“Pervasive Game”: Momentum

 

Momentum – Invitation to participate

A punk rocker and a brat sit at a cafe on Stortorget. They carry on an agitated conversation about the Earth First-movement, John Dees angelic language and the experience of returning from the dead. As they leave, they post a note on the ad board covered with something looking like a mix of hieroglyphs and ASCI-code. At the same time, down at Klara Sjö, twenty people have assembled to perform a magic ritual to cleanse the polluted waters, and at the suburb square in Skärholmen, a woman calling herself Huey Newton agitates against the labor market´s discrimination of immigrants.

What would the queer activit Sylvia Rivera do if she found herself alive today? Earth First member David “Gypsy” Chain, who was crushed under a cut down redwood tree in California in 1998 – what would he have to say about the environmental situation of today? What has Ulrich Wessel, Bader-Meinhof terrorist who was blown to pieces at the West German embassy in Stockholm, learnt about non-violent methods after death? What if there would be a route back from the dead for those that never stopped believing that their acts could change the future?

Prosopopeia II, Momentum, is a live-action roleplay staged all over Stockholm during October 2006. Thirty participants play possessed by dead revolutionaries, brought back to life through technoccult methods to continue their struggle for a better world. They use political and magical means to reshape stagnated reality on both sides of the river of death. Through passionate acting, Enochian codes, Hermetic ceremonies and wearable technology they interact with each other, the city and the world beyond. The event explores the boundary between fiction and reality, between dedicated play and the daily lives of the players.

The project is an event for the ‘pervasive extremist’: the primary contract is that the player should act as if everything is real. For the player that wishes so, the game is on for twenty-four hours a day for the whole month.

Prosopopeia is the second and last event staged by the ‘enhanced reality role playing’ showcase within IPerG (Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming). IPerG is a large European research project which researches pervasive games; games that are interwoven with our lives through the items, devices and people that surround us and the places we inhabit.
Through staging numerous game experiments focussing on a range of technology choices as well as design goals, we gradually build both design knowledge and adequate technical support for such games.

More information about Momentum can be found on the Prosopopeia website, www.prosopopeia.se

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