We think of live role-playing games as dramatic and narrative forms of game play, fiction adventures in which players portray character roles in person and where the physical world is appropriated as part of the game interface. In addition, costume, props, and set-design, play important roles in transforming players into characters and the mundane physical environment into a fantastic (as opposed to realistic) game world.

This highly interactive narrative game-form takes place in a magical and imaginary domain in the cross-section between physical reality and fantastic fiction. It is a social and collective exercise in emergent narrative creation where each participant is important to the design effort as a whole. With no physical division between player, character, and narrative, live role-playing games provide players a kind of immersion that many other interactive experiences promise as a technical goal, but have yet to deliver.Some might argue that this kind of narrative immersion is the holy grail of interactive fiction and computer games, and indeed entertainment, where content is embedded in our physical surround, creating a tangible, ubiquitous, sense-based, context-sensitive, and sensory-intensive interface to the experience.

In studying live role-playing games we are learning important lessons that inform our work in designing new game interfaces. For more information on these studies, and for some definitions of what LRP games are, visit Jennica Falk's webpages.