by Lizzie Stark
Then he put his fist on top of his head and said, “You see a tall man with a staff in swirling brown robes.”
“What?” I said.
He returned his fist to his head. “You see a tall man with a staff in swirling brown robes.”
“What?” I said.
He explained that that was what I saw when I examined him, despite the street clothes he wore. As I soon learned, putting a fist atop one’s head signified an out-of-character remark, as did crossing index and middle fingers and holding a hand aloft as if taking an oath. Many Avatar characters also covered their buttons to go out-of-character, or OOC. Out-of-game, or OOG, was the preferred term for this in other games.
“What’s your name?” he said, back in-game.
“Verva,” I said.
“God bless you,” he said, as if I had sneezed. He laughed. Verva glared. Evidently she didn’t appreciate jokes about her name.
With that brief introduction out of the way, the table turned its attention to the frizzy-haired woman, who talked about her fright and wanted to know where her pup was. By asking questions about her world we established that she was a werewolf who had popped into the Nexus during some sort of chase.
I was next on the agenda. It was like a game of twenty questions. Did I suck blood? No. Did I make giant machines? No. Did I come from a world that had magicians? Yes, but they were charlatans, I think. Was I a princess? Definitely not. I was a detective, for chris-sakes. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. The melancholy elven princess character in need of rescuing was a well-known trope in the larp world, and most players found her tiresome. Was my world called Earth? I thought it probably was. Did I remember how I got here? Well, I was investigating a crime, and the last thing I remember was an explosion. They, the others, the villains, had gotten me. Oh, everyone nodded, they. Who were they?
Lucky for me, I didn’t have to explain too much. Many Avatars new to the Nexus suffer “Nexal amnesia,” a condition that is both plot point and character device. Noobs could selectively remember their origins, which allowed new players, or old players with new characters, to take some time to develop a backstory.
After a half hour or so, I was ready for the action to start. Weren’t we supposed to go on some sort of adventure? Everyone remained seated, exchanging small talk in the personas of their characters. It was like a cocktail party where I wasn’t allowed to talk about the articles I’d read or the movies I’d seen because, of course, Verva hadn’t read or seen anything from the twenty-first century. Over the course of the next hour, I began to realize that these kinds of conversations helped develop character. As the Avatars talked with one another, they swapped stories about their past or about past adventures inside the Nexus. It took me some time to realize that these tales must be partially improvised. When someone asked me whether I had tommy guns in my world, I was flummoxed. Did I want to come from a world with gangsters or not? I hadn’t considered Verva in these terms before.
Over the course of the evening, I discovered that Verva liked logic and hard facts, eschewed emotion, did not believe in God, had a drinking problem, and lit (fake) cigarettes in her cigarette holder to keep her hands busy when she was out of her element.
At DEXCON, Friday night is always black tie night. Years earlier, one of the convention staffers had proposed the event because she wanted a chance to re-wear old bridesmaid dresses, and many of the women of the convention quickly jumped behind her. A tradition was born. Kate and Avie had lots of costumes that they seldom got a chance to wear because they were busy running the convention. Kate, Avie, and Vinny held larp and the Avatar System close to their hearts—they had met and fallen in love with one another through the game. So when Kate and Avie declared a night for dress up, the women of the Avatar System and the convention staff, along with a few of its men, complied. One guy also had “dress like a gamer” night, which ran coincidentally with formal night, and the bulk of the convention members participated, most of them unwittingly.
The council meeting, the only formally scheduled Avatar event, also took place on Friday, so whether players incorporated black tie into costuming or dressed up in their full costumes was a matter of judgment. The council, the governing body of the Nexus, had fifteen members, each one a house representative. Once a year the characters elected a new head of council, a source of great politicking.
The previous year Andromache had been the council head, but some allegedly shady backroom deals fixed the vote at the previous convention in January in favor of Hyran Starseeker, a Han Soloesque rogue.
