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The comic and the tragic are well-established modes within entertainment, but what about the puzzling? Riddles may have been a chief pastime in days of yore (well, they’re featured in Oedipus and The Hobbit, anyway), but does this way of being entertained have a place in today’s age of mass media?
Improviser and podcaster Adal Rifai joins Mark, Erica, and Brian to discuss his love of escape rooms, riddles, and other opportunities for puzzlement. We discuss lateral vs. algorithmic thinking, group dynamics, comparisons to improvisation and trivia, riddle types, video games, and more. Some puzzle-relevant films we touch on include Escape Room, Cube, The Game, and Midnight Madness.
Some resources we used to prepare include:
- Adal’s podcast Hey Riddle Riddle
- “Get Me Out of Here! Why Escape Rooms Have Become a Global Craze” by Simon Usbourne
- “Five-Year US Escape Room Industry Report” by Lisa Spira
- “Five Dead, One Injured in Polish Escape Room Fire” by David Spira
- “Solving Puzzles Satisfies The Nimble Brain” from NPR
- Wikipedia on Escape Rooms and Escape-the-Room Video Games
- TV Tropes on Stock Video Game Puzzles
Adal’s two other podcasts are Hello From the Magic Tavern and Siblings Pecular. Follow him @adalrifai. He performs regularly on Whirled News Tonight at Chicago’s IO Theater.
Listen to Mark’s other podcast discuss the not-really-escape-room-like Stanford Prison Experiment.
This episode includes bonus discussion that you can hear now by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop, or just wait a week, because we’re releasing that particular extra chatter as next week’s episode.
This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network and is curated by openculture.com.
[…] talk after the public discussion for the entertainment of our supporters. In this case, following our “escape rooms and other puzzlers” encounter, our guest Adal Rifai also stuck around, and the result was too fun not to share with […]