More details and schedule coming soon! See Speaker Biographies
East vs West – How should jubensha be adapted for the West?
Ophelia Au – translator, game master, and creator of two original jubensha – will discuss common features of Chinese jubensha that reflect the culture they come from. Because jubensha is ultimately a storytelling medium, we’ll take a look at how jubensha stories told by and for a Western audience might differ from those originating in Asia. Ophelia will use her experience creating jubensha geared specifically for a Western audience to facilitate an interactive discussion.
Who “Murdered” the Curator? Turning the Museum into a Playable Jubensha
The Trial of Amen-Ra is a live-action immersive experience that transforms a traditional museum tour into a jubensha-style investigation. By combining the core mechanics of jubensha – role-playing, clue hunting, deduction, and social gameplay – with the atmosphere and authenticity of museum spaces, the project turns cultural heritage into an interactive narrative. In this session, we will explore how museums can be redesigned as playable environments. We will look at why jubensha mechanics naturally fit heritage spaces and share a practical framework for designing immersive mystery games inside galleries.
Jiahong Xu (WanderWise)
Publishing Scripts that Kill: Building Durable IP in Jubensha
The Jubensha industry in China is a billion-dollar market, but a saturated one. In English, it’s barely begun. Suspense Studio’s co-founder Caleb “T&C” walks through their ideation-to-publication process and examines what separates publishable scripts from rejected ones: mystery architecture that survives player pressure, balanced hidden information, and emotional resonance that outlives the solution. He maps the market gap Suspense Studio is positioned to fill, and frames Jubensha not as an entertainment trend but as an emerging narrative asset class. For aspiring designers and backers, the moment is now.
Caleb “T&C” (Suspense Studio)
Lock, Stock and Murder Mystery: From Escape Rooms to Jubensha
Escape rooms and Jubensha are both games about groups of people coming together, chasing clues, and unravelling mysteries. But spend any time with the two and the differences are just as clear as the similarities. Game designer David Middleton spent a decade in the escape room industry before Jubensha caught his attention, and now he’s looking at both formats side by side, exploring what connects them, what sets them apart, and what a decade of escape room design can teach Jubensha creators who want to create better mystery experiences.
David Middleton (Jubensha Adventures)
Creating Jubensha using Deductive, Inductive, and Abductive Reasoning
Joe Strickland, Artistic Director of Chronic Insanity, will look at the three main ways that human beings reason about the world and how different Jubensha, as well as other puzzle and mystery experiences, approach utilising them. We’ll also look at trends in usage of these reasoning styles both geographically and chronological. This talk is for anyone who wants to under the mechanics of a mystery game in more detail to help identify the audience and position for their own experiences in the future.
Joe Strickland (Chronic Insanity)
Workshop Your Jubensha for Publishing (Invitation-only)
Have you embarked on a Jubensha project and wondered if it is publishable? Suspense Studio is opening up our development process for a hands-on workshop. Submit a game you’re currently working on and simply bring a paper prototype (A4 printouts are fine). Like Pixar’s Brain Trust, we’ll playtest selected projects together and informally workshop them live. We will share our practical insights on crafting compelling narratives, designing engaging game mechanics, and balancing storytelling with mystery-solving. This is your opportunity to test your design and your work might even be published!
Submit your game by 4 April. We aim to notify designers by 18 April.
Jubensha Trends in China: New Genres and Offshoots
As jubensha spreads throughout the world, it continues to evolve in China, generating new genres and spawning new forms of destination-based interactive entertainment. This session brings together scholars and highly acclaimed practitioners from China to talk about the latest trends in jubensha, their impact on both entertainment and player expectations, and how they differ from Nordic Larp. The two talks will be followed by an engaging dialog among the presenters and with the audience.
Moderated by Celia Pearce (Playable Theatre International, Northeastern University)
Talk 1: Scripted Intimacy: Designing Emotional Experience in Chinese Jubensha Games
Qingganben (情感本) is a popular subgenre in Chinese Jubensha Games that centers on emotional and intimate experiences. Unlike mystery-driven Jubensha, Qingganben prioritizes emotional experience, such as romantic attraction, heartbreak, tension, and collective emotional release. In this context, intimacy is not emergent but carefully constructed.
Compared with Nordic Larp, where emotional intensity often develops through players’ interaction, we argue that Qingganben relies on sequenced narrative design, built-in character relationships, active guidance from the game facilitator, and multimodal atmosphere triggers to generate emotional highs and lows, as well as carefully staged moments of collective interaction, to further amplify emotional intensity.
Bringing together academic research and design perspectives, this talk explores how intimacy is scripted as a design outcome in Qingganben. It outlines how the genre is practiced today, examines its core techniques, and considers how these structures shape emerging player practices.
Yulin Tian (Tongji University) and Yihan(Clytze) Li (The Snack Cart Studio)
Talk 2: Where Jubensha Is Now: Decline, mutation, and other new forms of pervasive play stemming from jubensha in China
The jubensha boom in China has largely passed its peak, but the form has not disappeared. Instead, it has branched into many other kinds of play experiences, including different types of escape rooms, ARGs, interactive Douyin livestreaming, female-oriented cosplay “escort” services, and other, more unconventional forms of live and pervasive play. These newer formats often build on the shared habits, expectations, and playful skills developed during the height of jubensha culture, while moving away from standardized scripts and fixed venues.
