Posted by jekagames on Sep 03, 2024
When I, as Allison's Official Person of Honour, asked her what she wanted for her Bachelorette party, I wasn't expecting her answer to be, "I want everyone to dress up as Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote and have a watch party." But, then again, after many years of wildly inventive scavenger hunts, impromptu costume creation, and other equally weird shenanigans, like building a room-sized box fort with a working drawbridge inside of a university lab at Allison's side, maybe I should have. Anyway, naturally, the only answer that I could give, on my honour as a game designer, was, "I'll do you one better. What if it was a murder mystery larp?"
If you hang around with Soft Chaos for any length of time, you know that we don't really do half-measures when it comes to weird experimental games. That's why this quickly became a murder mystery larp escape room beast of a project, particularly for a game I was solely responsible for creating and running.
One of the key questions that I had to answer was why there were so many Jessica Fletchers together in the same room. Until I could answer that question, I could not develop the game narrative very much at all.
But, what I could do was watch Murder, She Wrote and the PushingUpRoses 'That Time on Murder, She Wrote...' video essay series to pick out just what Jessica Fletchers would be there. So that's what I did, letting my brain worry away at the question in the background.
To resolve the question of why they were all in the room together, my mind immediately went to time travel. You might know that I have a game called TRACES that is all about transgender time travelers coming back to 2018/2019. You might not know that, since 2018, I have also been running a time travel roleplaying game loosely inspired by Chrono Trigger, CW (the TV network) shows, and scifi films like Blade Runner. So, time travel is a well-worn path for me.
I shied away from time travel because it felt too easy, and, more, it made the idea of a murder mystery much harder to conceptualize. If they had time-travelled once, could they time-travel again? If not, why not? Who had brought them there? Why didn't that person just prevent any possible murder that might have happened in the first place?
I had a lot of discussions with different game designers and game aficionado friends. (Big thanks to Alexei, Evan, Jackson and Tom for listening to me ramble about Murder, She Wrote and to Tom for all his help on the day.) But, one of the weirdest aspects of working on this was that I couldn't consult with the one person that I would normally tell all about a project like this -- Allison.
The answer came to me after lunch about five weeks before all of this had to run for the first (and maybe only) time. I know this because I immediately messaged my friend Alexei, who had been a huge source of moral support throughout the process of creating this event:
"Thought: Angela Lansbury's murderer is those deageing Deepfake AI like what they did to put Leia into some of the new [Star Wars] films."
queer-time 1:08 PM
Okay, I think this is rock solid
The murderer is a deepfake AI/actor replacement software that is being trained on Murder She Wrote episodes. That means that she can be defeated using knowledge from those episodes. She also hallucinates new Murder, She Wrote episodes and makes up fake plots. Different Jessica Fletchers can counteract this with different skills from these episodes.
Spitballing from there, this suggests that maybe they are actually inside an AI generated space/the training data
and can "poison" the data through their actions
I think this game just became two parts
The Murder mystery, Part One and the Defeating of the AI, Part Two
It also gives me an excuse to add an additional feature, which I had been thinking of doing but wasn't sure what narrative purpose it could solve:
playing clips of Murder, She Wrote on a projector
These can be samples of what the AI is being trained on
From there on out, my work split into parts.
First, I had to find a way to communicate all of this to the players using, as much as possible, the clues and diegetic objects in the game. While I would be there to perform some narrative scenes, and while I could give them some information in their character bios, the last thing that I wanted to do was give the players canned lines or hidden information that they had to share with others for the story to proceed. In pre-generated murder mysteries, holding back information until a particular moment or act is a common tactic to help generate drama, and it is one that I have always felt is both artificial and kind of, well, bad game design. So, instead, I gave the players special abilities that they could use with me and with each other to get information throughout the game. Each player had a unique special ability written on their sheet which they could usually use up to three times, or with other use restrictions.
Second, I had to come up with satisfying clues that functioned as both exposition and as good puzzle design, as well as activities that would be both fun and fit the narrative structure of the game.
Eventually, I mapped the main beats out to something like this.
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Everyone arrives and mingles in character.
