The physical touch

Mango TV launched the show Who's the Murderer, on March 27, 2016, inviting Chinese hosts He Jiong and Sa Beining and other celebrities to play the location-based detective game. The game has become increasingly popular. Mango TV has produced four seasons of the show, with the most recent airing in October.

Thanks to the popularity of the show among young people, similar location-based detective games have seen a boom in China.

Hao Shaojie, 27, works in Hong Kong and was among the first to play the game.

From Shenyang, Northeast China's Liaoning province, Hao went to work in Hong Kong in 2015. Far away from home, everything seemed different.

"As a newcomer, the first thing I needed to do was to build my social network, and in the beginning, I chose to play board games with friends," recalls Hao.

Things changed in the summer of 2016. After their first experience of playing the detective game in Shenzhen, Hao and his friends quickly became fans.

"Compared with board games, during which people only sit and talk, the location-based game provides us with more chances to interact with one another," says Hao.

"Finding clues in real locations makes the game more social and interesting."

He adds that the game brings together people from markedly different industries, who perhaps wouldn't have much to talk about otherwise.

"Each story has its own background and provides us with specific topics to discuss. Sometimes our talks can be extended to dinner after a whole afternoon's play," says Hao.

As far as Hao and his friends know, there's no physical venues for such location-based detective games in Hong Kong, so these fans regularly travel to locations in Shenzhen just to play the detective games.

Sometimes they even buy stories online, make simple scenes, set up props by themselves and buy costumes in order to play at their homes in Hong Kong.

However, Hao recently encountered a problem.

Unlike board games that can be played over and over again, the location-based detective game can be played only once for each player, because people will know the outcome after playing, and the number of top-class stories created and available in the market is limited.

As a player with three years' experience, Hao says it is increasingly difficult to find the best games to play.

"I have begun to keep the good stories, rather than play them the moment I find them," he says.

An experienced player, Hao says he has also become pickier about the people with whom he plays.

"If one player has poor communication skills or logical reasoning, it brings everyone's experience down," he explains.