Nothing feels quite as honest as a splinter under the fingernail when you’re trying to build a lie for a living. I am currently hunched over the floorboards of a room I’ve spent 12 months calling ‘The Ledger,’ and my 2 knees are screaming at the concrete beneath the carpet. Being an escape room designer is a strange trade because you are essentially a professional gaslighter. You create a reality that exists only to be dismantled, a series of hurdles that must be just tall enough to frustrate but just low enough to clear. It’s a delicate balance of cruelty and grace, and today, I’m failing at the grace part. My current problem is a magnetic lock that refuses to engage unless the player stands at exactly a 72-degree angle to the sensor, which is a level of precision that no human in a state of panic is going to achieve.

I’ve been at this for 32 hours this week alone, and the fatigue is starting to make my thoughts loop like a broken record. It reminds me of the time I spent 42 minutes trying to explain the concept of decentralized finance to my sister during Christmas dinner. I thought I was being brilliant. I used forks and napkins to represent nodes and consensus algorithms, but I ended up just looking like a man having a breakdown in front of a ham. I told her that crypto was the ultimate puzzle-a lock that everyone could see but no one could pick without the right mathematical key. She just asked me why anyone would want to live in a world where you have to solve a riddle just to buy a coffee. She was right, in a way. We have this obsession with making things ‘secure’ or ‘complex’ under the guise of progress, but usually, we’re just building better cages for ourselves. I made the mistake of telling her it was ‘unhackable,’ right before I realized I’d lost the recovery phrase to a wallet I started back in 2012. It’s still out there, floating in the digital ether with 2.2 coins inside, mocking me from behind a door I designed but can’t open.

The Illusion of Control

In the escape room industry, we talk a lot about ‘flow,’ which is just a fancy word for keeping people busy enough that they don’t realize they’re in a 122-square-foot box in a strip mall. I’ve watched 82 different groups try to solve my ‘Nuclear Silo’ room, and the ones who fail are always the ones who try to find a logical explanation for everything. They want the world to make sense. They want the buttons to do what they say they’ll do. But life doesn’t work like that, and neither does a good room. Sometimes, the 2nd drawer on the left opens because you turned off a light in the hallway, not because you found a key. It’s a chaotic system, much like the crypto markets I tried so hard to master. You think you understand the mechanics, you think you see the pattern in the candles, and then a billionaire tweets a picture of a dog and the entire 32-story building of your logic collapses.

“Complexity is a blanket we pull over our heads to hide from the cold reality of randomness.”

The Body as a Puzzle

Designing these spaces takes a physical toll that I didn’t anticipate when I started this career 2 years ago. My back is a mess of knots, and my neck feels like it’s been fused into a permanent C-shape from staring at wiring diagrams. My wife actually staged an intervention last month. She pointed out that I was spendng $92 a week on various heat wraps and ibuprofen just to keep standing. She eventually dragged me to see a specialist because my left shoulder had basically stopped moving. I was skeptical, as I usually am about anything that doesn’t involve a hex key or a soldering iron, but I ended up at acupuncturists East Melbourne after she threatened to lock me in my own ‘Dungeon’ room and take away my master key. It was a bizarre experience, honestly. Being the one pinned down by needles instead of being the one hiding them in the walls felt like a karmic reversal. But after about 32 minutes on the table, I realized that my body was just another puzzle I’d been trying to brute-force instead of actually solving.

It’s funny how we treat our health like a mechanical failure. We think we can just swap out a part or tighten a bolt, but sometimes you have to look at the whole system. When I’m building a room, if a door won’t latch, I don’t just look at the door; I look at whether the building has shifted or if the humidity is sitting at 82 percent and swelling the wood. Everything is connected in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. That’s the deeper meaning of what I do, I think. It isn’t about the locks. It’s about the realization that you are part of a larger, invisible machine. You aren’t just a player; you’re a variable.

The Expert’s Obstacle

I remember this one group-a team of 12 corporate lawyers who came in for ‘team building.’ They were the most efficient humans I’ve ever seen. They didn’t talk; they barked orders. They solved the first 2 puzzles in record time. But then they hit the ‘Mirror Room,’ where the solution requires you to admit you’re lost. They couldn’t do it. They spent 52 minutes arguing about the interpretation of a poem on the wall while the actual exit was hiding in plain sight behind a loose tile they refused to touch because it looked ‘unprofessional.’

I’ve made 2 major mistakes in my career. The first was thinking I could explain the blockchain to someone who didn’t care. The second was thinking I could design a room that no one could break. Last Tuesday, a kid who couldn’t have been more than 12 years old managed to bypass a $232 electronic lock by using a piece of gum and a literal hair tie. I wasn’t even mad. I was impressed. He saw a solution that I hadn’t programmed into the simulation. He broke the reality of the game by being more real than the game itself. That’s the relevance of all this, I suppose. No matter how many layers of security or complexity we build-whether it’s a vault, a digital ledger, or a psychological barrier-there is always a kid with a piece of gum.

The Final ‘Thunk’

I’m currently looking at a pile of 62 different wires that I need to sort through before the morning group arrives. The room smells like sawdust and ozone. My 2nd cup of coffee is cold, and I’m pretty sure I’ve developed a twitch in my right eye. But as I finally hear that magnetic lock ‘thunk’ into place at the correct 72-degree angle, a small part of me feels a rush of satisfaction. It’s a lie, of course. It’s a manufactured moment of victory for someone else, but for a second, the world feels like it has a solution.

Tomorrow, 2 groups of strangers will walk in here, pay their $32 per person, and spend an hour trying to beat me at a game I’ve already rigged in their favor. They’ll scream and laugh and maybe even get a little bit angry. And when they finally find the last key and the hidden door swings open, they’ll feel a sense of clarity that doesn’t actually exist in the real world. They’ll walk out into the sunlight thinking they’ve mastered something. And I’ll stay behind, prying up the floorboards once again to fix the 12 things they broke, knowing that the real puzzle is just beginning: getting through the next 2 hours of my own life without losing the key again.