Drawing from long-term exposure to jubensha as a player, experimental game practice, and previous work as an investment manager at a major gaming company focused on the offline gaming sector, this talk reflects on how jubensha has shaped today’s play landscape in China, and how these emerging forms differ from Nordic LARP and traditional tabletop games.
Joanna Lyu ([[rect**]]repair)
Speaker Biographies
Ophelia Au
TBC
Caleb “T&C”
Caleb is the co-founder of Suspense Studio, a narrative-driven Jubensha publishing and development studio focused on building high-quality immersive IP. He has overseen the incubation, editorial development, and market launch of multiple titles, including releases at PAX Unplugged and Gen Con. Caleb is interested in bridging creative talent and capital to build a structured studio ecosystem where writers and partners can participate in the maturation of this immersive narrative entertainment. Beyond Jubensha, Caleb enjoys immersive theatre, escape rooms, and social strategic games like The Genius.
tc@suspensestudiogames.com
Yihan(Clytze) Li
Yihan(Clytze) Li is the founder of the Snack Cart Studio and a well-known designer of Jubensha Games in China.The representative works “Love Actually” (洗劫系列) has achieved over 50 million yuan in box office revenue in the Chinese Jubensha market and has been translated into Japanese, with its release in Japan imminent.
703505024@qq.com
Joanna Lyu
Joanna Lyu is a designer and artist working with game systems, live interaction, and play in public spaces. She is a co-founder of 修四边形（[[rect**]]repair）, an art-game collective based in Shanghai. Founded in 2024, the collective focuses on experimental games, alternative game jams, and public events that combine playful media, narrative, and community practice. [[rect**]]repair collaborates with game designers, theatre makers, actors, writers, technologists, and local spaces to create works that are collective and situational. Recent collaborations and commissions include Chengdu A4 Art Museum, the Power Station of Art (Shanghai), abC Art Book Fair, TX Huaihai Youth Energy Center, BIE别的, and SYSTEM. (Please see [[rect**]]repair’s rednote account for their work in China)
Her creative work is driven by an interest in how play appears in everyday life, and how game logic can shape social experiences outside traditional venues. While [[rect**]]repair operates on the more experimental edge of game-making, distinct from the standardized, product-driven commercial ecosystem of jubensha, Joanna has been closely exposed to jubensha and the unique ways of play in China for many years. She is interested in how newer unique forms of play have emerged from the jubensha era in China, drawing on shared literacy that have accumulated from the trend of jubensha and werewolf.
joannalyu19@gmail.com
David Middleton
David Middleton is a UK-based immersive game designer, founder of Bewilder Box, a science-fiction themed escape room venue known for its humour and innovative puzzle design, organiser of ERIC, the escape room industry conference, and founder of games design studio Rebel Brain. He once built a toilet-themed escape room called The T.U.R.D.I.S. and took it to Glastonbury Festival. With over 70 gamified projects across tabletop, escape rooms, and large-scale immersive events, he has worked with brands and IPs including Disney, Peaky Blinders, Horrible Histories, The Paddington Bear Experience, and Roald Dahl’s The Witches. More recently, through Jubensha Adventures, he has been developing original English-language Jubensha, drawn to a format that brings people together and gives him the chance to make all sorts of weird and wonderful characters and worlds.
david.m@bewilderbox.co.uk
Celia Pearce
Celia Pearce is an award-winning game designer, curator, author and Professor at Northeastern University. She is co-founder of IndieCade, and Co-Executive Director of Playable Theatre International. Her first full theatre production, (F)UNFAIR, created with Director Nick O’Leary and Dacha Theatre, premiered in Seattlein 2022. Her games and larps have appeared at the Smithsonian, Incubate, Living Games, Sandcon, and The Smoke London. She has written multiple book chapters on playable theatre, and her most recent book, PLAYFRAMES draws from social science and performance studies to answer the question “How do we know we are playing?”
cp@cpandfriends.com
Joe Strickland
Joe Strickland is an immersive theatre maker, producer, creative technologist and access consultant. Since 2012 they have been helping to create all manner of theatre and performance in venues across the country. They are the Artistic Director & CEO of Chronic Insanity and run jubensha.co.uk. They have a PhD in Future Experience Technologies and Storytelling, which was based at the University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Lab and supported by the BBC. They specialise in using traditional theatre making techniques and applying them to immersive arts, as well as crafting that feeling of “liveness” that theatre does so well in remote and digital immersive experiences. They are an experienced digital, immersive, and accessibility consultant, having spoken about the subjects internationally and worked with the BFI, Young Vic, AMA, BBC R&D and British Council. They have been on the Access Working Groups at both Nottingham Playhouse and Innovate UK.
chronicinsanitytheatre@gmail.com
Yulin Tian
Yulin Tian works at the intersection of HCI, game play, and digital health. With a PhD in Digital Media Art and international research experience, she designs VR games and interactive works exploring game-based rehabilitation and parasocial intimacy. Her publications and award-winning projects have been presented at CHI, CSCW, IASDR, Dutch Design Week, Tokyo University of the Arts, and more.
tianyulin204@foxmail.com, yulin_t@tongji.edu.cn
Jiahong Xu
TBC
