A room with a clue
Players immersed in sleuthing scenarios make friends and come together to crack a mystery,
Imagine someone told you that they had seen you last night after midnight, but you remembered clearly that you went to bed before 10 pm. You are shocked, scared, and helpless, eager to know what happened. Your diary might provide a clue, or photographs might help you understand what’s going on. After digging and digging, an unexpected idea comes to you: Due to maltreatment during childhood, you suffer from schizophrenia. “Dumbstruck would be an understatement,” says Chen Xi, a 26-year-old woman to whom this unsettling experience happened.
Now you might think that Chen may need time to digest this and calm down, but she is not worried because this all took place in a location-based detective game, or juben
sha, in Chinese.
The deductive game, literally meaning “scripts of murder”, is based on different scenarios, with each player choosing a role to play and receiving a specific script that tells the story from a particular angle before the game. Once the game begins, players wear costumes suitable for their roles and together find clues that will explain the story, while the designated murderer aims to mislead and conceal his or her identity.
If the majority wins, they will draw a picture of the whole story. Otherwise, the murderer remains undetected.
“Good acting and communication skills are necessary for the game, and logic skills are a plus,” says Chen, who, working in real life in the digital game industry in Shanghai, plays such games with colleagues once every two weeks.
“The location-based detective game is time-consuming. You have to read scripts, change clothes and play the game. It usually takes a whole afternoon to play out a story,” Chen says.
“However, it is worthwhile since I not only experience the lives of other people, but also fully communicate with friends face-to-face.”
Like many people who moved to megacities for work, Chen had few friends in Shanghai when she first came to this city last year. She made her first batch of friends while playing the game with colleagues and got the chance to know them better.
“For instance, I never thought
that one of my most bulky and tall male colleagues had nyctophobia — an extreme fear of the dark — until we were stuck in a pitch-black room and he couldn’t stop trembling. I always thought that happened to children but not to a man 1.8 meters tall,” recalls Chen, adding that, seeing their teammate in distress, other team members volunteered to shoulder more assignments, leaving time for him to relax and calm his nerves, until, together, they successfully completed the task.
Most scripts have four to seven roles. Sometimes Chen’s colleagues will ask their friends to join in, giving her opportunities to meet more people other than her colleagues.
“I learned the importance of team spirit while playing the games together with friends,” Chen says.
The physical touch
Mango TV launched the show
Who’s the Murderer, on March 27, 2016, inviting Chinese hosts He Jiong and Sa Beining and other celebrities to play the locationbased detective game. The game has become increasingly popular. Mango TV has produced four seasons of the show, with the most recent airing in October.
Thanks to the popularity of the show among young people, similar location-based detective games have seen a boom in China.
Hao Shaojie, 27, works in Hong Kong and was among the first to play the game.
From Shenyang, Northeast China’s Liaoning province, Hao went to work in Hong Kong in 2015. Far away from home, everything seemed different.
“As a newcomer, the first thing I needed to do was to build my social network, and in the beginning, I chose to play board games with friends,” recalls Hao.
Things changed in the summer of 2016. After their first experience of playing the detective game in Shenzhen, Hao and his friends quickly became fans.
“Compared with board games, during which people only sit and talk, the location-based game provides us with more chances to interact with one another,” says Hao.
“Finding clues in real locations makes the game more social and interesting.”
He adds that the game brings together people from markedly different industries, who perhaps wouldn’t have much to talk about otherwise.
“Each story has its own background and provides us with specific topics to discuss. Sometimes our talks can be extended to dinner after a whole afternoon’s play,” says Hao.
As far as Hao and his friends know, there’s no physical venues for such location-based detective games in Hong Kong, so these fans regularly travel to locations in Shenzhen just to play the detective games.
Sometimes they even buy stories online, make simple scenes, set up props by themselves and buy costumes in order to play at their homes in Hong Kong.
However, Hao recently encountered a problem.
Unlike board games that can be played over and over again, the location-based detective game can be played only once for each player, because people will know the outcome after playing, and the number of top-class stories created and available in the market is limited.
As a player with three years’ experience, Hao says it is increasingly difficult to find the best games to play.
“I have begun to keep the good stories, rather than play them the moment I find them,” he says.
An experienced player, Hao says he has also become pickier about the people with whom he plays.
“If one player has poor communication skills or logical reasoning, it brings everyone’s experience down,” he explains.
A trend riding high
With China’s reform and openingup, people are exposed to more and more types of leisure and entertainment as well as social choices. At the end of the last century, karaoke bars and dance halls were the most popular places for young people to gather, while with the introduction of the internet, so-called wangba, or internet bars, became the next big thing, especially for young men who love playing computer games.
And this recent boom in locationbased entertainment is a trend, not just in first-tier cities, but in many inland cities like Changsha and Chongqing, according to Mi Shouchun, secretary-general of China Real Games Association under the China Culture and Entertainment Industry Association. There are nearly half a million Chinese who love to play such games.
“We estimate there are about 400,000 enthusiasts who play such location-based detective games very often around China,” Mi says.
“These players post photos of the game on social media platforms such as WeChat and Sina Weibo, which in turn attracts more players.”
Mi attributes the popularity of location-based entertainment to the personalized character of today’s young people, saying that compared with older generations who appreciate one person’s performance such as singing in karaoke, these young people prefer to fully interact with one another and express their opinions rather than just do a one-person show and otherwise be an audience member once offstage.
Increased incomes also help explain the trend. The locationbased game needs more time, space, as well as money to build, with the average cost per player demanding around 200 yuan ($30) — triple the price of karaoke.
Lu Yin, co-founder of Subo, a location-based entertainment company, got into the business in 2017. He also sees the location-based detective games as a growing industry.
According to reviews on Dazhong Dianping, a popular Chinese shop review website, Subo is among the most popular location-based entertainment venues in Beijing.
About 8,500 people bought tickets from Dazhong Dianping to play detective games at Subo, located in Chaoyangmen, Beijing, since July. Lu says that tickets for Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays are always hard to purchase. Sometimes people have to book weekend playing slots days in advance.
“Though the digital world develops quickly, I believe offline socializing is always necessary, and people’s need for face-to-face fun and interaction will definitely increase,” says Lu.
Usually a location-based game needs a room of at least 50 square meters to build a scene. In Subo, which sprawls across 463 square meters, there are three locationbased rooms for different scenarios.
Lu says that in order to provide veteran players with more choices, his team has obtained or created hundreds of scenarios, but to ensure the quality of each story, they still need more time to adapt the new scenarios to fit the location.
They are also finding ways to make individual games suitable to be played for multiple times by the same team of players.
However, players may have other opinions.
Hao says that he would always choose a new game rather than squander a whole afternoon and hundreds of yuan on an old scenario he has played before, even with some variation.
“I come for new experiences, so why should I press the replay button?” Hao asks.