China has discovered LARPing, kicking off a kind of Satanic Panic

Live-action role-playing is hot in China’s urban centers right now, according to reports from English-language state media website Sixth Tone. But following a surge in popularity in recent years, regulators are beginning to take notice of the genre’s mature content. The Wednesday story reveals that local and provincial authorities are now regulating the content of certain products and requesting that they be removed from retailers’ shelves. The situation seems far more serious than even the darkest days of the Satanic Panic in the 1980s, which saw conservatives and even some media organizations in the U.S. making unfounded claims about the safety of playing Dungeons & Dragons.

At issue are “script murder” games, where players don costumes and act out the roles in elaborate murder mystery games that take many hours to complete. There are many options for games: you can have them at home with commercially-available scripts, in retail shops, or in more thematic private settings.

“China’s script murder games stem from the murder mystery of LARP games,” Sixth Tone’s Luo Meihan told Polygon via email. “We call it ‘script murder’ because it’s the direct translation in English from the original Chinese word jubensha (in pinyin), or 剧本 (script) 杀(murder). The gaming genre’s original form in China is basically similar to LARP.

“But as the industry expands, the gaming genre has developed to involve various types of scripts engaging players in an emotional or joyful experience, in addition to the process of solving a murder mystery,” Luo continued. “People can also sit around and have their respective scripts in hand to get into a story and follow the storyline as one of the protagonists, often with the lead of [a] Dungeon Master.”

According to Luo’s reporting, the southwest city of Chengdu recently become the first Chinese municipality to “introduce new rules governing the role-playing mystery gaming sector.” The stated goal is to “promote the healthy and orderly development of the script entertainment industry.” Liaoning and Shanghai provinces in the north appear to be following suit.

Here are additional details from Luo’s original article for Sixth Tone:

The new rules for offline games including role-playing “script murder” games […] and other interactive gaming venues now require local industry associations to publish “red and black lists” of “good and problematic scripts” involving pornography, violence, and vulgarity, among others. The only exception to this rule is when a game is scheduled for weekends or national holidays.

Some store owners have begun to align their product selection with the government’s regulations. It’s unclear how this will impact the output of independent game designers inside China, but the addressable market — as with most markets inside mainland China — appears to be huge. Sixth Tone’s analysis of an industry report indicates that the number of gaming venues has increased by 400% since 2018, with $2.8 billion in revenue last year alone.