Murder Mystery Game Setting Research Using Game Refinement Measurement

This paper explores the game sophistication of a party game is called Murder Mystery Game (MMG), which is very popular in teenagers, recently it was boom developed in China and Japan. For players, they have to promote game story process by performing the role which was assigned to them, finally, players need to find out who is the “murderer”, reversely murderer player has to try his best strategy to escape from the story. In this paper, our research focuses on the playing settings, MMG needs several players and cost a few hours, the game would become boring as the number of players becomes too large or too small, therefore we use the game refinement theory to analyze MMG setting to make the game process become more balanced and sophisticated. Computer natural and convergent simulations for a simple version of MMG are conducted to collect the data while game refinement measure is employed for the assessment. The results indicate several interesting observations, which can help game designers to create a better murder scenario.