dave submitted a story about an interactive game that breaks the usual gaming mold. The game is called The Great Escape:

This medieval-looking electric chair sits deep inside an old bank in Madrid. The building has been remodeled to house La Fuga, a real-life role-playing game. Think of La Fuga (The Escape) as a $20 million cross between Halo and laser tag. The goal is simple: Decipher visual riddles to navigate and escape Mazzina, a high tech prison.

The company behind La Fuga is called Négone. It was founded by a sister-and-brother team, network engineer Silvia Garcia Alonso and former investment banker Jorge, who owned a piece of a dotcom that sold to Yahoo! for $400 million. They put their share of the money into live immersive gaming, starting Négone in 2002 and opening La Fuga last October. "There were lots of advances in in-home entertainment," Silvia says, "but in real-world entertainment, there was nothing happening."

A standard first-person shooter was one option, but the duo wanted something more cinematic. "There are certain plots that work again and again," Silvia says. "Finding treasure, a robbery, a big escape. The idea I think we all have when we see these movies is that it would be great to be the main character."

Creating the game presented both physical and intellectual challenges: They needed to erect a maze of steel and exposed concrete, and they needed to build a database to track the progress of each player through the labyrinth. Négone's coders didn't have to worry about writing the sort of physics-simulation software used in videogames, but Silvia says the logic engine - which keeps track of who's where in the building and what they're doing - gave her fits. "For video RPGs, you can use an off-the-shelf game engine, the way EA or Id does," she says. "But there's nothing that could handle all the kinds of data we need to use, so we had to build it ourselves." Now that the Madrid facility is operational, the company is focusing on opening a game center in Manhattan early next year - with plans for 60 more worldwide in the next decade.

I pay 15 euros, set up an account, and receive a navigational unit with a networked PDA and an RFID chip that I strap to my forearm. The chip tracks my progress through the prison.

See some pictures here.