How to Host a Pervasive Game Supporting Face-to-Face Interactions in Live-Action Roleplaying

"You are invited to the Bauer mansion for dinner and to help solve a murder." Invitations like this one have been sent out by the millions, inviting friends and family to a multiplayer murder mystery party, often from the best-selling "How to Host a Murder" series of games. At these parties the players gather at a friend's house for dinner imagining it to be a mansion in the 1930's. The party goers often dress up and interact as characters and spend an enjoyable evening together solving a murder mystery. Multi-player games such as these are based on social interactions as the key feature contributing to the players’ enjoyment. Although the earliest documented live-action variants of board games date back to 735AD, when games of chess were played with real people, they remained rare until recently. In the last two decades live versions of roleplaying games such as Hasbro's Dungeons and Dragons and White Wolf's Vampire, the Masquerade have become extremely popular, according to our own estimates there are over 100,000 regular players of live-action roleplaying (LARP) games worldwide. Multi-player and LARP games have evolved over time to incorporate generally available technology. Originally these games were traditional board games such as Clue or 221B Baker Street. With the general acceptance of videocassette recorders (VCR) these games adopted the television and the VCR as support tools that could interact with the players and enhance the realism of the game. Today we are surrounded by a wide array of computing and communication technologies. It is a widely held notion that we are moving towards a networked world of possibly billions of interconnected intelligent devices that permeate the physical world. This vision, which is referred to as Pervasive Computing, leads to a world where the physical and digital space fuse together, where data and information diffuse throughout every part of the physical world. We are interested in how pervasive technology can be incorporated into multi-player LARP games and what effect this will have on the character and nature of games. We define a Pervasive Game as a LARP game that is augmented with computing and communication technology in a way that combines the physical and digital space together. In a Pervasive Game, the technology is not the focus of the game but rather the technology supports the game. Although technology is ubiquitous in a Pervasive Game, its role is a supporting one and thus the technology is kept as unobtrusive as possible. In this paper we are proposing a game, Pervasive Clue, played with personal digital assistants (PDAs) that will support game play and sociability in the game. We intend to use Pervasive Clue