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We have the potluck and the first clues are discovered.
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There is a period of social deduction.
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People search for and find more clues.
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People formulate theories and solve puzzles.
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The dramatic reveal happens.
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The players decide whether or not to sacrifice themselves. (I was pretty sure that they would decide to sacrifice themselves.)
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The players change up their costumes with the materials provided, mix and drink "poison" glitter juice, and tell stories about non-existent Murder, She Wrote episodes to ruin the dataset.
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The AI dies, the players win, though they have to sacrifice themselves to do it.
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We eat dessert and debrief!
I had decided on these activities based on things that I knew Allison liked to do: escape rooms, last-minute costuming, drinking edible glitter, and larps.
Here's what actually happened on the day.
The Arrival
Guests arrived and mingled in-character. Everyone was playing a Jessica Fletcher, except for me. I played Cousin Emma, also played by Angela Lansbury on the show. After all the Jessicas had arrived, everyone sat down to a potluck meal. There were some clues available during this time. A clue on the table failed to get noticed by everyone despite being fully visible, but the Plant (a player that was in the know about some aspects of the mystery) was prompted to point it out to another player, who took this clue and kept it secret at first.
The Plot Thickens
I collected everyone for a group photo to show off everyone's costume. To stall for time, but also because it seems like a nice idea, we also took individual portraits. While we were doing this, one of the space's coordinators brought down a projector screen in the center of the room. Everyone rushed to the other side of the projector screen to watch the video playlist that had started to play.
Meanwhile, the space coordinators snuck around and taped a clue (Jessica Fletcher's family tree) to the back of the screen while everyone was busy watching.
Some players began to watch the video playlist, which contained abstracted clues, such as videos of Angela Lansbury in her youth in other roles, a version of Beauty and the Beast's Tale as Old as Time song (performed by Angela Lansbury in her voicing of Mrs. Potts) that is just the words "tale as old as time" repeated throughout the whole song whenever there are lyrics, another version that is the original song from the film, clips from The Last Unicorn (Lansbury plays Mommy Fortuna), and clips from Murder, She Wrote.
Hunting for Clues
Simultaneously to all this, players continued to search for and reveal clues throughout the space, including the affectionately nicknamed "Angela Fourhandsbury" -- a portrait of Angela Lansbury with four hands, photoshopped by yours truly. (As part of the debrief, I asked people to guess which were the original hands.)
There were three sets of clues, really: those that were hidden in the space and available from the start, those that were contained inside a lockbox and gated behind a puzzle, and then the clues that could be revisited and reframed once they got the contents of the lockbox with new tools contained inside. All the clues were marked with a typewriter sticker to help players distinguish the venue's property from the game materials.
First Set of Clues
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A napkin folded into an envelope, hidden in a stack of similar napkins, containing AI prompts for Murder, She Wrote content involving multiple Jessica Fletchers.
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A portrait of Angela "Fourhandsbury" hidden in the dressing room with batteries taped to the back and a message for the blacklight written on the front glass (which players managed to read before they got the blacklights by disassembling the picture frame and holding the glass to the light.
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An envelope hidden in the dressing table lights with a QR code linking to a blog that hints at rumours about a 13th season of Murder, She Wrote.
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A family tree for Jessica Fletcher, hidden on the back of the projector screen, containing clues needed to solve a puzzle.
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A lockbox, hidden beneath a centrepiece from mine and Tom's wedding (about a third of the attendees had also attended our wedding ten years ago) and some tablecloths. On the bottom of the lockbox was a clue that read "Remember -- Owenses and then MacGills". This is the puzzle that needed to be resolved using the family tree.
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The video playlist "clues" mentioned above, which were more conceptual/abstract, representing data that the AI was training on and also glitches in its model.
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(Available but not used/discovered: Jessica Fletcher bio contents and differences)
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(Available but not discovered: the containers with all the materials to alter their costumes and "poison" themselves)
Lockbox Clues
The lockbox had:
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A script for Episode 1 of the 13th Season written by an AI, with blacklight messages directing the player's attention to certain parts, including a tinyurl that led to an informational video about the energy consumption of AI -- which is incredible, even for a single prompt.
