Live Role-Playing Games: Implications for Pervasive Gaming

Live role-playing (LRP) games stand as powerful metaphorical models for the various digital and ubiquitous forms of entertainment that gather under the term pervasive games. Offering what can be regarded as the holy grail of interactive entertainment – the fully immersive experience – LRP games provide a tangible and distributed interface to a gaming activity that is emergent, improvised, collaboratively and socially created, and have the immediacy of personal experience. Supported by studies of LRP games, specifically aspects of costume, set design and props, we outline the interface culture specific to LRP and in which ways this culture may inform the design of pervasive games.