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Prosopopeia: experiences from a pervasive Larp

Published: 14 June 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Live action role playing, Larp, is a play genre that so far has received little attention from the game studies community. However, the Live action role playing community is perhaps the most interesting role play community of all in its intense focus on role-taking, improvisation, and immersion. Furthermore, Larping has been extensively used for serious purposes, both for crisis training and psychological treatment.In this paper, we focus on Pervasive Larp, Larp events that are staged in the real world and where both the people and the objects of the real world have a direct role in the game. This is a relatively novel variant of Larping, which poses higher demands on technology support than traditional Larps. We report on the experiences from designing and staging Prosopopeia, a pervasive Larp event based on an alternate reality aesthetics. In this game, every design choice was informed by the wish to keep the game as close to reality as possible. We conclude that the approach is indeed both possible and promising, and identify some suggestions for improvements.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ACE '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGCHI international conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology
June 2006
572 pages
ISBN:1595933808
DOI:10.1145/1178823
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 14 June 2006

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Author Tags

  1. alternate reality game
  2. live role play
  3. pervasive computing
  4. pervasive game

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Methodological considerations of technology co-design with families and design implications on mediating family connectedness from empirical researchHumanities and Social Sciences Communications10.1057/s41599-024-04043-911:1Online publication date: 23-Nov-2024
  • (2023)Tracing the Impact of the Digital Virtual Ludic on Immersive Theatre: A Case of Theatre GamificationActa Ludologica10.34135/actaludologica.2023-6-1.4-276:1(4-27)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2023
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  • (2021)Deliberating Data-Driven Societies Through Live Action Role PlayProceedings of the 2021 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3461778.3462028(1726-1738)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2021
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