Guerilla Hide n Seek Heads To Melbourne IKEA

A game of guerilla hide and seek has been planned for IKEA’s Richmond store in Victoria for this Sunday, 29 August.

In terms of our recurring childhood fantasies, swimming through the fishbowl of primary coloured spheres in the IKEA ball pit is right up there next to the power of flight, owning a puppy and being a ninja. A culture of underground fight clubs was spurned from some of the base human instincts (mortality, fear of pain, Darwin’s theory of evolution, guilt-free ass kicking), and now a similar underground subculture has been identified, one that taps into another of those base instincts: regression. And this brings us back to the ball pit.

Inside Retailing reported that “Thousands of Melbourne youths are planning a massive game of hide-and-seek in Ikea’s huge Richmond store” on this Sunday, 29 August and has alleged attracted 3,000 participants on a (as yet unidentified) facebook page. This game of guerilla hide and seek starts at 12.30pm “with prizes offered for anyone who manages to infiltrate the ball room”.

There’s little doubt where the concept originated: a generation of adults who grew up watching Tom Hanks playing “Chopsticks” on the foot operated keyboard:

The Melbourne event isn’t a unique incident, with past mass hide and seek sessions being reported in IKEA’s from Stockholm to Texas, and future events planned in Perth, Melbourne and the Burbank store in California.

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