Leaving Mundania

by Lizzie Stark

  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.

  Rob and Molly advise me over several visits. Rob is a couple years older than Molly, in his mid-thirties, a tall black man with a quiet, unassuming demeanor and a subtle, sarcastic sense of humor so dry that it sometimes passes over my head. He installs computer software, and he had met Molly at Avatar, which he has been playing for upward of ten years. He based his character, Zane, on The Prisoner, a 1960s TV show starting Patrick McGoohan. Talking to me about Zane made Rob nervous because he had plots in motion that wouldn’t come to fruition for years, and he worried that my book would come out before he was able to spring his various traps.

  A cadre of larp veterans in addition to Rob and Molly offered me suggestions on what sort of character to create. I was to choose a genre that spoke to me, that I knew backward and forward, for my first character, to give in to the secret fantasies I harbored about myself while huddled under the sheets with a book as a child. My feminist sensibility recoiled at my first thought—a princess—so I had to delve deeper.

  I had my character’s name before I had anything else: Verva Malone. It inexplicably popped into my head and stuck. The whole point of larp is to play pretend, to be someone I usually didn’t get to be, so a journalist was out. I opted for the next best thing: a private eye. I intended to report as I larped, and clearly a private eye would have an in-character reason to carry a notebook.

  The more I imagined Verva as a private eye, the more it made sense. The first books I ever liked on my own came from the Nancy Drew series, which I read so voraciously that my mother rationed books while we were on family vacation. I’d loved detectives my whole life, from Sherlock Holmes to film noir to the pulpy paperbacks I read guiltily while in a graduate program for literary fiction.

  Molly scoured the Internet for private eye outfits to use as models, and together we came up with a costume concept. She lent me a beige clutch handbag and the four inch purple heels she could no longer wear but loved. Rob talked to me about Verva, where she was from (California), and how she arrived in the Nexus (mysterious explosion).

  The week before the convention, I scoured costume shops in New York for long strands of fake pearls, a toy pistol, and gloves. I burned hours on eBay searching for the perfect cloche hat but had to settle for a cheap flapper rendition bought at a costume store. I even read a Raymond Chandler novel to get myself in the proper mindset.

  Finally, Wednesday, July 16 arrived and DEXCON 11 began with great fanfare at the East Brunswick Hilton in New Jersey. Molly sat between Rob and me at a round table in one of the hotel’s ballrooms. Perhaps two hundred of the one-thousand-plus convention goers who would arrive over the course of the weekend sat around tables covered by white tablecloths with their chairs pushed back, sated from the all-you-could-eat buffet. Not everyone was a larper, per se, but all these people were gamers, and the crowd definitely had a self-selected look. There were reedy young men with ponytails, rotund women poured into their jeans, men representing the so-called fatbeard contingency, spindly young women of the Goth persuasion, middle-aged bald bikers in leather jackets and military hats, and many people of average build in black shirts with kicky slogans like “Joss Whedon is my master now.” As a diehard fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I related to that sentiment.

  Over the course of the five-day convention, these people would collectively play a jillion rounds of Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games, war games with hand-painted miniatures, collectible card games such as Magic: The Gathering, badminton, trivia games, Monopoly, Risk, and more. Over twenty different larps would also run. Vincent Salzillo
, president of Double Exposure, the company that ran the conventions and the Avatar System, even put together a puzzle with one clue on each convention-goer’s badge.

  Vinny Salzillo had dark brown hair, a Burt Reynolds moustache, and an impressively diverse collection of gamer humor T-shirts bearing such slogans as “+20 Shirt of Smiting” and “Everything I know, I learned from gaming.” At conventions, he was famous for wearing bright patterned lounge pants and walking around the convention floor without shoes. He’d grown up in the Bronx, where he attended the Bronx High School of Science, a magnet school where he created and ran his very first games for his fellow students. He’d been a fixture on the sci-fi fandom and gaming convention circuit since the early 1980s, and over time he became known both for writing games and for running theme parties at various conventions. He fondly remembers running thirteen parties over three days at the Disclave convention in 1990, including a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle party that featured pizza bagels and a party inspired by the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that featured the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, which Vinny concocted for the occasion out of dry ice, grain alcohol, blue food coloring, and lemon extract. In 1992, at age twenty-six, he’d run his first DEXCON, keeping up the tradition of theme parties with SUGARFEST, a sweet-themed shindig, and a chocolate fondue party. In 1995 he introduced the Avatar System at Double Exposure’s first DREAMATION convention, which ran that January.

