All of the elements to our interactive murder mystery were now completed. We had the story, the clues and what would lead the players to the next box. The next step was figuring out the flow of the space and how the layout would work and if it was clear enough. 

The only way for us to know this was to do a walkthrough we laid each box on the ground and placed what would be next to and inside around the box. so we could visually see each section.   

Whilst doing our walkthrough we realised a few small things had to be changed in order for it to actually work. We changed one of the key locks to a number lock as it was the clues we had previously decided. We also decided to reprint a lot of our items so that they were more fitted to the theme (old looking paper). 

The main hurdle we came across during our final walkthrough was where to place each block. To make sure that we had a good flowing layout we made a few different plan to look at it as a whole. Overall we wanted the person doing the game to have to look around the room for clues and go back and fourth a few times. Hence why we separated certain numbers.

During this week of our project we decided to focus on finalising the story. However for this to become a proper murder mystery we had to do a deep dive into the conventions and tropes of what a traditional murder mystery looked like. 

When building our story we looked at a number of murder mysteries to give us inspiration. Some of these being the board game Cluedo, Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries and escape rooms we have gone to ourselves and tried out. 

Combining these areas of exploration we began to build our story. We needed to think of all the elements in the story and how they would align with each other to lead to clues and “Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story” (Jenkins, 2007). 

We knew that a common trait in a murder mystery was to have a red herring so we immediately chose the cleaner to be framed as the murder when really it was Mr Clement. This was going to be a good way to lead the player down a rabbit hole before actually being able to find out who it was.

There were elements to our story that were getting too complicated and we knew if we wanted this to flow nicely and have each element contribute with the unfolding of the story we had to simplify. We took away the affair between the cleaner and Mr clement and made it be a framing Mr clement had planned for the audience to believe it was the cleaner. This not only added a fun twist but it also took a bit of the cliche overtone away.

references:

Following our presentation pitch it was clear that there was refining to be done this week. The question we were researching was the first of many things we refined. Previously it was too wordy with unclear points. Our new and refined question being: “How do the conventions of a traditional murder mystery translate into a transmedia form of story-telling, through the use of an interactive game. How easily are we able to develop a coherent narrative without sacrificing the engagement and immersion of participants?”

Previously in our pitch we spoke about doing a pre recorded audio to read the clues thinking this would add a level of engagement that people feel lacks within these types of games/stories. Upon reflection the technical difficulties that come with this are far too much for it to run smoothly with the space and equipment we have access to, so we have changed it to do printed out scripts for each player to read. Although this may not have the same effect it definitely will be a smoother running experience.  

Another alteration we have made is moving away from the escape room element to our story. After looking into tropes of murder mysteries it was clear that to be able to fulfil our research objective it would be beneficial to make it more of an interactive game experience using some genre conventions from escape rooms but instead of the main point being to get out of the room, we have made the main objective to be uncovering who the murderer is.

Week nine was purely explorational, finding the correct research question to fully protect our wanted idea was a challenge but it was through trial and error that we eventually grasped all aspects of our transmedia story and placed what we were exploring into two simple questions: “How do the tropes and conventions of a traditional murder mystery translate into a transmedia form of story-telling, through the use of an escape room?” 

“How easily are we able to/are we able to develop a coherent narrative through an interactive murder mystery game, without sacrificing the engagement and immersion of participants?” 

The main idea explored through readings during this week was the idea of challenging the preconceived notion that games and stories can’t be linked and they are two separate entities. Looking at an interview published in the Wired magazine, George Lucas provided the opposing view. He purely believed that there was no way to like a good story and a game due to the traditional tropes of both not aligning. Grasping onto this our mission became clear to prove this wrong. 

“While story is still king, creating an experience where people need to discover and undercover the evidence of a story and then actually tell the story to each other as a community is hugely powerful, immersive, and effective. When done right, there’s nothing as addictive as a good real-time immersive experience.” – Steven Peters, as quoted in Garcia (2017)

  The quote above from a journal by Antero Garcia provided us with the wording of what we are hoping to create with our immersive murder mystery transmedia story.

references: