Pervasive Larps at Scale: Design Challenges of a Novel Work

This paper by Benjamin Viney examines the design challenges of scaling pervasive live-action role-playing games (larps) to reach wider audiences, and presents INCOMING_TRANSMISSION, a new pervasive game staged in Adelaide, Australia during the four-week Adelaide Fringe 2023 festival. The work situates pervasive larps within the broader pervasive games literature, contrasting their expansion of play across space, time, and social boundaries with location-based mobile games such as Pokémon GO, which reached a peak of 147 million active users. The author argues that pervasive larps remain constrained by cultural stigma around role-playing and by their typically small, infrequent, and resource-intensive productions, as illustrated by the 2006 Stockholm game Prosopopeia Bardo 2: Momentum, which involved only 30 players.

The proposed design addresses these limitations through several strategies. INCOMING_TRANSMISSION uses a staggered start, so players arrive at different session times and are not briefed together, reducing organizer workload and allowing encounters in which participants cannot be certain whether others are players or actors. Rather than offering traditional workshops or character instruction, it immerses players immediately through a secret-agent premise, a visible leaderboard, and point rewards for both completing tasks and reporting rule-breaking peers. Gameplay is structured as "assignments" that range from one-off side tasks to multi-part story missions.

To support scalability, the game relies on semi-automated game mastering, in which metrics gathered during play determine which assignments each player receives, with reliable and role-play-skilled participants assigned more critical or collaborative missions. The paper presents this as a model for reconciling the intimacy of larp with the reach of mobile games, though its findings are framed as a design proposal rather than an empirical evaluation.