3 lessons every jubensha teaches us
I love jubensha for many reasons. It’s a combination of my favourite things: social deception, role play, storytelling, mystery, deduction, and puzzle-solving. These elements can be found in many other well-established mediums (see my other posts about this), but there are some things jubensha gives us that none of the others can.
At its core, jubensha is a story told through multiple perspectives. Although some books, movies, or video games use this format very well, none can achieve the same effect as jubensha because jubensha’s capacity for immersion is unmatched. The immersion into a multi-POV story makes a world of difference. It even teaches us a thing or two about how to navigate our lives with a little less egocentrism. Here are the three ways it does so:
You must rely on others to see the full picture and/or solve the mystery.
We may attribute the revolutionary inventions, beautiful artworks, and breakthrough scientific discoveries to a single person, but they are always built on the foundations and influence of others, both past achievements and contemporary exchanges. The illusion that a single person achieves great things is misleading at best and harmful at worst. In jubensha, no player holds all the keys to solve the game, and like reality, working together (as much as you can with all the secrets in the way) is the only way you can move forward.
Your (character’s) biases are challenged by other characters, and vice versa.
Unreliable narrator is a common feature of character scripts. Your character’s perspective colours everything they see, hear, and believes, leading to tense and interesting interactions during gameplay. Perhaps your character thinks your spouse is cheating on you, but in fact they are secretly the phantom thief that’s been terrorizing museums lately. Or maybe your best friend, who you’ve known from childhood and you trust implicitly, has a hidden dark side that your character can’t wrap their head around until the irrefutable evidence surfaces over the course of the game.
In jubensha, your character’s beliefs and perceptions are challenged not by the script, but through interaction with other players who have beliefs and perceptions of their own. Who’s right and who’s wrong? My favourite jubensha mirror real life in this respect: the “truth” never exists in a vacuum, but is always interpreted through the beholder. Jubensha teaches us that we all have biases we must acknowledge and that we should invite others to challenge our even deeply held beliefs.
You are the main character of your own story, but a side character in everyone else’s.
It’s sometimes easy to forget that other people have lives, dreams, fears, and hopes just as vivid as your own. When you step into a character in a jubensha game, you’re grabbing one of multiple scripts that each contain roughly the same amount of material. Your fellow players are navigating the game with goals that might be different than your own, even if you’re working on solving the same mystery. It’s a reminder to be a little more considerate to others both in game and in real life, that everyone has their own inner lives they’re working through.
These are the reasons I want more stories to be told through jubensha as a storytelling medium. I might be waxing a little too philosophical about a type of game that is also just pure fun. But the best fictional experiences are ones that reflect the reality we live in. I never fully understood McLuhan’s quote about how “the medium is the message,” but when it comes to jubensha, I have a new appreciation for how the medium itself is as important as the story it’s trying to tell.
