‘Death game’ operator ponders own demise
For Xinglai, the operator of the first 4-D “death experience” game in Shanghai, to be, or not to be, is no longer the question.
As it celebrates its second anniversary on Tomb Sweeping Day, which falls on Thursday, it will also begin the one-year countdown to its own demise.
Xinglai, which means “wake up” in Chinese, occupies an area of just under 260 square meters in Shanghai’s Huangpu district, and has been designed to make people think seriously about life and death.
It does so via three and a half hours of psychological games in a darkened room, in which 12 people discuss, debate and vote. At the end of each round, the player that receives the most votes enters the “door of impermanence” and walks along the “way of death” to arrive at a simulated incinerator, before returning to zero and waking up reborn.
One of its founders, Huang Weiping, said the unprofitable project is closing for two reasons. It is running out of money but also wants to make a statement about its own mortality.
The project opened in 2016 and was a hit in the first three months, welcoming 24 visitors a day, meaning it was operating at full capacity.
It has since received about 4,500 visitors, but its co-founders have decided it is unsustainable despite positive feedback and its 444 yuan ($70) admission fee, deliberately chosen because it sounds like the word “death” in Chinese.
In the past two years, the project has drained all the 4 million yuan invested by its three founders as well as 400,000 yuan raised from crowdfunding. But Huang, 48, and his partners still regard it as a success and say making the project available for another year will let more people try it.
“Memorial ceremonies nowadays are formalistic and short,” he said. “Xinglai wants to be a place for people to place their sorrow when they have nowhere else to put it.”
The idea for the project came to Huang in 2012, four years after a life-changing experience in Sichuan province. He had been working as a volunteer offering psychological assistance to survivors of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, which killed more than 60,000 people, when he realized that although death is a topic most people try to avoid in daily life, it is one that everybody will have to face some day.
“We did a free life-education session in a public space by placing a coffin on the ground and welcoming people to try it out,” said Huang, who established China’s first nonprofit hospice care NGO in his hometown of Shanghai in 2008.
A third of people tried to avoid the coffin and less than one-fifth opted to lie in it, mostly for laughs, he recalled.
“Toward death, people usually have some romantic or heroic notion,” Huang said. “The truth is that death exists. If people don’t have the right attitude toward it, they will panic when it arrives.”
He said the experience at Xinglai is similar to performance art, with people immersing themselves in the topic and acting out death and rebirth. “Although the project will come to an end in a year, we’re trying to bring it back to life by launching a stage play based on the experiences and stories of its 4,500 visitors,” he said.