  As I found a seat in the banquet room for my first day at DEXCON, I read the phrase “Are you ready for some football?” scrolling across a scrim at one end of the room in large letters. The tiny script “then you’re in the wrong place” followed. Eventually, the lights dimmed, and a short homemade film that poked gentle fun at gamers played.

  The crowd clapped and cheered at the end of the film, and as the lights were turned up, a group of men walked slowly and reverently through the sea of tables, each holding the edge of a white piece of cloth that draped between them but did not touch the floor. When they reached the front of the room, they attached one side of the fabric to an inverted U of PVC pipe and hoisted the banner high. Various multisided dice were outlined with electrical tape on the banner. Later that evening, many audience members would use similarly shaped bits of plastic to play Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D, as it was commonly abbreviated.

  Molly turned to me. “You know how some people talk about having a flag?” she said. “Well that’s our freak flag. And we actually like to fly it.”

  As men finished raising the flag, the audience burst into applause, and several people shouted “Do-ba! Do-ba!” (pronounced “dough-bah”)—some inside joke from the Avatar System that had not yet been explained to me. Molly wouldn’t tell me what it meant. Evidently, I’d have to hear the origin myth from Michael Smith, an affable high school physics teacher who played a character named Michael Lovious Smith in the Avatar System. And he only told the Do-ba story once per convention.

  Onstage, Vinny officially welcomed everyone to the con and introduced key members of his staff to his audience. He introduced us to the spunky Avonelle Wing, who had a mass of red waves flowing to below her shoulders, and to Kate Beaman-Martinez, who smiled a lot and had a cloud of dark brown hair to match Avonelle’s. They were more than Vinny’s nexts-in-command; the three of them loved one another and lived together in a polyamorous relationship that others sometimes called “the Triad.” Recently, the three of them had become mutually engaged, despite the fact that the law wouldn’t recognize their three-prong union.

  Vinny took turns calling various other staff members to the stage, where they each had a chance to say a few words. Finally, Molly and Rob came up to the microphone. This would be Molly’s first convention on senior staff; she was in charge of Con Suite, the convention space where anyone could come for chips, soda, or Gatorade. Molly took the mic and spent a few minutes telling everyone how excited she was to be helping out. “But seriously, you all are my family,” she concluded, echoing the sentiment of many other staff members.

  “Do-ba do-ba,” the audience shouted back.

  The following evening, Molly began her transformation. She put on black pants and a green tank top with an empire waist; it looked like silk but was made of something cheaper. She slung a black sheet across her, toga-style, and dabbed makeup on the exposed skin of her neck, shoulders, and arms to make her appear more tanned and Mediterranean and less pale and Caucasian. She bundled her brown hair under a wig that was black and curly. Long, shining earrings of linked metal jingled around her ears.

  In less time than it took Molly to put on her earrings, I nervously slithered into my costume. Verva Malone was from a 1920s world, because I liked the that era’s style so much that I sported a bob haircut with bangs during my hours in “mundania,” as larpers occasionally termed real life. I exchanged my sensible reporting clothes for a white collared shirt that had a flimsy black corset-looking thing sewn to it. A large quantity of costume pearls was slung about my neck. I fit my sweaty palms into black lace gloves and perched a red monstrosity with glitter, a bow, and feathers atop my head. I slapped on black eye shadow and red lipstick and slipped my feet into the too-big purple stilettos.

  Molly wore her costume effortlessly. I appeared conspicuously uncomfortable, like a teen in her first bikini.

