In 2013, a ‘murder mystery game’, commonly known as Death Wears White, was translated and introduced from the UK, making it the first scripted murder game available to domestic players at the time. But it wasn’t until 2016 that the game was brought to the public’s attention by the hit variety show “Star Detective”. In the tabletop era, scripted kill was strictly a game for deduction enthusiasts, with the key to the game being the players’ “reeling in the culprit” (i.e. the real culprit) according to the timeline of their respective characters. But as murder mystery games have evolved from a traditional tabletop game to an offline experience similar to escape rooms, the game has evolved into a diverse storyline.
The player is immersed in the game with the plot and the characters. But usually, we think of immersive gaming as an escape from reality. But is escapism necessarily negative? Can escapism also be a purposeful escape, a considered and positive escape?
Soul of the game
The Dutch scholar Johan Heazinha has spoken in his book The Man of Play about how one of the most important characteristics of play is its isolation from the space of ordinary life. An enclosed space, whether physical or conceptual, is marked out and circled from the everyday environment. In this space, games are held and rules pass.
Murder mystery game succeeds in shaping such a perfect space for play. During these five hours, 14 NPCs and six players work together to interpret the script, and with the alternating scenes of sadness and happiness, the “life is like a play, it’s all about acting” feature of Script Kill is brought into full play, and players are able to experience all the flavours of life and escape the monotony of everyday life.
The performance is not influenced by a single factor such as the script, but rather by the player’s “secondary creation” during the game interaction. Thus, the player’s psychological grasp of the scripted characters, the logical reasoning of the story, and even the interaction with the other players, the host and the non-player characters, all have a direct impact on the game experience. It succeeds, as Heczinha describes the connotations of classic games, in “allowing the innate human need for rhythm, harmony, substitution, change, opposition, climax and so on to unfold in its full richness”.
The script writer and the facilitator are recognised as the soul of the game. The scriptwriter creates the script’s worldview, characterisation and story logic. The facilitator, on the other hand, needs to take control of the situation and guide the characters according to the actual situation in each scene, based on the players’ respective personalities, involvement and different understanding of the characters.
Lee Giggles is the author of a popular emotion book from last year, The Sound of Voices. Compared to the live-action search and interpretation scripts that are now on the market to kill, she says outright that her favourite is still the tabletop book, “Adding scene setting or NPC interaction is because the text of some scripts doesn’t bring you a good experience and requires external forces to make up for it in order for the player to integrate. But some of the books can make you believe that the character is yourself and that you can actually cry if he dies”.
The Voice is an old-fashioned play about delicate emotions, and when you search its reviews online, the general feedback from players is basically that it’s “too good to cry”. “Good crying” seems to be the reason why many people love a play. When we finished the game, the player playing as Yun Qi praised the group, “It was really great as my eyes hurt from crying.”
Emotional catharsis seems to be one of the reasons why many players indulge in the game. Tang Qin, editor-in-chief of the content division of Xiaohei Tan (the leading scripted killing service platform in China), told the journalist that the trend of scripted killing in the past two years has mainly shifted from a single hardcore reasoning to a multi-dimensional and comprehensive experience, from hardcore reasoning to an immersive experience, with more emphasis on users’ empathy and resonance. So this has led to the emotion book being particularly hot in the last two years, as it is more likely to resonate with users. Stanislavski has suggested that the process of transferring one’s emotions to bring out the best in a character is called ’empathy’. In contemporary psychoanalysis, empathy is the process by which an actor releases his or her own emotions, or the accumulation of emotions about the past, into the character he or she is playing, thus achieving an emotional catharsis.
Game researcher Hugh Bowen has found that role-playing games are the most emotionally stimulating genre because role-playing and first-person games rely most heavily on narrative structure, and narrative is one of the world’s oldest techniques for conveying emotion. In the world of scripted kills, everyone needs to take on the role of a character and watch the story from a first perspective, understanding the motivation behind every choice they make. The playwright and facilitator, as an omniscient God, then needs to rationalise these motivations during the course of the game.
In the world of the game, the DM uses his imagination to complete an important secondary creation of the script. Despite being virtual, it is still a different life that many players will only live once. According to Mo Zexi, murder mystery game has something in common with theatre performances, “It’s like a play where you can interact with the guests, where the play ends straight away and you can’t start over. Then it must be ensured that the effect is the best this time”. This challenges the DM and NPC’s ability to react on the spot, often needing to respond to unexpected audience interactions or some unexpected situations that fit the character and the plot.
David Ewalt, in Dice and Men: A History of Dungeons and Dragons, explains the appeal of such games. He points out that people often have an enduring fantasy in their lives, yet watching movies or playing video games does not allow them to actually experience and experience these fantasies, but realistic role-playing games offer players a way to enter these worlds and create a more enduring experience and more empathy.
Back to offline social
Hunt A Killer is a “murder mystery” game that has been a huge success over the past two years. Its founder, Ryan Hogan, told Fox Business that at this particular point in 2020, people are looking for a way to put down their devices and really connect with the people around them on a meaningful, deeper level. Traditional tabletop games, while also fun, lack the storytelling element, “and what we’re doing is creating a new experience where people can sit around a table, solve challenges and get excited about it.
For a growing number of players, scripted kills are both a form of entertainment and a means of social interaction. The extraordinarily long playtime of the game runs counter to the fragmented virtual social environment. Some figures however bear witness to the great demand for offline socialising and how the industry has been able to expand rapidly over the past few years.
In 2019, the number of scripted kill entity shops nationwide increased from 2,400 in 2018 to 12,000; by the end of 2020, the number of scripted kill entity shops had reached 30,000, a growth rate of 150%. According to the 2021 Physical Scriptkill Consumption Insight Report released by Meituan, over 70% of players are under the age of 30, with over 40% of them playing more than once a week.
While the reasons for being drawn to the game may vary, such as to satisfy a desire to reason, perform or take pictures, a new social model has been quietly formed as players sit face to face, put down their phones and engage in close interaction over hours of gaming. If players can’t find enough people they know to form a game, they go to the shop and play with strangers. When returning from gaming to reality, many players still manage to connect with each other.
For the game to become a popular entertainment activity, there are still two problems: firstly, the barrier to entry is high, players need to be able to be willing to spend 4 to 5 hours quietly reading scripts and concentrating on playing along with everyone else; secondly, in terms of content creation, the experience diminishes when players are able to find that there are still routines to follow after trying 50 to 80 scripts.
Perhaps, as the philosopher Bernard Sutz put it: “It is games that give us something to do when there is nothing else to do. We therefore call games ‘pastimes’ and see them as trivial fillers for the gaps in our lives. But they are so much more important than that. They are a clue to the future. For now, their careful cultivation may be our only salvation.” “It remains to be seen whether “murder mystery” games are a passing fad or whether they will grow into such a game worthy of “serious nurturing”.