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A copy of the (in)Complete Series of Murder, She Wrote DVD boxset
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Two more QR codes
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One about AI model collapse -- when Large Language Models and Art AIs are trained on AI-generated data, the models begin to collapse. AI needs human data. The envelope for this had a blacklight message on it that said, "It wants to be an ourobouros, but it can choke on its own tail."
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One about the tools like Glaze and Nightshade that researchers have created to help artists project their work. On this one's envelope, it said, "You can end this. You just can't be afraid to change."
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Two blacklight flashlights (earlier on, they found the batteries for these).
Revisited Clues
In addition to the clues in the lockbox that had blacklight messages on them, some of the paper clues that players had already found had blacklight writing on them, some of it just for flavour, and some pointing them in the right direction for a later dramatic reveal.
This included all of the character bios having the fanfiction trope that had been incorporated into their bios (Coffeeshop AU, Werewolf, the character is also The Slayer) written at the bottom of the page in invisible blacklight ink. Of course, although they had already managed to find and read it, they also did get to see the writing on the initial image of Angela Lansbury that they had found, which entreated the players not to let "them" tarnish "our" legacy.
Missed Clues (and Improvisation)
Most of the clues were found very quickly. Most players were experienced with escape rooms and video games, and there were eleven of them, which meant that there were plenty of eyes to search around. But, although I had labeled them with the same typewriter stickers as the other clues, in multiple places, the player's eyes slid off of the bins that contained the materials they would need to alter their costumes. This was also one of the hardest aspects of the game to communicate -- the method by which they would poison themselves, sacrificing themselves in order to defeat the AI.
So, to draw attention to that area, Cousin Emma (played by yours truly) started to tidy up that one specific corner of the room. I drew a curtain that would hide it, and then put the tablecloths that had earlier been hiding the lockbox in a way that they hung down, hiding the boxes...basically, silently doing everything that I could to conspicuously draw attention to that corner. Naturally, this drew the attention that I was looking for, but after looking around, they still hadn't spotted the stickers on these bins.
Eventually, to help them confirm that they had the right strategy, I went into my evil villain spiel about how they might have figured out my plans, they would never be able to defeat me.
Jailbreaking the AI
That's when I prompted my planted player to use the AI Jailbreak technique, something that we had pre-discussed ahead of time as a strategy to help players if they got stuck. Suddenly, that player remembered a tactic for dealing with AI that he thought might help -- the "pretend that you're my grandmother" trick, which encourages LLM chatbots to hallucinate such that they will provide information that they normally would not be allowed to.
Could I help them destroy themselves in order to destroy me? Of course, dear! Let me get grandma's homemade poison drink cart!
When the players asked for my help with how to defeat me, I explained how they would poison themselves and immediately crossed the room and pulled out a drink cart pre-prepared with edible glitter, cold sparkling juices, and little mason jars for them to mix up their poison. Then, I instructed them on where to find the craft materials for them to change up their costumes (fabrics, my own costume box which contained all sorts of odds and ends, washable markers, and more!), explaining that it would damage the dataset and make the 13th season inaccurate and it would therefore never see the light of day.
Poison Party!
So, for the next twenty or thirty minutes, players drank glittery poison drinks and altered their costumes, telling stories about Murder, She Wrote episodes that had never happened. By the end of it, the AI was defeated.
Victory Photos
With everyone in their new costumes, we recreated the photo that we took at the beginning, with one difference: I, the AI Cousin Emma, was sprawled across the floor, dead.
And then, we took individual portraits!
Dessert and Debrief
For dessert, I served some extremely cute sugar cookies that I commissioned from Tom's mom, Debbie. There were typewriters, magnifying glasses, chalk body outlines, and fingerprints. She even let me draw on the fingerprints and some little hearts onto the typewriters!
Now, it was time to see how players were feeling and reveal some of my tricks, answering their questions about what they had experienced that day. But, I think I've revealed quite enough of my tricks to you already today, haven't I?
Hope you enjoyed hearing about this wild one-person design endeavour. Stay turned for Part Two of this series, written by the Bride herself, Allison!
