On April 1, the Ministry of culture and tourism and other five departments issued the notice on regulating script entertainment business activities (Draft for comments), which incorporated offline “script killing” and “secret room escape” into the supervision as a new business form of script entertainment business activities, and put forward clear requirements.

“Script killing” and “secret room escape” are immersive cultural tourism projects that have sprung up in recent years and are popular with young people. The so-called “immersion” is to attract consumers by enhancing the sense of experience and substitution. With the upgrading of cultural consumption, users’ demand for immersive and experiential cultural products is increasing. Immersive experiential products and projects have become a new business form to further stimulate cultural consumption.

According to the 2020 white paper on the development of China’s immersion industry, the total output value of China’s immersion industry in 2019 was about 4.82 billion yuan. Immersive tourism, immersive performance, immersive Exhibition… The immersive industry almost covers the new consumption field of culture and tourism, showing the potential for vigorous development. The 14th five year plan for cultural and Tourism Development issued by the Ministry of culture and tourism proposes to “encourage the development of new consumption modes such as customization, experience, intelligence and interaction, and create new scenes for immersive tourism experience”, emphasizing the need to cultivate 100 immersive experience projects; The 13th five year plan for the development of national strategic emerging industries formulated in 2016 simply mentioned “adapting to immersive experience”. In just a few years, the immersion industry has developed rapidly with policy support and technology promotion.

However, the immersion industry is still in the initial stage of development and needs to be standardized in management. The notice clarifies the regulatory requirements and responsibilities for the problems in the operation of script killing and secret room escape, and puts forward the normative bottom line, which will effectively promote the healthy and orderly development of the industry.

But for the immersion industry, norms alone are not enough. Lack of creativity and weak sense of cultural experience are the biggest bottlenecks faced by immersive experience projects. Many projects do not excavate the historical and cultural connotation according to the actual situation to create a unique IP, but simply carry out content Patchwork and plot grafting, and the project homogenization is very high. Other projects only use scientific and technological means to show off their cool. They look tall, but in fact they are gorgeous in form and empty in content. A script without story plot and emotional resonance is difficult for consumers to have a good experience and cultural immersion, and there must be no good revisit rate.

Blindly following the trend is also a pain point of immersive experience projects. Some places follow the trend and launch immersive experience products. However, due to the high production cost and long return cycle of high-quality light and shadow show, script killing and performance products, small and medium-sized scenic spots with insufficient strength can only find small teams to write a few scripts and hire a few people to play NPC (non role player). They claim to be immersive tourism experience, which raises the expectations of tourists, but can not give corresponding high-quality experience.

Of course, there are many wonderful works in immersive experience projects. The shooting place of the hit drama “Chang’an 12:00” has been changed to an immersive live game. The site has been built for secondary utilization to escape the circle fire in the secret room. The prospect of this immersive entertainment experience with video entertainment linkage should not be underestimated. High quality film and television IP will be re created by combining immersive drama, interactive experience and other elements of live entertainment, or incubate IP from immersive entertainment and then push film and television, or it will become a new path of immersive industry.

In general, the rapidly rising immersion industry needs to be standardized, more needs strong creative research and development, and introduces more unique innovations in playing methods to make it more cultural. Only in this way can the immersion industry develop healthily and orderly and have huge imagination space.