Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

Summary

Augmented Reality (AR) blends digital and real-world elements that possess the potential to transform the end-user gaming experience. This study presents The Paradox of the Lunatic game featuring an innovative game-experience implemented in the form of a collaborative psychological horror. The gameplay processes promote active collaboration, puzzle solving and a narrative-driven mystery unfolding in a real-world setting. The experience integrates real-world exploration, AR, a web app, all elements that transform real-life environments into interactive narrative spaces. To evaluate player experience, we conducted playtesting, followed by semi-structured interviews. Findings confirmed the game’s immersive nature, emphasizing collaborative mechanics and spatial storytelling. However, testers suggested environmental refinement to deepen engagement. This research demonstrates the AR’s potential beyond conventional formats, showcasing how psychological horror games can create dynamic, interactive experiences that blend technology, teamwork, and narrative-driven mystery.

Objective

In general, Augmented Reality (AR) technologies blend digital elements with real-world environments, enhancing immersion and interactivity in gaming while facilitating storytelling, exploration, and problem-solving[1]. In addition, collaborative interactions in AR games engage players with virtual objects in real-time, sometimes encouraging physical activity[2]. Meanwhile, AR games offer new ways to explore historical sites and museums[3] and relive historical events in engaging ways[4]. 

This study explores a different game experience approach in contrast to typical AR games and serious-game applications featured in education, cultural heritage, and well-being. The experience is implemented through an interactive, narrative-driven mystery unfolding in a real-world setting. Designed as a collaborative psychological horror experience, the game immerses players in a fictional mystery inspired by the site’s atmosphere, requiring them to investigate and solve puzzles. The environment actively shapes the experience, making physical exploration an essential gameplay element. Thus, this study explores the research question: 

What is the influence of a collaborative psychological horror AR gaming experience in a real-world setting on players’ experience?

Method

Inspired by video games such as Alice: Madness Returns, which incorporate psychological depth and puzzle-solving mechanics, we designed The Paradox of the Lunatic, an AR gaming experience set in the Old Psychiatric Hospital of Corfu. The game invites players to uncover unsettling truths through fragmented memories and psychological experiments. Although it takes place in a real-world location, its story is fictional, drawing inspiration from the site’s history. Players must solve puzzles and investigate hidden secrets, creating an unsettling yet engaging atmosphere.

The experience leverages AR technology and a web app to create and sustain an immersive, collaborative journey that blends the physical and virtual worlds. Players take on distinct roles and must work together to solve puzzles. These puzzles require both players’ input to progress the story and unlock new locations. The web app plays a crucial role, offering clues, managing inventory, and shaping the unfolding mystery through AR interaction and problem-solving, blending the natural and the virtual environment to a high degree. This feature allows the game to deepen further and implement scenarios that move beyond the typical point-identify-reveal function of AR. Here each element can fire-up a new transmedia scenario that helps players explore the narrative space of the main story interactively through their actions and collaborative puzzle-solving abilities. This innovative characteristic can be considered as a mechanism that may allow games to expand their narrative breadth and depth. 

The game was developed using web technologies. Playtesting was conducted, using a qualitative approach, and confirmed the game’s effectiveness, with feedback highlighting areas for further immersion improvements.

Conclusion 

We designed The Paradox of the Lunatic, an AR gaming experience set in the Old Psychiatric Hospital of Corfu, aiming to immerse players in a fictional mystery inspired by the site’s atmosphere. The game’s evaluation results confirmed the immersive nature of the experience, with play-testes engaging deeply in the story and puzzle-solving mechanics. However, further environmental improvements could enhance immersion. These findings highlight the potential of AR gaming beyond traditional formats, demonstrating how interactive storytelling and location-based experiences can create engaging, dynamic narratives.

References

1. Sorot,A., Kalia,A., Kumar,A.,Singla,A.,Kumar,A.,&Sharma, K. (2024). AR and VR are Transforming Video Game World: A Comprehensive Review. In 2024 International Conference on Electrical Electronics and Computing Technologies (1), pp. 1-6. IEEE.
2. Vidal-Balea,A.,Blanco-Novoa,Ó.,Fraga-Lamas,P.,&Fernández-Caramés,T.M. (2021). Developing the next generation of augmented reality games for pediatric healthcare: an open-source collaborative framework based on ARCore for implementing teaching, training and monitoring applications. Sensors, 21(5), 1865.
3. Haahr,M.,&Wiil,P.H.(2022). A lens to the past: using site-specific augmented reality for historical interpretation. In Joint International Conference on Serious Games  259-265. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
4. Hsin-Ju,W.A.N.G.,&Ju-Ling,S.H.I.H. (2023). Develop and Analysis of Educational Board Game on Cultural Cognition. In International Conference on Computers in Education.