Offline games, which also include “Script Killing,” are immensely popular among Chinese youth. A new regulation will forbid references to religion.
by Zhou Kexin
Young people in China desperately seek socializing opportunities outside of the CCP’s official circuit. One of them are offline games, where players congregate, often in a restaurant or cafeteria, and guided by a host compete to solve a puzzle or problem. Millions of young Chinese feed what is becoming a booming market.
“Secret Room” is a popular puzzle-solving role-playing game, and even more popular is “Script Killing,” whose market is estimated at 10 billion yuan. There, a small group of players gather and are assigned roles by the host. They should identify and catch a murderer in whodunit performances, although there are endless possible variations.
How happy players are in the end depends on the quality of the script and the host. Some young people complain that the market is plagued by unprofessional hosts and bad scripts, but they also acknowledge that there are high quality, if expensive, proposals. The good scripts are also imitated, and there is a good deal of copyright infringement in the field.
This does not seem to be the main concern of the CCP. On November 9, the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism published a draft of “Regulations on Controlling the Contents of Script Killing and Secret Room.” Comments were invited before December 8, 2021. This is a common way of launching new regulations in China through a so-called “democratic” consultation. In fact, rarely these “consultations” result in significant changes with respect to the drafts.
The Shanghai regulations, a pilot project that may become a model for national rules, does require that those organizing Secret Room and Script Killing events submit a declaration that they are not infringing the copyright of others. However, the core of the regulations is that they should first submit their scripts to “self-censorship,” and then send them for preliminary approval to the Municipal Bureau.
Both the self-censorship and the subsequent examination by the Municipal Bureau should make sure that the scripts do not include content “endangering national unity, sovereignty or territorial integrity” (i.e., they should follow the Party line on Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet), “undermining social stability,” “disrupting social order,” “violating social ethics,” or “harming national honor” (i.e., they should not include any criticism of the government or the CCP), or “violating the state’s religious policies and promoting xie jiao or superstitions.”
Since religious policies forbid any religious discourse outside the authorized places of worship, this means that no allusions to religion is allowed in the scripts. Xie jiao means those religious movements banned by the government as “heterodox teachings” (sometimes less correctly translated as “evil cults”). And “superstition” is a broad concept. Taken literally, it may mean that most scripts about mysteries of past eras, which include spells, magic, and supernatural powers should be eliminated.