Culture ministry opens media literacy week in Seoul with escape rooms and a play

The culture ministry said Thursday it will hold a three-week festival on media literacy from Oct. 23 to Nov. 16, built around giving ordinary citizens a chance to feel for themselves how the same facts look different depending on where you stand.

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism is running the 2026 Media Literacy Week, or ME:LI WEEK, together with the Korea Press Foundation. Organizers say the program is designed less as a lecture series than as something people do: escape rooms, a theater premiere and an exhibition where visitors rather than speakers do the work.

The centerpiece in Seoul's Seongsu district is a new exhibition, "But Seriously, What If," which opens Oct. 24 and runs through Nov. 8 at a pop-up space on Seongsui-ro 18-gil. Visitors spend a day in 2046, a year in which artificial intelligence has settled deeply into daily life, and are meant to come away feeling that an AI's judgment, too, is just one way of seeing things.

In the same building, the escape game "Jump X Cut" 2.0 starts participants from a single news item and has them track clues through the case, testing how their view of the information they accepted at the outset shifts as they go. At the Wooran Foundation's Wooran 2 building nearby, the play "Jump X Cut" will have its premiere, running Nov. 7-15. Six characters give conflicting accounts and memories of one incident, and the audience is asked how they take in what someone else tells them.

A parallel program looks at the future of media and journalism. A national media education conference opens the week on Oct. 23 at the Korea Press Center under the theme of finding a path for media education for the AI-native generation. The ME:LI Awards on Nov. 14 at the Cube Convention Center will honor winners of the seventh News Reading News Diary contest and the eighth Youth Checkathon. The festival closes Nov. 16 at the Korea Press Center with the foundation's KPF Journalism Conference, billed as a question about journalism's next ten years.

All programs are open free to any member of the public aged 12 or older. To discourage no-shows, the escape game takes a 5,000 won deposit and the play 10,000 won ($8), both refunded in full after participation. Booking details and schedules are on the event's official website, www.meliweek.com.

"This ME:LI WEEK will be a good opportunity to build the ability to look at information from a variety of perspectives and accept it critically in the age of artificial intelligence," Culture Minister Choe Hwi-young said.