Live Role-Playing Games: Implications for Ubiquitous Computer Game Interfaces

Live role-playing (LRP) games stand as powerful models for the design of ubiquitous computer 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 live role-playing games, specifically aspects of costume, set design and props, we suggest principles for the design of interfaces to ubiquitous computer games.