Do New Regulations Spell Death for China’s “Murder Game” Sector?
Holding a booklet in hand, Baishi sits at a table, shedding tears of sorrow as she discovered the truth about herself: She wasn’t an orphan at all, but rather a daughter of a poor rural family who ran away from home after being unfairly accused of theft at school and repeatedly fighting with her parents. Oh, and she had leukemia.
Don’t worry, Baishi isn’t going to die—when the lights come back on at the end of the night, Baishi, who asked TWOC not to use her real name, melts back into her regular identity: a 26-year-old resident of Beijing and a fan of jubensha (剧本杀), literally “scripted kill,” a type of role-playing game with over 9 million players in China. On this night, Baishi and six friends have spent about four hours locked away in a Beijing mall acting out Bunnies Are Good, a script about six young leukemia patients and a father who lost his daughter to cancer.
Based on Clue, a classic board game developed in 1943, jubensha also takes inspirations from Murder Mystery, a live action role-playing (LARP) game from the 1980s, in which one player is secretly assigned the role of a murderer and the guests must figure out the identity of the killer by following a script and looking at clues.
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