From axe throwing and mini golf to arcade bars, competitive socialising is allowing adults to play again.
I didn’t know what to expect when I walked in. I barely knew anyone there, except for one friend. And yet there we were, a group of near-strangers laughing together like old friends.
Just a plastic labyrinth nailed to a wall and a golf club. We’re all silent, gripping our clubs, some of us unconsciously mirroring the movements of the girl in front of us; eyes fixed, jaw set, guiding her golf ball through an intricate maze built into a wall, trying to bring it out the other side without letting it fall — every wrong move and the ball drops.
Every tremor of the hand starts again from the beginning.
“This is impossible!” she shouts, louder than the music.
We boo. We laugh. She gets more and more frustrated, which somehow makes it funnier, which makes her even more frustrated, which makes it funnier still.
We are strangers, or close enough to it, and we are booing a girl trying to get a golf ball through a plastic wall at 11:00 pm on a Tuesday in Camden. Eventually, one of us caves and reaches over to help. The ball makes it through. We cheer like she’s won something that matters.
The venue is small, but people fill every corner. Couples showing off to their dates, groups laughing at each other’s failures, everyone seemingly around the same age. It is, quietly, a very popular thing to be doing on a Tuesday night. Walking to the next hole, I thought: Why don’t we do this more often?
Popular among millennials and Gen Z, competitive socialising, which includes mini golf, ball pits, axe-throwing, escape rooms, and more, is one of the fastest-growing sectors in UK nightlife.
According to a 2025 KAM Insight report, 29% of UK adults visited a competitive socialising venue in the past year, with repeat visits up from 35% in 2023 to 41% in 2025.
Most respondents said they make more memories at these venues than at pubs or restaurants. This is not a trend. It is a shift.
But why are these venues becoming so popular? “Take Carnival and Mardi Gras, for example, scheduled inversions and chaos with a social rulebook,” says sociologist Jennifer Walter. “People ditch their day-to-day role for a set amount of time. Adult play venues work the same way.”
The appeal of these venues lies not simply in the games themselves, but in the social permission structures they create. Psychologist Stuart Brown, who has spent more than 30 years studying the benefits of play across animal species, including humans, argues that play is not optional.
Like sleep, or food, or basic hygiene, he says it is fundamental to our survival. When we make room for it, we don’t just feel better – we function better, in every other area of life.
Somewhere along the way, adulthood recoded play as unproductive, even wasteful. “We defined adulthood through productivity, restraint, optimisation, and emotional control,” Jennifer explains.
“And that model is breaking down.” Spontaneity, the thing that makes play actually feel like play, has been quietly engineered out.
It is no coincidence that this shift arrives now. “Gen Z reports unprecedented early-life stress, financial insecurity, and constant connectivity that blurs work from rest,” Jennifer says.
Add a pandemic, years of burnout, and a generation that has grown up scrolling through other people’s curated lives, and you have the perfect conditions for the return of something messier, louder, and altogether less optimised.
Screens and AI can simulate almost everything. You can scroll through live streams of communities gathering online, watch competition and shared laughter play out in real time, and still feel nothing.
Because what they cannot replicate is the unpredictability of being in a room full of people. No filters, no curation, no delete button when something doesn’t come out right the first time.
What these venues are selling is not a game. It is permission to exist without editing yourself. And that craving has a very specific shape. In most adult contexts, being silly, clumsy, or visibly bad at something carries a social cost.
But in spaces designed specifically for play, that cost is suspended. There is no moral judgment. Play is not just allowed, it is mandatory. Feeling foolish is a given. When an adult walks into one of these spaces, they stop being an adult.
“The social rule is made explicit the moment you walk in: everyone here is about to look ridiculous, and that’s the point. Embarrassment gets collectively suspended rather than individually managed,” Jennifer says.
Maybe what these venues are really doing is giving back something we were taught no longer belonged to us. Not lost suddenly, but taken gradually, replaced, piece by piece, with tasks, commitments, and the performance of having it all together.
Jennifer puts it most plainly: the minigolf, the ball pit, and the arcade bar are not symptoms of nostalgia for a long-gone childhood. They are symptoms of something more urgent. “The dissatisfaction behind it – the craving for more raw, messy humanity – isn’t going anywhere.” We are done waiting for permission. We are claiming it back ourselves.
Watching the group I was with that evening, I noticed something odd. Strangers found their rhythm faster than they should have. Someone laughed at someone else’s mistake, someone reached over to help, someone quietly tried to cheat their way to an extra point, and just like that, the distance that would have kept them apart in almost any other room was gone.
The barriers between us, it turns out, are thinner than we pretend. They just need the right conditions to fall. According to writer Johann Hari, authentic connection is built through what he calls “valuable connection”: moments of vulnerability, shared purpose, or emotional openness that allow people to relate to one another beyond surface-level interaction.
Competitive socialising creates exactly that kind of dynamic. A shared goal, even something as small as getting a golf ball through a plastic maze, becomes enough to collapse the distance between strangers.
But those conditions come at a price. These venues are not cheap, and the freedom they offer, to be loud, clumsy, and unfiltered, is available mainly to those who can afford the entry fee.
If play is as fundamental as Brown argues, as necessary as sleep or food, then it should not be a premium experience. And there is something else worth sitting with: when the night ends, does the spell?
The group disperses, the laughter fades, and we put the adult back on like a coat we never chose. Whether we are genuinely reclaiming something or simply renting it by the hour is a question these venues cannot answer for us.
We may not know how long these venues will ride the wave, or how they will evolve their offer. According to National Geographic, more than a third of UK nightclubs have shut down. Themed bars, meanwhile, have risen by nearly 195% in a year.
What is dying is one kind of night out. What is growing is another — one that seeks something more meaningful, and is not afraid to be a little silly in the process.
But the shift runs deeper than a change in how we spend our Saturday nights. What we are witnessing is a collective awakening to something that should never have been negotiable: that play is not a childish indulgence but a necessary part of a functioning life.
“People aren’t regressing into childhood; they are rejecting a version of adulthood defined by former generations,” Jennifer says. One built on restraint, productivity, and the suppression of anything that couldn’t be justified by its output. Younger generations are not refusing to grow up. They are refusing to grow up the way they were told to.
That cheer, the one for a ball through a plastic wall, seemed like nothing. But it was something. A moment of lightness with nothing to perform and no one to impress.
Yes, we were at a minigolf club. Yes, we were competing against each other. But that collective cheer brought every wall down between us, and for a moment, at least, we were all on the same side.
All images by Valentina Musto.