Murder Mystery Games

In recent years, the fan base of Mystery games has dwindled down to a small core following – rather a shame in that it makes parties such as the one we had hard to sell on populist grounds, but the upside is that the games that do get designed tend to be much more sophisticated and of higher quality than the ones you used to be able to get off the shelf. A few companies in Britain (see this pages’ “links” section for detail) actually manage to make something like a living from the production of more elaborate and customized mystery games. Their services range from the provision of two or three-page “beginnings” of interactive stories that are meant to be told “by the fireside,” as it were, to the actual organization of parties and “interactive theatrical events.” Myself, I am inclined to think that the lapses in verisimilitude and pervasive silliness that have kept this genre from being taken seriously by the interactive design crowd would be quite easier to overcome. A more radical possibility, indeed, might be that perhaps they could be set up around more subtle and conceptually challenging varieties of “mystery’ than the standard issue of “Who Impaled Dr. Boddy?” This is a topic for another occasion, however – in the meantime you might want to check out Dave Brandl’s excellent article “Murder and Meals” on the authoring of the “dinner theatre” versions of these games over at S101’s “Playwriting” site, at http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/play...

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