Live Action Role-Playing Games

Abstract

Live action role-playing games share a range of characteristics with massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Because these games have existed for more than 20 years, players of these games have a substantial amount of experience in handling issues pertinent to MMOGs. Survey and review of live action role-playing games, whose participant count can be in the thousands, reveal that features such as size, theme, game master-to-player ratio, and others interact to form complex systems that require several different groups of control tools to manage. The way that these games are managed offers a variety of venues for further research into how these management techniques can be applied to MMOGs.

Can massively multiplayer online gaming environments support team training?

“…The core of a LARP is role playing guided by rules (Tychsen, Hitchens, Brolund, & Kavakli, 2006), where players usually have full control of decision making at the character level. LARPs are usually set in a virtual context of fictional reality, and game play is governed or supervised by a game master (the instructor or facilitator).…”

An Investigation of Visual Attention in FPS Computer Gameplay

“…Thus, it applies interdisciplinary research methods from human-computer interaction, computer science, neuroscience, media studies, psychophysiology and psychology to name a few. With this comes a necessary shift in ludology, which has in the past been focused primarily on analyzing games (Juul, 2005;Tychsen, Hitchens, Brolund, & Kavakli, 2006) or establishing a design vocabulary (Church, 1999;Hunicke, LeBlanc, & Zubek, 2004), taxonomies (Lindley, 2003) and ontologies (Zagal, Mateas, Fernandez-Vara, Hochhalter, & Lichti, 2005). Ludology now acknowledges the need to understand cognition, emotion, and goal-oriented behavior of players from a psychological perspective by establishing more rigorous methodologies (Lindley, Nacke, & Sennersten, 2008;Ravaja, et al, 2005).…”

Proto-Acting as a New Concept: Personal Mimicry and the Origins of Role Playing

“…The last thing I list in this part of Figure 2 is a recent surge of interest in role-playing-based games, including board games, live action role-play (LARP) games, and massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) (Tychsen et al 2006;Hitchens and Drachen 2009;Leménager et al 2014;Shulman 2017). They differ from one another in that board games and LARPs take place in the Next, Figure 2 lists pretend play in children as another everyday form of proto-acting (Walton 1990;Lillard 1996;Harris 2000), which I see as the ontogenetic precursor of improvisational acting in adults, mentioned below as a performance form of proto-acting.…”

“…The last thing I list in this part of Figure 2 is a recent surge of interest in role-playing-based games, including board games, live action role-play (LARP) games, and massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) (Tychsen et al 2006;Hitchens and Drachen 2009;Leménager et al 2014;Shulman 2017). They differ from one another in that board games and LARPs take place in the physical world, while MMORPGs take place in a virtual world.…”