The Collaborative Sensemaking Play of Jubensha Games: A Deconstruction, Taxonomy, and Analysis

Jubensha games, popular in China, combine storytelling, social deduction, and script-centered group play, sparking widespread interest among gamers and researchers worldwide. However, enthusiasts and researchers have struggled to accurately describe Jubensha , often defaulting to comparisons with genres like murder mystery and live-action role-playing games. This reliance on comparisons hinders efforts to generalize Jubensha or to deconstruct and adapt its unique design components, dynamics of player interaction, and playing experience into other games. This research provides a taxonomy and analysis of Jubensha games, based on a thematic analysis of over 80 Jubensha games accessed through mobile applications and physical copies. The analysis combines the authors’ positionalities as native Chinese and English speakers and lenses from close reading of the games, discourse analysis, and distributed cognition. We provide summative case studies to exemplify our taxonomy, and discuss design implications for Jubensha games for future projects. Our work provides a descriptive tool and vocabulary for researchers and designers to facilitate communication and theorize the evolving Jubensha gaming phenomenon highlighting how gameplay centers collaborative sensemaking. In addition, we argue that the design of game narratives in Jubensha games, including structures in scripts and the evolving performance of players, can be generalized and transferred to the design of a wider range of analog and video games.