China youth escape reality in ‘Whodunnit?’ role-playing boom
- After a pause caused by the coronavirus pandemic, young people are returning to live-action mystery games in droves
- Concerns raised about the emphasis on murder and violence but many say the break from smartphones is welcome
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A scream echoes from behind a black door, while inside a young woman cowers as she hides from an attacker. But Zeng Tian is not in real danger – this is an elaborate role-playing game.
The 26-year-old and her seven friends are spending their afternoon locked away in a Shanghai basement to take part in murder mystery game “The Haunted Mansion”.
“Every time I join a new play and read the script, I get to live a new life,” says Zeng, who is unemployed but hopes to work in the live action role-play (LARP) industry.
“I can spend his or her entire life within four hours and have a taste of their love and hatred,” she added, wearing a frilly hooded cloak, part-European medieval, part-Red Riding Hood.
The friends sometimes use their mobile phones to help them with clues but they are mainly reading from scripts and debating who could be the killer on the loose. Prices for the experience vary around the country, but in Shanghai players pay from about 300 to 800 yuan (US$45-$120) each to take part.
The live action murder mystery market appears to have captured the imagination of China’s urban youth before the Covid-19 pandemic emerged this year. Online shopping platform Meituan-Dianping estimated the industry was worth more than 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion) in 2019 – double the previous year’s figure.
There are no official figures for 2020 but, as virus restrictions ease, young people are returning to these fantasy games, experts say.
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State media has in recent months run a series of stories about the popularity of role-playing. A report on China National Radio last month voiced fears that too many of the scripts relied on murders, violent plots and sexual content, but others see the games as a way to get young people off their smartphones and back interacting with each other in real life.
State news agency Xinhua quoted Yuan Hang, an owner of a LARP game studio in Luoyang, a city in the central Chinese province of Henan, in a report on the trend: “This type of game, bringing people back to real life from cyberspace, meets the need of young people to have offline social contact and face-to-face communication.”
Zhao Qingsong, 25, who works in e-commerce, agrees. “Nowadays people tend to talk to each other on smartphones. But I feel something is missing during that communication compared to the old days when we could sit together and talk face to face. This gathering really makes me feel no longer lonely.”
