ABSTRACT
In the fall of 2006, players in Stockholm immersed themselves into the world of Momentum, a “live action role playing” game (LARP) that required players to embody roles of various historic characters. Moving seamlessly between their everyday lives and the world of the game by using the city as the game space, players used specially designed mobile devices to navigate to sites within the city where they were able to communicate with the dead and perform rituals that would invoke the powers of the other side. The motto of the game, as in most LARPs, is that players were to “play it as if it is real.” As players progressed in this game world, the administrators of the game were less hands-on in guiding them to these significant locations, letting the players figure out which items in the environment were clues and which were not. This led to significant interplay between the realm of the game and the realm of everyday life. As Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola write about the game:
The players could never tell who was playing and who was not . . . Sometimes outsiders were presented in a way suggesting that they might be players, and sometimes such outsiders had actually been instructed to act in some way when encountered by players. As the players did not know where the ordinary ended and the game began, the protection offered by the magic circle waned.1
