Tangible Pleasures of Pervasive Role-Playing

Markus Montola's paper argues that pervasive role-playing, which extends role-play beyond the magic circle of a game into everyday urban environments, offers a distinctive form of pleasure that sets it apart from tabletop, live-action, and online role-playing. Its central claim is that the appeal of this practice rests on tangible, unmediated immersion in a physical fictional world, along with the experimental thrill of social interaction with outsiders who are unaware a game is underway. The author situates the form within a lineage that includes assassin games and World of Darkness-style play, and defines role-playing through three elements: an interactive process of world-building, a governing power structure, and anthropomorphic characters.

The analysis draws on pervasive larps such as Prosopopeia, Momentum, and Där vi föll, examining how tangibility, emergence, and social expansion into ordinary settings generate satisfaction. Case examples, including a staged art-gallery encounter, a graveyard tape-recording scene, and a chained-task failure caused by miscalculated coordinates, show how real consequences and unpredictable reactions from unwitting bystanders intensify immersion. Montola concludes that the combination of "real things done for real" and seamless integration with daily life provides a richer design space than traditional methods of social expansion, such as spectatorship or refereeing.

The closing argument extends these observations beyond games proper. Montola suggests that the techniques of spatial and social expansion can enrich ordinary activities such as urban exploration and parkour, and he examines how players come to regard every door as a possible gateway to the game world only after being surprised by emergent content. Designers can cultivate this attentiveness by providing material that accommodates diegetic interpretation without demanding much suspension of disbelief. The paper is grounded in a substantial body of scholarship on role-playing theory, pervasive games, and alternate reality gaming.