(Quintin exhales loudly) - This is my favourite video that I've done for People Make Games. This video is gonna
teach you about Jubensha, a brand new type of gaming
coming out of China, that in the last few years, has taken an entire generation by storm. Translated as "script
murder", it shares some DNA with Murder Mystery Dinner Parties, but don't let that put you off. It's like pointing out
that Hidetaka Miyazaki shares some DNA with a crab. It's true, but unhelpful. In this video, I'm gonna e
xplain
where Jubensha came from, how you play, why China's Gen Z
got completely hooked on it before flying out to Singapore where people are working the hardest to translate these games into English to conduct interviews with shop owners, game masters, and super fans. And finally, following a bit
of luck and a lot of effort, I'm gonna talk you through my experience actually playing one of these
games in the English language. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. First, let's talk about what
thes
e games actually are. So like Murder Mystery Dinner Parties, Jubensha do see a bunch
of people sat around, role-playing as characters who
are trying to solve a murder when one of them is usually the killer trying to escape the very investigation that they're participating in. But in China, that basic foundation has today exploded outwards in
a new frontier of game design that is pushing the envelope of deduction, of role-playing, of storytelling, and a lot of the demand for which is being led by
young women. And this is not some niche
thing, this is a sensation. According to one report referenced by the South
China Morning Post, there were an estimated
30,000 Jubensha shops across China by 2021. To give you a point of comparison, according to an industry report, the number of "Escape
Rooms" in the United States peaked in 2019 with around 2,350. It's not comparable at all. But even these statistics don't do the size of the scene justice because today there are
also apps and boxed produc
ts that let you play Jubensha at home, as well as Jubensha cruises,
Jubensha hotel experiences, even entire villages
with hundreds of actors pottering around where you
can experience Jubensha like a cross between game
design and immersive theatre. In fact, today for many
fans, Jubensha has evolved way beyond even being about a murder. Popular genres of Jubensha
now include horror games, tear-jerking romances, sci-fi, fantasy, and mechanism Jubensha,
which bring in elements of board games and gam
e shows. It is wild to me that in the West, we simply haven't heard of what might be the most exciting and innovative thing happening in game design today. Because let me tell you, these games, they're just something else. So let's begin with the unexpected story of how Jubensha was born. Part of Jubensha's meteoric
rise can actually be traced back to a French murder mystery board game called "Death Wears White" by excellent designer, Guillaume Montiage published around 2001. In this game, a who
pping nine players spend about four to five hours painstakingly solving
a murder in a hospital, going over all this evidence
and everyone's alibis to try and work out which of you did it. Now, I've worked as a
professional board game journalist for 12 years, and I've
never heard of this game. So clearly, in the English language world, it didn't make much of an impact. But 12 years later, this game, this seed gets translated into Mandarin
where it's a cult hit. In 2016, following on from such pop
ular Chinese reality shows as
"Dinner Party Seduction", a show where celebrities play werewolf, Chinese production company, Mango TV, buys the rights to the Korean
game show, "Crime Scene", restyling it in China as "Who's The Murderer?" A reality show that riffs on the format created by the board
game, "Death Wears White". In the show, a cast of celebrities
are assigned characters and proceed to spend a whole season, again, going over everyone's alibis and searching for evidence
to try and work
out who of them did it, and
this show is a dynamite hit. Today, they're working
on the ninth season, and this show starts off
more Chinese game designers creating more games in this format. And eventually, the most
popular way to experience it became Jubensha shops, where
today you and your friends show up at one of the country's
tens of thousands of shops, and a game master runs one of the venues' dozens of boxed scripts for you. It's sort of like you're
paying a Western game master to run one
session of a tabletop
role playing game for you, except in Jubensha, the GM
fades into the background pretty quick because they
just want you to feel that you're living out "Glass Onion". - You vainglorious buffoon. - Okay, that's the history. Let's get into how you play. So you and your friends enter a room, and the GM also comes in
with the game materials. Some shops will also give you
on theme costumes to wear, or have the game take place in a set that's a fully immersive crime
scene for you
to explore. And the game starts by giving everyone what's called a script, but
is more like a booklet explaining who your character is, and what they know when the game begins. This is the big deviation from
Western murder mystery games, which might give you like
a postcard of information to read about your character
and what they know. In Jubensha, strap in, sucker. You're reading for 15 minutes at minimum, but for the more hardcore games, you might all be reading
different little booklets for
over an hour. And you're doing all of this reading because it's prepping you
for an epic experience. A simple Jubensha might
finish in three hours, but for players who get the bug, there are Jubensha that
last for six hours, seven hours, even multiple days. But this game is just
a conversation, right? How do you sustain a
conversation for seven hours? Well, first off, different
characters in the script all know different stuff, but also have different
objectives, different secrets, different sec
ret objectives. So Jubensha is mostly powered by a lot of super fun and very coy in-character sharing of details
and asking of questions. Then if you're on a set, you might search the room
you're in, or for boxed games, the GM deals out evidence cards of things the characters find. This leads to a protracted but totally delicious phase of the game where players slap down
evidence they found at just the right moment
to cause maximum discomfort for the player you just
caught out telling a big fib.
