Blind Spots in Mystery Games

A deep dive into the psychology of witness testimony

Mystery Game News

• Evolving death game Beyond R: Rule Ripper now has a Steam page — wishlist now!

• At long last, GENBA no Kizuna, the Mesozoic murder mystery from the creators of SHINRAI, now has a release date of August 26th!

• Paper Perjury also now has a release date of October 4th, and a few days prior I will be interviewing its developer, James from Paper Cat Games, on the Mystery Gamedev Podcast!

Last but not least, there are some big and exciting updates coming to the Mystery Gamedev website, though I couldn't get them all ready for today's newsletter.

Actually, keen observers (you are checking the website every day, aren’t you?) might have noticed some changes that have already been pushed, but I'll wait until next week to go over them in more detail.

Now, for today's topic — here's another preview from my upcoming book on mystery game design. I don't know for sure if this one will make it into the book (it might get a little too technical at times), but I think it's a really interesting topic and I had a lot of fun writing it, so I'm going to share it with our paid subscribers today:

Blind Spots in Witness Testimony

As we were all hopefully taught in grade school, we perceive information in terms of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Our body parts — eyes, ears, nose, and so on — relay all kinds of sensory information to our brain. And although we might instinctually associate an "eye witness" with seeing an event take place, we should more generally think of a witness as someone who perceives any kind of relevant information through a sensory input.

Consider the questions a witness might be asked: "What did you see? Did you hear a gunshot? Was it hot or cold? Did you smell anything strange at the time?" All of our senses are vital receptors of information, especially when it comes to solving crimes and mysteries of all sorts. You can imagine a situation where you've been kidnapped and forced to wear a blindfold — smelling the scent of the ocean and hearing the ringing of a bell tower might give you enough information to know where you're being held captive.

Smell and taste are especially useful for survival. If you can smell a gas leak or smoke, you'll have enough time to escape it. Smelling, or even tasting, spoiled food lets us know we shouldn't consume it due to harmful bacteria. Touching a hot stove is also quite bad for us, and our senses let us know by giving us a big jolt to forcibly remove our hand as quickly as possible. The disgusting stench of a corpse not only discourages us from touching bacteria, but also from getting too close to the scene of the crime and ending up as the next victim.

Video games make use of our senses much more vividly than books or film could ever dream. You could make an entire game out of the scenario I just described — a dark screen where you must identify your location from sound alone. Games can even simulate spatial sound, where sounds come from different directions in 3D space. Don't forget about the spatial perception of modern VR headsets and hand-grips, or how we can make controllers vibrate (or even overheat — though that's probably unintentional, and not very safe). A fully immersive game world would also be one with full sensory perception.