
Freedom in every reality
If the world is a simulation, we're free to do and believe whatever we want. None of it matters anyway. And that goes for when the world isn't a simulation, too.
Or was that my sick mind talking again? Maybe I do belong in a straitjacket. Maybe it's better if I get locked away in an asylum. It makes no difference to me. None of it is real anyway.
