Who Killed Sir Redshift: How We Used Gather and AI to Throw a Virtual Murder Mystery Party
Celebrating Wins
Here at Storyblocks, we recently had some major cross-functional accomplishments that required a lot of collaboration and brain power to implement. In the spirit of ‘work hard, play hard’, the Product & Engineering crew wanted to take a moment to celebrate together in recognition of these efforts. Given our remote work setting, we needed a creative way to host a virtual event with an interactive element. I had found a ‘mystery mansion’ template on Gather’s website that I was dying (pun intended) to use, so we decided to organize a virtual murder mystery.
Leaning Into AI
Since we only had a week to create the event, we used AI as much as possible. We generated most of the narrative using ChatGPT, then added a few extra Storyblocks-specific touches. Additionally, most of the text-based clues were drafted with ChatGPT and the ‘photographs’ we used were created using the MidJourney AI tool as well.
Crafting the Experience
1. The Space
Though it’s absolutely possible to create a custom murder mystery space in Gather, we knew that we wanted to use the mystery mansion, which came with built-in rooms and secret passages. We ended up building the narrative and clues around that space. If you want to customize your spatial experience for your own murder mystery event, I recommend doing that first, as the themes and clues can be enriched by the environment your players will be in.
2. The Narrative
We asked ChatGPT ‘can you come up with a murder mystery narrative that takes place in a mansion?’ and it gave us a great multi-paragraph backstory to start with. From there, we asked it to make some alterations, including ‘can you add some unimportant details about the event?’. A few variations of this request gave us a rich backstory with details such as “trays of rare vintage wines and handcrafted cocktails garnished with edible gold leaf” being served at the event prior to the murder. We also added the Shenandoah mountains as the mansion location — a tribute to Northern Virginia, where our home base is located.
3. The Investigator Personas
Depending on the size of your group, you might be able to build out personas for each individual. Our group was too large (~16 people), so we decided to randomly assign people (using ChatGPT of course) to three distinct groups. We asked ChatGPT ‘can you create three distinct groups of investigators?’ and got pretty generic results, so we decided to provide themes that would be easy to put together costumes for. One was a group of recent college grads who wear shirts representing their favorite universities. Another was a group of mediums who wear bright colors. The third was a group of mysterious investigators who wear all black. From there, we tried again, providing the generic themes and requesting unimportant details. ChatGPT provided gems like a pet bat named Midnight for the third group and an “experimental psychedelic rock band” for the second.
4. The Suspects
Again because of our group size, we wanted to limit the number of possible suspects. We asked ChatGPT to give us a list of five suspects with backstories based on the narrative we had already generated, then changed the suspects’ first names to those of leaders involved in the tasks we were celebrating. Once we had a solid draft, we asked ChatGPT to randomly select the murderer from that list.
5. The Rules
We made a rules document outlining basics about the event, including how to interact with objects, the timeline of the event and how to submit guesses. We also noted that there would only be one murderer. Guesses and secondary guesses (in case no one guessed correctly) were submitted by a group-appointed captain using a Google form. We also requested supporting logic for each team’s primary guess, which was a fun detail for our moderators to see. We used the following timeline:
- Intro: ~10 minutes
- Team Discussion + Team Captain Selection: ~5 minutes
- Initial Investigation: 15 minutes
- Team Discussion: ~5 minutes
- Final Investigation: 10 minutes
- Final Discussion + Guess Submission: 10 minutes
- Announcement of Winning Team
6. The Clues
In a traditional game of Clue, timing is a key element: players typically discover clues at a controlled pace. Using Gather as a medium, we had no control over when certain clues were discovered, so we had to account for that with the clues we provided to make identifying the culprit more difficult — but possible. Based on a list of items ChatGPT suggested, we ended up with the following clues:
Eye Witnesses: We came up with 12 eye witnesses (including the suspects) to interact with in Gather. Their avatars were created using this site, then placed in Gather with prompts and notes we primarily created using ChatGPT.
Cell Phone: Missed calls from a suspect could be seen by clicking the phone icon on this phone, which was created using Google Drawings
Custom Gather Objects (created using Krita):
- A pen with a suspect’s company brand was placed at the murder scene
- Blood splatters of various sizes were placed on both ends of a secret passage
- Headphones were placed at the murder scene and, according to an eye witness, belonged to one of the suspects
- A USB on the floor contained a code to unlock a PDF on the victim’s computer
- A diary contained entries mentioning suspicion of one of the suspects
- A surveillance camera, placed in the hallway, showed an image of a suspect leaving the parlor. We edited the image to add text with a timestamp to indicate that this occurred right before the victim was found
Built-in Gather Objects:
- The laptop object provided a locked PDF with suspicious emails
- The note object provided an angry letter from the victim’s daughter
- The document object was used for financial documents, a pawn shop receipt and a ‘grocery list’ that was actually a coded message
- Blueprints linking to a pdf we created with Google Drawings depicted the secret passageways in the space
- A duffel bag placed near one of the suspect included a prompt noting that the bag was full of the victim’s jewels
After generating the content of the text-based clues, we formatted and shared them using Google Drive’s ‘publish to the web’ feature. Players could access these documents by interacting with embedded website objects in Gather. For the locked PDF specifically, we had to drop a link to the PDF in a note object to allow players to interact with the PDF.
Putting it All Together
A few days before the event, two moderators did a walkthrough. Their feedback prompted some slight alterations to the clues to ensure they weren’t too challenging or confusing. This step provided a lot of insight about the difficulty level and flow of the experience.
We created separate Slack channels for each group, as well as an all-participants Slack channel. These channels were used to introduce people to their teammates and team personas ahead of time. They also enabled everyone to communicate when in different Gather rooms during the event.
The day of the murder mystery, we played suspenseful music using Storyblocks’ music library and Gather’s ‘self spotlight’ feature as players gathered in their groups. We then did a brief introduction, a dramatic reading of the narrative, and a run-through of the rules.
Finally, after the players had time to investigate, regroup, then investigate again, we brought everyone together and called for final guesses. In case you were wondering, one group did correctly guess the murderer. More importantly, everyone seemed to have a great time.
Conclusion
Thanks to the powers of AI and Gather, we were able to throw a somewhat complicated event together in a matter of days! When you lean into modern tools, you can really accomplish a lot in a small amount of time.
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