Cultural venues leap on whodunit wagon

As the number of murder mystery game players flocking to museums for fun rises, the role-playing sector may find itself at a turning point.

Wu Yusheng remembers visiting the Nanjing Tangshan National Geological Park Museum in Jiangsu province in November 2021, not just to tour the museum, but also to participate in a special role-playing murder mystery game, or jubensha, called Missing Password.

She was one of 40 players, mostly university students, who had been divided into groups of four and tasked with unmasking the perpetrator of a murder set in a fictional primitive society thousands of years ago. The first group to find the killer was the winner.

"What impressed me most while playing the game was the sense of immersion," Wu says. "The clues in other murder mystery games are usually presented in the form of text. This game was different. While I searched for clues on my own, the game was so immersive that I even forgot to take photos."

When murder mystery games meet museums, the journey of knowledge can be full of fun.

These jubensha (literally "script murders") are a form of role-playing game in which the players unmask criminals by collecting information and cracking the case, much like actual detectives. Museums are taking advantage of the trend by using their valuable collection of relics and the stories behind them to attract more visitors.

Since 2019, dozens of cities, including Shanghai, Luoyang in Henan province, Changsha in Hunan province, Beijing and Chongqing, have launched their own museum murder mystery programs based on their collections.

Apart from physically taking place inside a museum, the scripts of these role-playing murder mysteries are based on the museum's area of interest.