Beijing prison breakout - a field trip with a difference

A pioneering playful enterprise, drawing youthful crowds in several of China's cities, hints at dissatisfaction with corporate lifestyles among young people, writes Martin Mulligan, who is in Beijing training journalists in financial reporting for the Thomson Foundation.

With 10 blindfolded and baffled colleagues all Xinhua journalists covering Beijing's intense, business and finance beat - you are led along what seems an endless corridor to find yourselves sealed in a dark cell fashioned to resemble Alcatraz or Devil's Island. That loud banging and jangling is the gaoler's key turning in the lock.

Doorway to freedom When the blindfolds are lifted, the hunt for clues begins. You have an hour to decipher the clues hidden in your cell, to crack the code, spring the lock, release your colleagues from a neighbouring cell - and finally to break into the guard's room with its doorway to freedom.

It is no accident that this description resembles a computer game plot, says Olym Xu, one of the founders of Omega Room Escape, the leading room escape game and service provider', because such a game was the inspiration of Beijing's premier company in this field (their company logo carefully altered to avoid any trademark conflict with a well-known international watchmaker).

This real-time, real life charade which has multiplied rapidly in China, to eight cities in only a year took its cue from an online flash game which originated in Japan in 2004. Supremely digital, in that it was game that could be played with one finger, Tohimitsu Takagi's Crimson Room was an instant hit for tablets and smart phones. In a similar fashion, explosive positive publicity for the real-life game product has spread via social media.

The creators disseminated an enthusiastic article about the business which was read by tens of thousands of people. The site was crowded during the summer says Mr Olym. Most customers are aged from 16 to 35, he adds.

Corporate team-building Yuxiang Hu, another co-founder, said more than 50,000 players have experienced the game in the past 12 months. Not bad for a start-up with an initial investment of only 20,000 RMB (USD 3,300).

Corporate team building exercises are clearly a growth area: More than 100 companies or organisations including Sinopec, Cisco, Google have come to experience it , says Mr Olym. The turnover is not bad. We invest all the recurring income in expanding the venues and designing (fresh) games.

The sound of carpentry and electrical work from behind a curtained-off workshop is constant at the premises since the four-person design team introduces a brand new game every two months.

Social media and word of mouth recommendation have to date successfully driven customers to the company's Xinyu Business Tower premises, a short walk from the Ciqikou subway station in the Dongcheng district. We are using ... micro log, Ren Ren social network, We Chat message service in order to reach out to more customers, says Mr Olym.

A striking element of this particular venture is that the founders are lawyers in their mid-20s at internationally recognised law firms that is, ostensibly good jobs . Here are people who on the surface have every professional and material advantage that contemporary Beijing can offer. Why would they want to quit the corporate hierarchy for the uncertainty of a pioneering game playing start-up, an inquisitive bystander asks.

Creative fleas In the law firm, if you make a million dollars, it's for your boss. But here, every yuan we earn is for ourselves. The long-term goal, he adds, is to take the company public as a cultural industry blue-chip.

This starts to look very like a future prophesied by management guru Charles Handy in his book The Elephant and the Flea. He suggested the age of the big corporation had drawn to a close and that the future would belong to the quick-brained, agile, corporately uncommitted or even corporately averse creative fleas - independent freelancers and entrepreneurs with their own smaller but prosperous businesses and ambitions.

Do the founders of Beijing's only five-star Escape Room franchise share that vision of today's working world? Mr Olym's reply seems to come from a great depth, especially for man of only 25 years, as he says: This thing has become my law firm! You may not get so excited when this becomes your job."

LINK:	http://www.thomsonfoundation.org/news-and-features/2013/06/11/beijing-...
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