When talking about Interactive Literature games and boffer games, for many years, I have been using five “scales”. Each of these scales refers to an aspect of the external game design itself, not the setting or the moment-to-moment gameplay.
This way of categorizing larps is based on conversations and observations I had mostly in the mid-2000s, when the divide between the types of games run at Intercon and traditional boffer campaign games was much larger. I think there’s a lot of interesting games to be found at various points along each of these scales, and many games exist at multiple parts on the same scale within the same game (e.g. a game that uses card-based mechanics for combat, and physical locks to represent lockpicking)
Shadows of Imagination 