Then there might be a mini
game that occurs in the story, there might be another round
of scripts for you to read, another round of evidence cards, or sub mysteries, or ethical dilemmas the players have to agree
on before they proceed. And since each of these
phases last about 45 minutes, time flies by as you all peel back layer after layer of this mystery. With players earning and
spending trust with one another to further their own
goals before, as a group, you vote on who you think did it. I
f you're right, the murderer is caught, but if you're wrong, they win. And finally, the GM comes
out and slowly reveals what actually happened in this thing you've been bickering about for hours as if they were drizzling honey. You see, that game
master, they're only here to keep the train on the rails. They set the moods, they answer questions, they watch the clock, but if
the game's going smoothly, they basically disappear. Or here's another way to think about it. You know how when you do an e
scape room, you and your friends all show up and then face away from each other to solve like two dozen puzzles
that are all on the walls? Jubensha is similar, but the
puzzles are all contained in the other players sat opposite you. So rather than entering a room and then facing away from one another in the manner of anxious
people riding an elevator, Jubensha is all about facing inwards and looking your friends in the eye, and trying to figure out who's lying. It's all of you. You're all probab
ly lying,
but why are you lying? You're probably gonna lie about that too. One final interesting thing
about the structure of Jubensha, almost all of them are designed
for exactly six players. Three men and three women, and we're gonna talk more
about the role of gender in this hobby later in this video. But also, in the Jubensha scene, people will show up with
just one or two friends, or even alone, and then play
these games with strangers. And a huge reason for
Jubensha's popularity is that mo
re than any kinda
game that we have in the West, it is a perfect way to make
friends and meet people. Because everybody's playing
a character in a story, everyone gets to immediately act pretty familiar with one another. If we're playing a game together, I might not know who you are as a person, but if we're role-playing siblings, then we're immediately gonna act close and teasing and judgmental. And second, because Jubensha
is all about secrets, and who to trust, and
what you share with whom, t
he game almost immediately sees players pulling one another aside to share important information with. Think of it this way. Usually, when you're meeting new people, the most stressful thing is not knowing what you're gonna talk about. With Jubensha, you have no choice but to talk about this one
specific exciting thing for hours and hours and hours. It would be weirder if you
didn't, after the game, go and get tea or food or something. So yeah, today it is hard to overstate how beloved Jubensha
is to a
generation of Chinese gamers. An expression I heard twice
when researching this story is that two generations ago, the Chinese hobby of choice was karaoke. Today, it's Jubensha. The sadly now finished
Chinese culture substack Chaoyang Trap, said that
a line they often see in Chinese Tinder profiles
is "No hookups; yes, Jubensha". And referenced a report that said Jubensha was the third
biggest offline entertainment after movies and sports. In 2021, Chinese video game
mega publisher, Tenc
ent, got in on the action
by writing and filming a special Jubensha play through with the voice actors
of their flagship game, "Honour Of Kings". And last year, Estee Lauder was
one of several luxury brands to launch a Jubensha themed product that combined skincare with a game, and like I teased earlier,
all over the country there are these epic
Jubensha installations. What you're looking at now is an advert for
Qingtianjian: Peace in Chang'an The national winner at China's latest experiential g
ame awards,
in the cultural category. And it is a two day,
one night Jubensha set during the Tang Dynasty that takes place in a whole *** town with dozens of actors. It's like immersive theatre where you're also the protagonist, but you don't have to learn any lines 'cause you just say whatever you want. But of course, People Make Games can only learn so much about Jubensha reading about it online. So thanks to the People
Make Games patrons, I was able to hop on a plane to do some boots on the g
round reporting. We made it. We made it, baby. Just two short eight hour flights, and here I am in Singapore. A land where it's just hot as (beep). Seriously, this humidity,
I was not ready for it. I don't have the clothes for it. Didn't Google the weather
before I came here. That's okay, because what's
hotter than the weather? It's games... that I'm gonna look at. I came here because Singapore is a city with Jubensha shops that mostly
cater to Chinese students, but also, a lot of the people in
