Dream Park

Dream Park is a science fiction novel by the American writers Larry Niven and Steven Barnes, published in 1981 and set in a futuristic amusement park of the same name.

The park builds games the way a studio builds a film, with actors, scripted events and machines that make the fantasy feel physical, and its players include people from the armed forces, from the entertainment industry and from other countries, all of them in costume and in character. Niven and Barnes alternate between the game as the players experience it, complete with the dice rolls and character records it is modelled on, and the investigation happening outside the fiction, where a motive has to be found among people who are pretending to be somebody else. Griffin's own position is awkward because the park cannot afford to stop the show, which gives the book its pressure: the crime has to be solved inside the performance. The novel was nominated for the Locus Award in 1982 and began a series that continued with The Barsoom Project, The California Voodoo Game and The Moon Maze Game; it was written before the term live action role-playing existed, and groups of players have used its name and its ideas since.