In a Way, Everyone LARPs

Have you ever told a lie over and over again that you yourself had been convinced by? You are role playing. You didn’t get that girl, you didn’t get that hole in your pants saving a baby from a burning building, and Dan isn’t short for Danger is it? The truth is bland, its mild, it’s a cucumber on a saltine. This is why we lie. We need to escape the bleak truths of our self image and create a facade, a screen, a mask, with made up tales of calamitous self indulgence. No, not everybody does this to extremes, but face it: you lie, and you like it, or you don’t, but you can’t stop.

I think that this is something that is deeply seeded in our generation, or maybe just me. My adolescence was spent surrounded by fictitious worlds. Everything from Super Mario to “Sesame Street” filled my young mind with false hopes of the real world I would soon enter. It’s easy to see why a need for a happier, altered universe would arise. Life as a youngster can get boring, and somewhere between begging my parents for an ant farm, and begging my parents for a flame thrower they settled on a Nintendo. I, like most kids, decided that the rest of my days would be spent trying to become the wizard, even if it meant hanging out with Fred Savage.

With a video game you have to work hard to win. Hours upon hours of mindless repetition to finally cross the bridge, get the hammer, and save the princess, and all this work to achieve the ten note fanfare awarding your victory. You become consumed by the game. It is almost as if you need to be in a different world to focus on the game. Eyes glazed over, mouth wide open staring at the TV, I think the reason you have to blow into a Nintendo to make it work is because with that breath Nintendo takes a part of your soul, only to return at the game over screen. Nintendo transcends just the gray square of gaming pleasure. Its skewed version of the real engulfs the player by making attaching (expensive) controls that bring the virtual gaming experience to new and unmatched heights. The zapper, the power glove (crap), and the power pad. Much like C and C Music Factory, I too “got the power.” In my case, “I got the power” pad.

Nintendo was surpassing reality, and so was I. I was making my own world, not unlike the LARP kids; in my mind I was a track all-star. I could triple jump, hurtle, sprint, and long-distance run. On the power pad I was a virtual Bruce Gener. My eight-bit, 12-color dreams were shattered though, when I found myself on minute 13 on the mile run in sixth grade. What drag reality is.

I was leaving reality in a not so healthy way. I wasn’t being honest with myself and separating the game from reality. I guess that’s what it comes down to. That is what makes the LARP kids special; they know they want to escape reality, just like everybody else, so why not just do it for a night, have some fun pretending to be some one else for awhile then go back to your normal life having satisfied your desire to escape.

The LARP kids are aware that they are being goofed on, and seem to goof on each other too, but they are very honest about what they are doing. They escape in a way that everyone can see and ridicule, but what they are doing is being up front about something most people do anyway and hide away, tucked in the pockets of the character they have contrived for you. I think Billy Joel wrote a song about this: “The Stranger.”

Yes I know some kids got married as their LARP characters, and you can read what Jake Drum found out in the LARP article, but those piratical people are the extreme. From my time with them they are all pretty normal kids out having a good time on a Sunday night.

Lighting Bolt,

Dan Boardman

Photo Editor