this city speak English as a first language. So plenty of folk are doing
the work of translating and marketing these games for a new English speaking audience. And almost immediately, I found out that one of my assumptions
about Jubensha was wrong. Researching this story, I
thought most Jubensha fans loved the experience of unpicking a mystery like a social puzzle. But what I found out is for
the people who get hooked, the best part is the role playing, and stepping into the shoes of someone tot
ally unlike yourself. - I mean, I think when
we started out playing more beginner games as well, we were used to the very clear idea that the point is to go there. One of you is a murderer, you have to figure out who it was, right? But as we kind of explored the genre, we found more interesting things
that games could do, right? So you go there not just wanting to have the intellectual exercise, but to enjoy the process of
discovery both as yourself, but as the character. You might realise that
you did something terrible without meaning to. You killed someone, but
oh, they were actually your long lost sister, or something extremely
melodramatic like that. Or if it's one of those cases where you know what you've done, but you don't know whether
you actually succeeded in killing them, then for you, the process of finding out who the murderer is also matters at that pure, you know, am I gonna get away with it? Or did I actually do it? Am I guilty or not? But even the game, the win
conditi
ons change for you. - [Quinns] How do you even
decide who you're going to play? - Well, firstly they'll ask, "Are there any real life
couples in this group?" And then they'll try to assign the books in a way that don't end
in break up, you know? So there's literally a big concern, especially in China where all these "Qínggǎn", or "emotional games" are whole separate genre by themselves. So there are groups of players
who will play Jubensha, not so much for the murder mysteries, but they have thi
s sort
of like emotional journey with their significant
other, or to meet people, which is actually a problem in China because there are like
players who just turn up to pick up chicks basically. So some of the games as well, they will ask you questions about say, what themes connect with you more, right? So you care more about romantic love, or even like patriotic love
'cause there's actually a sub-genre of patriotic games. They are very much often set
in like historical periods where, you know
, important
things happen for China. And at the end of it all you're like, oh, I'm so moved by this patriotic plot. People actually start crying. Yeah, and actually so a lot of Jubensha sells the emotional experience. Like, they're like,
oh, if you play this game you're gonna cry. The players are like, yes,
I'm gonna feel something. You know, something about urban alienation in there, I'm sure. - [Quinns] For many of the
people I was speaking to, cathartic group crying sort of felt like the gold
standard of these games, but when I stopped over at
Jubensha company, Criminal X, they were excited to show me
just how diverse the scene is, including a game about amateur rappers where players literally
have to write raps. And that game aside, I
was desperate to play everything else he showed me. - Okay, so this one, you know the tree, how you tell the age is. - [Quinns] Through the rings of the tree? - Yeah, the rings of the tree. Yeah, exactly. So it means the rings of the tree. That is a c
lassic. Some details, for example, in your story, person A is a chef, but in
my story he's a teacher. We won't find out without,
you know, discussing it. So at some point people will notice, okay, things doesn't match, and then slowly you'll
piece things together, and find out (beep). This is called "Hello". It's really a good one. So basically, there are
three couples within it. There's the parents, their
kid who also grown up, and also their friends. It's a complex story, actually. I can't spo
il too much, but each couple, they sacrifice for each
other, and, you know, the moment that you find out the truth, I cry with my girlfriend. We played together. Also, there's a murder case, but- - [Quinns] Also there's a murder, but that's not that important. - Yeah, it's not that important, no. Like, nobody really cares
who's the murderer is at the end of the game. - [Quinns] Wang also showed me a game about the Chinese process of
matchmaking to find a spouse, which was literally aimed at play
ers who were looking to find a spouse. So maybe it's time we talk about the role of gender in Jubensha. With most games being designed for exactly three male and three female players. - The thing about gender
is interesting, right? 'Cause obviously, the characters
have specified genders, and sometimes it's, especially
for the emotional games, they will encourage
you to play a character with a similar gender identity and so on, and there are also some cases
which are quite progressive in that you
