Despite skipping the trial phase of our game, coming into the exhibition this week, I still felt confident. My group worked well as a team, and we had all put in a great deal of time and effort into creating this interactive murder mystery game. Managing the project by dividing up all the work up between group members and maintaining constant communicating with each other. I believe that this was reflected in how our final exhibition was presented. Seeing all our work come together, all the clues that we had created and the props that we ordered. I felt incredibly proud of what we had achieved. Transforming the corner of the studio room into the 1930’s office style that we visualised for our murder mystery game.

Reflecting upon the project overall, it’s critical to return to our on-going research regarding transmedia storytelling, narrative and the conventions of the murder mystery genre. Although a traditional murder mystery has numerous tropes that we included throughout our game (for example- suspicious death, suspects, a red herring etc…), research shows that at its core the most important aspect of the murder mystery genre is engagement from the audience (Eger 2020). Alongside genre, within transmedia “narrative is the universal factor … that underlies psychological immersion” (Rutledge 2019, p. 4). Therefore, engagement reflects that our story/narrative was successfully communicated through our transmedia piece.

At the heart of this research is engagement and immersion. Therefore, in order to measure our success, we need to ask the question- how effective was our murder mystery interactive game in engaging the audience? As engagement reflects that we reached a balance of genre, narrative and gameplay- creating a successful transmedia piece.

Through the exhibition, I believe that we achieved this- we had strong engagement from all the participants working through our murder mystery. Although we had a few hiccups along the way and had to give some clues to help them solve the murder. Ultimately, I hope that they had fun working through the narrative and playing detective!  If we had more time on the project, I would have liked to refine our game more (to avoid those hiccups). Despite this, I am happy with my groups final project and what we managed to achieve in the short timeframe we had.

 

References:

Eger, M. (2020) ‘Murder mysteries: the white whale of narrative generation?’, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 16(1):210-216. accessed 31 May 2023. https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIIDE/article/download/7432/7298

Rutledge, P. (2019). ‘Transmedia Psychology: Creating Compelling and Immersive Experiences’, Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies, 1:350-363, accessed 31 May 2023. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781351054904-39/transmedia-psychology-pamela-rutledge