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‘Script-killing’ craze: the murder role-playing game young people in China are flocking to as escape from everyday life
- ‘It was a complicated feeling yet they portrayed it vividly, and I was touched’
- There are two types of script-killing; a tabletop game where people read scripts and solve mysteries, and one that combines role-playing and escape rooms
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On one Saturday afternoon, Shenzhen resident Liu Jie encountered a murderer in a green military uniform. He didn’t see the body itself, but in the dim lighting, he saw the bags it came in.
Three hours later, he had completely shifted his view of the murderer. Through a series of puzzles he and his teammates solved, he discovered the murderer had a backstory. He wanted to find a magic spell that could revive the dead, in order to save his older sister, who had raised him. “It was a complicated feeling yet they portrayed it vividly, and I was touched,” Liu said.
Liu had “paid 100 yuan (US$15.5) for a piece of a life”, a popular way to describe the fashionable Chinese game known as “script-killing”. The game sometimes played on a tabletop, and sometimes involves role-playing and escape rooms, has become increasingly popular in recent years.
In one much-discussed case, one of the confirmed Covid-19 cases in the northeastern city of Harbin last month had played a script-killing game at a local shop for three days in a row, public epidemiological investigation records show.
The main reason the game attracts young people so much is that it offers a first-hand experience of a different life.
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