do have, say,
like, queer storylines or sexual minorities, and it's often it can be played quite sensitively and not in some sort of sensational way. And being able to kind
of actually even do that in China's censorship environment,
I think is quite valuable. And to also encourage a sort of
imaginative empathy, right? The player starts with a script, someone who hasn't thought very much about the experience of
being a sexual minority, and then through the process
of playing through the game, an
d realising the struggles
that their character faces, you know, you could achieve
something there actually. - [Quinns] Jay would, however, stop before describing the
scene as progressive. - It is actually a lot of
juvenile games as well. Juvenile in terms of
the emotional maturity of how they treat the themes, right? And the industry itself as well, there's a lot of discussion
about games which just use like, sex, and gore, and
violence for shock value. There was actually a spate of cases where
the games just pile
on lots of themes of like, sexual assault, just like really twisted, and like gleefully sordid themes just for the shock value. So there is a problem in the industry. - [Quinns] Do they have trigger
warnings or safety tools, or anything like that? - No. Right. So that's the other thing as well, precisely because half of it is a mystery. There are no content warnings. You can sometimes get
quite unpleasant surprises. So there was one script I played where the character ostensi
bly is just like a male character, and then halfway through you realise that actually firstly
they were a female character in their past life or something
complicated like that, and then like it's the middle
of a rape scene, right? From a first person point of view. So like, I can imagine that's
very upsetting if you have, especially if it is a trigger for you. - Jay's warning would end
up being quite prophetic for where this video goes next. Okay, so this was going to
be the part of the video w
here we did a cool let's play of one of the few English
language Jubensha in existence. GMed by one of the Singaporean
people who wrote it, and it was gonna have these
cool YouTube celebrities you've definitely heard of, and it was gonna take
place in this cool room that we rented. And instead, we chose not to do that because at the last minute, we found out that the content of the
game we were about to play included not just murder,
but also sexual assault, which could have put
our guests or ou
rselves in a potentially complicated
or uncomfortable situation in which they were intentionally
or not role-playing a game on the internet in which they might hide or aid in hiding a sex crime. But we still have the room,
we still have the game, and we still have the GM. So instead, we've just
invited some friends of ours to come and play the game, and
we're still gonna explore it, we're still gonna explore those themes, we're still gonna embody those characters. We're just not going to do it i
n public on the internet forever. Now, in a moment, I am gonna
talk about what it was like to actually play a Jubensha, but wow, I was stunned to discover
that not only the game we had scheduled to play, but the other boxed English Jubensha that I got sent home with also had a female playable character who'd been sexually
assaulted in the script, and this is a big secret that
comes out during the game. It's part of the plot
that you are acting out and reacting to, and
in some Jubensha plots, the
character who sexually assaulted you might well be another of
the players at the table. That was a shock to me. I'm sure it is to you too. But in China, Jubensha's closest relatives aren't just games, but
the enormous industry of crime fiction, thrillers,
and mystery novels in which sexual assault
is often part of the plot and a motivating factor for characters. But when I was talking about
all of this to my friends who like crime fiction,
their response was like, "Well, obviously the
game shou
ld have that, especially when the
entire genre of Jubensha is so cavalier about using murder as a propulsive narrative device." And I do think it's
interesting that in the West, many of us wouldn't blink at
a game asking us to pretend to be someone who's committed a murder, but the idea of a game
asking us to pretend to be someone who's
committed a sexual assault is just beyond the pail. I think that speaks to
many people's discomfort living in a patriarchal society that prefers not to think abo
ut a problem that largely affects women. A society that does
produce games about PTSD, but PTSD that mostly affects men if you think about how
many games there are about the horror of war. The problematic element of Jubensha isn't the content at all. It's just the fact that Jubensha has currently no safety tools of any kind. That is quite the contrast with the tabletop RPG community
in the West, which has, in the last 10 years or so,
really embraced safety tools. And I think it's something
that
