Leaving Mundania (2 page)

Larp can also teach less concrete skills. As a social interaction, it gives players plausible deniability through the ego-saving excuse, “It wasn't me; it was my character,” an excuse that helps people take social chances. For example, some players told me that larp made them more comfortable approaching new people or speaking in front of groups. Because there is something of the player in every character, larp can also serve as a tool of self-reflection. Some players, intentionally and unintentionally, re-create and work through real-life conflicts in larp.

Most of all, larp joins its players into a tightly knit community through shared experience—after all, many bands of larpers have faced “death” together. This community has its own lingo, its own sacred space—the terrain of the game—and its own ritual in the form of the game itself. Thanks to its ethereal, time-bound existence, larp is strictly a “you had to be there” sort of hobby. The game can't be relived, and the anecdotes gamers tell each other afterward sound like inside jokes to anyone who wasn't there. The shared experience of the game creates a strong community linked by two layers of social bonds. Each character has in-game relationships with other characters—their lords, subjects, friends, or enemies—as well as out-of-game relationships with the same group of people. Ask any long-time larper why he or she has been attending the same game for four, eight, or twelve years, and inevitably you'll hear, “What really keeps me coming back is the people.”

I have always had a soft spot in my heart for geek culture, because at core, geeks care deeply about something, and I think that's incredibly cool. Maybe it goes back to my adolescence, which I spent engrossed in fantasy novels and serial mysteries. In middle school, my clique of friends dubbed itself the “Multiplying Fractions Anonymous Group” during a relevant unit in our honors math class, sort of like Alcoholics Anonymous but, obviously, for those addicted to math. In high school, we were not the girls sneaking a drink on Friday nights and
making out with boys. We were the theater nerds who got up early for a cappella choir practice.

I first learned about larp years later from a good friend, Sarah Miles, who had found her roommates on Craigslist. During Sarah's and my weekly
Xena
marathons, she'd talk about these roommates, larpers, and describe with relish the strange implements found in their house—the foam swords and shields, the costuming—and the odd half-performance, half-rules-bound way they had of working out plot points. We both kind of wanted to try it out, a desire fulfilled during the writing of this book. I have never been a gamer. In fact, I strongly dislike competitive games, especially strategy games—I find something pitiless and rage-provoking about the idea of a winner and loser. However, subcultures and performance have long fascinated me, first as a young fiction writer and then as a journalist. The idea of the larpers, with their self-made costumes, collaboratively writing—well, living—the stories of their characters fascinated me. I wanted to know more about this hobby and its participants, and I began researching.

While my first few games didn't fully convince me of larp's charms, over the three years I spent researching and writing this book, the community won me over. Admittedly, I did drink the Kool-Aid (although we called it “wine” and pretended to be drunk afterward), but despite my intoxication with the deeply engaged, quirky species of human, homo pretendus, I hope my account of its oddities, both good and bad, may be trusted.

*
In the United States, larp is often written LARP, since it is an acronym denoting live action role-playing. The word is adaptable—one can larp, play in a larp, go larping, be a larper. Like the acronyms scuba, laser, and radar before it, many think it's time for larp to lose the caps and enter language as a regular, lowercase word, a move that I hope will destigmatize the hobby, making it seem less like unrelatable jargon. The Nordic countries, which have a long-established discourse on larp aesthetics, have already de-capitalized it.

I
am still not sure how I ended up in a fake black corset and glittery red hat listening to a woman in a leather vest tell me about her lost pup—by which she meant her son—who vanished during a chase in a parallel universe.

I'm pretty sure that somehow, Molly Mandlin is responsible.

Before I knocked on Molly Mandlin's door on a fateful day earlier in 2008, I had been to one gaming convention, where I'd seen grown men in lab coats and period reproductions of Revolutionary War uniforms. I'd seen grown women in Old West harlot outfits, in medieval corsets, and in plaid shirts with fake rifles à la Annie Oakley. But I'd felt a sort of vague confusion about the whole process, tinged, perhaps, with contempt that adults could spend their free time on something so frivolous as dress-up.

Meeting Molly at her apartment changed all that. She wasn't the first larper I'd met, although she was, perhaps, the most passionate. She lived in Brooklyn with Rob, her boyfriend of five years, and their apartment was crammed with gamers' treasures—old copies of games such as Heroes and Dungeons & Dragons and piles of fanzines for various role-playing games. A box filled with mystery novels sat in front of a bookcase, the books on those shelves obscured by Rob's collection of Nerf guns.

Molly invited me into their small living room, and I sat on the couch while she pulled up her rolling desk chair. The armchair next to us had been rendered functionless by a pile of carefully arranged stuffed animals, including two linen rag dolls maybe two and a half feet tall that sat on the lap of a large bear. The dolls' faces were blank except for noses made from a gathered knot of fabric. One wore a purple outfit, the other a blue one—not doll clothing but real children's clothing. Both dolls had on real black wigs topped by headbands attached to bunny ears. Within five minutes of my arrival, Molly was introducing me to the dolls, who represent the twins Kayleel and Thea (short for Athena), the children of Andromache, the futuristic character that Molly had dreamed up as part of a game. We jumped into the first of many conversations about her characters.

Andromache was an assassin trained by the government of a technologically advanced world in which ancient Greek culture had become the prevalent world culture. In what I learned was typical gamer fashion, Molly had plenty to say about her character.

