Cultural venues leap on whodunit wagon

He believes that the continued trend toward role-playing games in museums is widely recognized but says that the degree to which the market and consumers welcome these games has yet to be explored, and adds that the answer to this question will be decisive to the further development of the sector.

"If we can cultivate a niche market for jubensha in museums, create a regular group of players, and commercialize operations, then considering that there are thousands of museums in the country, this should be a very promising market," he explains.

Tours for parents and children, night visits to museums, even spending the night in museums, all these recent innovations are efforts to tap the fun-seeking museumgoer market, and to test the waters of market preferences.

"For museums, this is a challenging opportunity. They should not only highlight the attraction of their exhibits and create their own signature intellectual property, or IP, based on their area of expertise, but they should also have a high ability of operation, as well as creating suitable storylines," says Zhang.

Yuan Yilang, who also played Awakened Brewmaster, came away with a relatively poor impression of the experience because of broken devices and annoying teammates. "I would gladly pay for the immersive experience of playing a murder mystery game in a museum, but there's still a lot to improve upon," she says. "Museums need to do more customer research to help improve visitor satisfaction."

For her part, Wu expects better options, such as more time to solve the case, and a reduction in the number of players for each game.

"I will be more conscious about choosing well-set and thematic scripts for museum murder mystery games," she says. "Interesting themes, logical plots, and a high degree of interactivity are the three features that I prefer the most."

Guo Wenqing contributed to this story.