might have to change if we're going to start
importing Jubensha in the West. So today in the TTRPG space, which includes "Dungeons
and Dragons" and whatnot, before your campaign begins,
players are encouraged to have a conversation
about what content they do or don't wanna see, and
a lot of game masters will use something called an X card, which is a tool that players
can touch that basically says, this scene stops because it sucks for me, and I don't have to explain why because that would also
suck for me. Now when I talked about this with Jubensha fans in Singapore, the response that I heard
was, "Ah, we don't need that because we can handle dark themes". That's not really what
safety tools are for. Safety tools aren't there
for the majority of players. They're there for the minority of players who've gone through something awful that the rest of the
players don't know about. While everyone else is having
fun acting out a scene, that player is having an awful
time, but can't say anyt
hing because unlike a book or a movie, the social contract that
they have entered into means they can't leave without ruining this
experience for everybody. Or on the subjects of something
like content warnings, let me speak from personal experience. I have traumas that I
might find super cathartic to explore in a role playing game. But with content warnings, I can make sure I don't enter that specific experience with strangers, or with a game that I've
heard isn't that sensitive about the subje
ct matter. Safety tools aren't there
so coddled role-playing fans can no part of any discomfort. They're there so all of
us can more easily engage with dark stuff. From America's hardcore haunted houses, to the legendarily
emotionally devastating games of the Nordic Larp community, safety tools enable role
players to experiment with some of the darkest
role play on the planet. Some of it that would
literally be illegal otherwise. Anyway, rant over. Our experience of playing Jubensha without turn
ing into a
let's play was great. All five of us had a phenomenal time. I'm not surprised this hobby
has spread like wildfire. I'd be playing Jubensha
every week if I could, and it would be the best
thing I did that week. This despite me looking
so guilty in our game that I almost immediately
knocked over a glass of water. (glass clatters) Jesus! And then 10 minutes later,
somehow managed to do it again. I don't know why. (glass clinks) Oh my (beep)! Holy (beep)! Which is like slapstick
levels of
looking shifty. I wasn't the murderer. The cops still should have locked me away. I've seen this episode of "Colombo". Our story centred on chemistry
students at a university trying to solve the murder
of their own professor in their own laboratory. So the game started with
us all giving our alibis in a very respectful and
innocent sounding tone. Damian's my friend. Just two quiet, reserved people. Before our GM handed out the
first batch of evidence cards as we all had the opportunity
to searc
h the crime scene and one another's dorm rooms, which was like taking the candle that we'd lit in memory
of our dead teacher, and just pouring gasoline on it. - Why you got a bag of aerosol cans, man? (players laugh) - Is it normal for a
39-year-old research assistant to be getting that involved on Reddit, and also on your laptop, having a folder containing various news
articles featuring Chloe, and research articles published by Chloe? - You have news articles about me? When am I (beep) news? -
Your research papers. - Oh yeah, no, I'm very good. And I just cannot describe
to you how fun it was to slowly untie this
incredibly complicated story through the medium of pointing out that your friend is lying
over and over and over again, and watching them squirm every single time as they try and figure out how much more of the truth
they have to give you to make this excruciating
attention go away. - On your computer, there was an e-receipt showing a purchase from a
dark website for cyanide
. - [Quintin] You found that on my computer? -You said that you spent most of your time looking for clothes. - You were looking for clothes on the dark web and then you accidentally went to poison.com? No, we didn't (beep) order. But I do... Okay, listen, listen. As we entered the third hour of our inaugural Jubensha experience, I was blindsided by a handful of twists that if I'd been more familiar with soap operas or crime
fiction I might have seen coming, but in the context of a
social deducti
on game, just floored me. Turns out my character
was an unreliable narrator and I didn't know it, several characters weren't who I thought, there was love of all kinds
shot through the mystery like marbling in steak. - Can I ask why in your room there was a shattered
photo frame on the desk that had a picture of
you and Jermaine hugging? (players laughing) There may be a connection between. (players laughing) - By the time we finished,
I was the only player who didn't identify
the murderer corre
