Play it for Real: Sustained Seamless Life/Game Merger in Momentum

"Play it for Real" examines Momentum, a five-week pervasive live action role-playing game staged in Stockholm in 2006, and asks what sustained, fully seamless merging of play with everyday life demands of its designers and players. The authors pursue a dual purpose: a proof-of-concept for "extreme" pervasive gaming that uses fictional content and fabricated clues to question consensus reality, and a practical evaluation of long-duration seamless play. Their analysis centers on three challenges: pacing the experience across an extended period, enabling player interruptibility through a possession-based role-taking model, and sustaining continuous run-time gamemastering, which proved labor-intensive and required careful management of narrative coherence.

The game told players that the fiction was reality and expected them to role-play in the physical world, supported by real-time gamemastering through controllers and an orchestration tool. Seamlessness performed well at the outset and during the high-intensity weekend, but produced mixed signals, impaired players' ability to reflect on the game, and led to exhaustion. Over 90 percent of participants reported feeling guilty about not playing enough, a striking indicator of the pressure the design exerted. The authors conclude that runtime game mastering was indispensable and that seamlessness offers substantial benefits, though fully concealing the game introduces serious new difficulties.

Ultimately, the authors judge Momentum to have been too seamless, largely because of its extended duration, even after seamlessness had already been moderated relative to their earlier work, "Där vi föll." They propose treating seamlessness as a flexible design principle rather than a rigid rule, and they note that ethical considerations for pervasive games remain an underdeveloped field. The paper's contribution lies in its candid documentation of the trade-offs involved in extended seamless play, and it situates these findings within the broader literature on live role-playing, pervasive gaming, and game design.