  As Molly and I left the hotel room, I began to dread what was about to happen. I would not be taking a vacation from myself or working out any personal issues or experiencing catharsis. I looked like a freak; surely, the people downstairs would send mocking glances my way, stares that told me how much I didn’t belong. I had once visited a convicted murderer at Rikers Island while working on a story, but somehow this was scarier; I was about to embarrass myself.

  I nearly turned around in the hallway, but Molly pushed me on. We pressed the button for the elevator and waited.

  “Will other people be in costume down there?” I said.

  “Maybe,” Molly said.

  Great, I thought. We’ll be even more obvious. In the mirror beside the elevators, the ridiculous feathers on my hat were actually quaking.

  Downstairs, people who were largely not in costume milled around the convention floor, a square room on the second floor of the hotel. Tables outlined the perimeter of the room, spread with genre fiction, comic books, and material advertising various larps. Conference rooms branched off the main area, each one home to a different sort of game—painted miniature war gaming, video gaming, board games, and tabletop role-playing games, also called RPGs. Tabletop RPGs were one of larp’s forebears, and the most famous game of the genre is Dungeons & Dragons. Often called paper-and-pencil role-playing games, they tell a story using a complex set of rules, dice, and a lot of imagination.

  As Molly and I stepped onto the floor we ran into Rob’s mother, surrounded by a gaggle of her children and their friends. My shoulders tensed. One of the children gestured to me and told me I looked “hot.” With my esteem temporarily bolstered by that twelve-year-old girl, who I was sure had eminently adult taste in fashion, I left Molly to her conversation and went in search of the other Avatars.

  Unlike other larps at DEXCON, the Avatar System did not occur at a particular place and time. Vinny had originally conceived of it as a downtime activity between other games at the convention. Players roamed the halls in costume or lack thereof; if you wore your Avatar button and had your character card in your pocket, then you were “in-game.” By default, most of the weekend’s Avatar action would take place in the Con Suite, so I headed there first.

  I found Vinny’s fiancée, Avonelle, whom everyone called Avie, in the Con Suite. As the senior game master for the Avatar System, when plot needed to happen, Avie would direct it, describing the scenery to the Avatars and playing any supporting roles—townspeople, baby dragons, deities of the Nexus—that the plot required. Otherwise, players were on their own.

  I pinned the neon pink button Avie gave me to my blouse, which let other players know that I was a newbie or noob, a zero-lev
el character who couldn’t be harmed … for the moment. A visible button signified “that you’re open to role-play,” Avie told me. It sounded vaguely dirty. As soon as my character joined a house, an in-game faction of like-minded players, I would replace the pink button with a white one rimmed in black that bore the insignia of my house in its center.

  I spotted the Avatars by their strange dress and house buttons, walked up to them, and took a deep breath. “What’s going on over here?” I said, in a very un-hard-boiled way.

  One of the women had frizzy copper-red hair belied by its gray roots. She wore a tight leather vest that displayed her décolletage. Earlier in the day I had seen her sporting a pink pin, so I knew she was new. Since then, she had chosen a house—now she wore a button with a yellow cup on it, the symbol of House Galahad, the coterie of the noble and often tortured hero.

  Across the table, another woman wore a backcombed blonde wig with bangs and a black streak at one temple, a high-necked shirt, a vest, and a long green skirt. She carried the hooded skeleton of a small rat. The rat was supposed to carry a scythe, made of a stick attached to some aluminum foil, but the scythe kept falling apart, and she couldn’t keep the rat upright on the table. I understood that she played Susan, from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, the granddaughter of death. The rat in her arms was the Death of Rats, another character from the series. Verva, of course, had never seen any of these people before and was confused about where she was.

  Two men in street clothing also sat at the table with their buttons on. One was rather rotund, and from talking to Molly I knew he played a sentient tree that had recently been turned into a human. The other, very slender, man wore a limp white T-shirt and round glasses. He told me that I didn’t have physical form and that I wouldn’t until I chose a house. To illustrate his point, he moved his staff toward my head and told me that it went right through my body as if I were air.