ctly, and do you know why? It's because, not me, but my character that I was role-playing,
had reasons to trust him, and that had corrupted my own ability as a player to solve the puzzle. Terrific, perfect ending,
no notes, flawless. And here's the thing,
as we all left that game and immediately went to the pub to talk about what we'd just experienced, if I had the ability to sign
up to another Jubensha game, I'd have done it immediately, but I'd want something that was longer now that I've got
a taste for it. Something more epic, and convoluted, maybe try one of the
different genres of Jubensha like a romance or a horror. I had my first hit, and
I was desperate for more, and I can't have any more,
because this whole world of amazing games is
currently not available outside of China. That's not an experience I'm very used to as a game journalist, I'll be honest. I'm not very good at dealing with it. So now I'm going to do something that's only semi-professional. I'm gonna try and use m
y
platform to change things. So if you too would like
to play these games, let's get the word out. Please for yourself, or just for me share this video with a friend so more people can find
out about these games so we can increase
demand outside of China, and get all of these new brilliant, envelope-pushing game
designers some recognition outside of their home country. Let's help this scene go global. Not least because Jubensha's
future inside of China is looking just a touch
less bright in 2023
. So China's government has a long history of censoring everything from the internet, to books, to movies, to bring it in line with the state's moral and cultural norms. And for a moment there,
Jubensha was new enough that it had escaped the state's attention. That's less and less true
with every passing year. In 2021, plain clothed police
officers in Shaanxi province went undercover in Jubensha
shops and confiscated games that had, "bloody and gruesome elements". By 2022, local governments in S
hanghai and Guangdong province began
requiring Jubensha providers submit scripts for state approval, seeking to weed out scripts that might propagate sex,
violence, or superstition. This slow backpedalling of
violence in Jubensha mysteries can be seen very clearly in
the original hit TV show, "Who's The Murderer,"
where subsequent seasons have dedicated more and
more airtime to explaining that murder is bad actually,
and today, features a judge explaining what the penalties would be for the crim
es you see in the show. And this year in 2023, the National Ministry
of Culture and Tourism announced further guidance on the regulation of
the Jubensha industry, where according to reports
about this announcement, "Content that eulogises the
Communist Party of China, promotes the core values of socialism, builds a strong sense of
Chinese national community, and promotes the popularisation
of science and technology are among those encouraged by the ministry as per the document". Which sure sound
s like
the Chinese government would like the Jubensha
industry to go the way the Chinese movie industry, where at best, movies are socially
conservative, and at worst, they are queasily nationalistic. Now, I don't wanna mischaracterize
what's happening here because I certainly do not know what the ramifications of any of this government interest is going to be, and none of the people that
I spoke to for this story brought this up as a pressing issue that I should know about as a journalist. But
equally, the games that
people chose to tell me about to sell me on the Jubensha experience, Chinese cops struggling with
a miscarriage of justice, queer storylines, or frightening
and bloody ghost stories, I personally can't see those
stories getting marketed or even developed in a circumstance where every Jubensha game
has to be rubber stamped by a Chinese state censor. And frankly, I find this new vein of game development so exciting, I hate to think of it
being limited in its growth by any g
overnment. So I'm just sat here at my
desk hoping against hope that people like you will
join me in doing what you can to help this scene go global, even if it's just telling
more people about it. Thank you so much for watching, everybody. If you'd like to support deep dives into under-reported areas of
games, that's what we do, baby. And it's all funded by people on patreon.com/peoplemakegames, who pay us a little bit every month so we can do things like
fly out to Singapore to conduct intervie
ws, and
then pay translators and fixers so we know what anyone in
those interviews is saying. So please consider going to
patreon.com/peoplemakegames to get exclusive content, and
also support the work we do. And hey, personally, just from me to all of our patrons
watching this, thank you because I can't tell you
how exciting and fulfilling I found researching this story. I'm just very grateful
that I get to do this job. Cheers. (upbeat music)
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