thread: 2005-04-06 : The Whole Point
On 2005-04-12, Matthijs wrote:
I'm currently in a campaign where at the end of each session, each player gets a real-life challenge from one of the other players. It's experimental and fairly free-form, and we're not really sure what we're doing. (We're also not allowed to talk about it much, so I can't go into details, but will do so if/when the group okays it.)
We've been joking about how this sounds like the start of a bad movie - "it started as a harmless game, but soon became deadly serious as the young men crossed the border between fiction and reality".
I agree with Chris that it's important that games have state what they're about - and in the case of games specifically made for the purpose of changing the players' real-life behaviour, it's an ethical duty. The problem, of course, is that games have been - more or less unintentionally - doing this for years, with very little critical thought or planning by designers.
(Within the Scandinavian LARP community, there's been a lot of thought on social experimentation and change through games such as the LARP "Panopticorp".)