After she shared the basics of Andromache's story with me, Molly pulled a clear plastic suitcase out from under the desk in the den and unzipped it, revealing many tiny costumes, each one in its own plastic bag. She unzipped one labeled “Halloween costume” and showed me a gauzy tutu and some cat ears on a headband. The twins, I learned, were ballerina cats this year for Halloween. Each twin had her own lunchbox, outfits, and toys.

I don't know what I expected, but certainly not props of this specificity, displayed with what was unmistakably pride mingled with self-consciousness. Molly knew that not everyone would understand her gaming life, but she pursued it anyway because it was her passion. I
might not understand why yet, but I could respect that. Toward the end of our five-hour interview, Molly showed me the baby book she had made for the twins during the time that Andromache was pregnant. It had little handprints and footprints in it, rubber stamped with ink, and handwritten notes from Andromache to her children.

“I know I'm a little too into this stuff,” she said.

Molly plays Andromache in a larp called the Avatar System, a game that has two or three sessions each year, primarily during the gaming conventions run by Double Exposure, which also created the game. In between events, characters interact with one another using online forums, and many players post fiction or narration relating to their characters. The Avatar System is set in a fictional world called the Nexus, which exists between all possible realities. For this reason, players can create whatever characters they can imagine—there are vampire slayers, space pirates, sentient computer programs, popes from cartoon worlds, and medieval kings.

Molly began playing Avatar after her then-boyfriend brought her to a Double Exposure convention, and soon she was hooked. After they broke up, Molly says, the community reached out to keep her involved in the game. One player, Dave Stern, even drove into Manhattan from New Jersey to pick her up for conventions.

Over the next few months and several visits to her apartment, I try to unravel exactly what a bright, if unconventional, woman like Molly gets out of larp.

At heart, Molly is a storyteller. She doesn't simply use the various characters she plays in games to tell stories. Like many other larpers, she turns every aspect of her life into a story. She tells me about her fibromyalgia, a chronic condition characterized by body pain, how it went undiagnosed for many years: the terrible dry mouth, fatigue, and bone pain that make small things like leaving the house to go shopping very difficult. She tells me about Jason, her former fiancé whom she met over the Internet and then discarded after he bilked her out of $15,000, hocking her platinum engagement ring to defray the debt. She tells me about teaching in the South Bronx before her fibro became so bad that she had to stop working, about the children's books she hopes to write and illustrate. Her paintings, some abstract,
some representational, all representing no small measure of talent, are strewn across the apartment. She tells me the story of her father, a surplus buyer who purchases large quantities of odd things from auctions and surplus sales, how in her childhood he once bought so many flats of rubber bands that she and her brother jumped on them like a trampoline when they visited the warehouse. She tells me about the giant wheels of Camembert that her father bought and the small ice cream fridge that housed them, how she and her brother ate Camembert sandwiches at school for many months.

I learn the surprisingly innovative backstories of the strong female characters Molly has dreamed up. I hear about Polly Rogers, an Aztec pirate queen whose mother married a conquistador and then abandoned her. Molly never played Polly because she developed the character so much in her mind that she felt there was nothing left to discover in-game, nowhere for the character to grow. Molly's second Avatar character, Echo, is a cyberpunk kid with a rare disease that her super-smart parents cured by inventing nano-robots. And it is these nano-robots that give Echo superpowers. When I ask, Molly agrees that Echo's family is an idealized version of her own; Molly's parents are divorced, but Echo's parents stayed together until a powerful corporation abducted them. Echo's parents were able to cure their daughter of a debilitating illness, but Molly's parents, through no fault of their own, could not do the same, and for a long time, chalked Molly's fatigue up to weakness of character.

Echo and Polly Rogers aside, Andromache is the center of Molly's fantasy life, a life that Molly puts a great deal of energy into developing, posting as Andromache regularly on the Avatar System's in-character online forum. She shows me the Barbie doll she made over to look like Andromache and a comic book cover with a woman in leather on it, one that Molly says resembles Andromache.

Andromache does not look like Molly. Although they are around the same age, in their early thirties, Andromache is tall and Amazonian, with brown, Mediterranean skin, large breasts, an anatomically impossible waist, and long, cascading blue-black hair. Molly is pale and wears her straight brown hair pulled into a small bun or ponytail. She says that her generously proportioned figure represents one
of the many side effects of fibromyalgia—she feels too crummy to exercise.

When she gets a new cane, she shows that to me, too, and says she always used a hand-me-down cane and finally decided to get one for herself. The cane is made of anodized aluminum and is colored electric turquoise. Its laser-etched floral pattern glints silver in the sunlight.

As the big summer gaming convention DEXCON approaches, we begin to talk about me. I need help. I've never done this before. My imagination is rusty from a year of graduate work, so I will need to rev it back to life. If I'm going to write about larp and discover its draw, then I need to try it, both to get inside the community and to decipher the seemingly endless amount of jargon—IC, OOG, GM, meta-gaming, munchkin, min-maxer. At least, that's what I tell myself, that I'm doing this because it's part of the job.

My fascination with larp is a little hard to explain. As a child I loved the Arthurian legends, medieval fantasy novels, and adventure films, solitary activities that are made into communal ones through the interactive storytelling of larp. Maybe larp speaks to my failed theater aspirations in high school, where I was a perennial chorus member and never the lead actress I wanted to be. Maybe larp fascinates me because I stubbornly like things that are weird, DIY, or on the fringes of the cultural landscape—experimental literature, soap making, fermented pickles, obscure Japanese film. Perhaps my larp fetish derives from jealousy that there are others in this world who can join a community without making a sardonic joke of themselves.