NFC Murder Mystery using NFC smartposters

No need to ask who dunnit, we’ll just straight out tell you. It was Proxama in the UK who, with the Nokia C7, Proxama developed an NFC Murder Mystery event based game to showcase the sheer amount of potential uses NFC could be tailored to. Of course, you and I saw Google IO and the NFC capabilities in games, but that still didn’t show how games could be constructed for offline scenarios like Proxama’s NFC Murder Mystery, which it demoed at the Norfolk Network birthday party. For those who live outside of the UK, Norfolk is a County in East Anglia which is east of London and north of neighboring County Suffolk, full of country farm houses and mansions and perfect for NFC Murder Mystery.

Proxama are a solutions company who have become synonymous with NFC, rewards and payments after working on some high profile gigs for BT and MasterCard. However, the British company is certainly not limited to financial experiences and have worked on projects as diverse and wide in scope as payments and ticketing, retail experiences utilizing NFC, and information and service discovery apps where you can interact with companies you deal with by securely logging into your account. The company says on its website that it has been working with NFC since 2005, and although the technology is quite a few years older than that, it pretty much sets them apart in the end user solution developer arena. But we are not here to talk about that; we are here to find out about the NFC Murder Mystery game that sounds a lot like Clue…

NFC Murder Mystery game

The great thing about NFC tags is that they are passive and require no power outside of the initiator’s (Nokia C7 in this case) own RF field; or in other words, your NFC-enabled phone sends out a radio signal that contains minute amounts of energy which is enough to power the passive target (NFC tag). Proxama used passive NFC tags to their full potential when constructing its NFC Murder Mystery game by placing multiple clues and tags on smartposters and building the rules of the game to make use of the extra choices that NFC can offer. Around 100 participants played the game and separated out into teams. Armed with only their brains and Nokia C7 (or forensic tools), the teams went searching for clues. When they came across a smartposter, all they needed to do was to tap the poster in a marked NFC hotspot area and they were given an NFC Murder Mystery clue. The NFC Murder Mystery game rules allowed them to return as often as they wished to revisit clues.

On tapping their NFC phone to a smartposter, players were presented with the opportunity to view three pieces of evidence. Once a choice had been made they would no longer be able to view the other articles of evidence. According to the game makers, this increased the variety of clues that each team viewed and allowed for deduction to happen in different ways to try and find out who did what and where. When it was time for the final accusal, teams went back to the starting point of the game and accused with a tap of their phone on the picture of the potentially guilty party and to solve the NFC Murder Mystery.

What the NFC Murder Mystery game achieved

Reactions to the NFC Murder Mystery game were by all accounts very positive. Business owners understood that they could construct immersive and interesting new ways to engage with their customers using NFC. Poxama have threatened more NFC fun and we can’t wait to see how they top NFC Murder Mystery. With the cost of posters and tags being so low, developing a solution or campaign like the NFC Murder Mystery is really only limited by your creativity.