All fifteen house representatives crammed around a long conference table in one of the smaller rooms off the main convention floor. One of the house reps, a real-life chaplain, wore the long white robes of a holy man and a homemade cardboard pope hat with three cartoon bombs on it—his character, Pope Frig’emall, was a cartoon character who worshipped chaos and venerated bombs. He represented House Lugosi, house of vampires and other baddies. There was also the king of House Avalon, the house of questers, in a blue velvet pirate coat, and Molly as Andromache, representing House Delphi, the enlightened ones. Because Hyran was the head of the council, his player, Bill, sat at one end of the long table, a stuffed otter in a pirate costume standing on the table to his left. By decree of the GMs, Bill was the only player allowed to represent both of his characters, Hyran the rogue and Cutthroat the celestial otter, simultaneously. Cutthroat was a crack shot, a brutally effective pickpocket, and a total slut for chocolate chip cookies. Cutthroat and Hyran belonged to House Lightfoot, the thugs and thieves of the Nexus.
Perhaps two dozen lower-level players lounged around the table, leaning against walls, sitting on the ground, or skulking into the curtained windows that ran along one side of the room.
As players slipped in and out of character, Avie raised one hand like a schoolteacher and yelled above the clamor for everyone to stop. We had some new players here, she said, so would everyone please describe him-or herself.
Many people, particularly those in costume, said, “What you see is what you get,” or something with the gist of “What you see is what you get, but I’m taller and thinner.”
With the formalities dispensed, the council immediately began arguing about Cody, an Avatar played by Kate of Triad fame, who had disappeared at the last convention after terrorists exploded a sort of mystical dirty bomb in the Nexus. Everyone had been driven quite mad by exposure to the substance that the explosion dispersed. Avie reminded everyone that outside of the council chambers where we sat, we’d have to role-play the effects of this madness.
The council decided that the first order of business was to try to reduce the effects of the dirty bomb across the game world. After a lengthy bureaucratic discussion, they decided to try the Doba song, which produced magical effects in the Nexus. The room began to sing “Do-ba, do-ba do, do-ba do—” to the tune of “Kumbaya,” and after we finished, Avie told us that we could feel the dust’s effect reducing, and the mental links that some characters shared snapping back into place. With everyone temporarily sane, except for Pope Frig’emall, who was normally insane and bomb-crazed, the real and very tedious arguing about how to find Cody began.
The house reps and other experienced players argued the way family argues at the Thanksgiving table, spanning the divide between friendly and deadly serious. At times, the brawl had an element of fun to it, an element of “of course you would say that,” but at other times, genuine rancor seemed to come through. In the weeks leading up to the convention, I’d interviewed a large number of Avatar players, and I’d discovered a high concentration of people with complicated family relationships—dead siblings or sick relatives or estranged parents. For example, there was Robert Nolan, a man in his mid-thirties who had been nicknamed Buddha for his affability and corpulence. His mother abandoned him when he was six months old, leaving his grandparents to raise him in New Jersey, while his father worked in Virginia. Robert saw his father only a few weeks each year, until his dad
died of a heart attack when Robert was only fourteen. In some ways, it makes sense that Buddha shaves his eyebrows and head before conventions and dons a custom-made metal head plate with wires protruding from it as he plays Yuri, an emotionally distant Soviet general from a parallel universe. Avie escaped an abusive childhood and moved to New York City in her late teens, arriving with all her worldly possessions in a backpack and all her worldly wealth—$16.75—in her pocket. A single tragedy can’t define someone’s life, but the amount of familial turmoil concentrated in this game, and the close relationships these players formed with each other over years, struck me. Avie found love, in the form of Vinny and Kate, while Buddha found friendship and community.
While the council bickered, a few younger players advised me on which house to pick. I was leaning toward House Fleming, the faction of spies, which Vinny had named for Ian Fleming, author of the 007 books, or toward House Lillith, the house of strong women, traditionally a bastion of girlfriends who had been brought to larp against their wills and currently headed by an ex-army man who played a succubus with admirable commitment to the feminine role.
Hyran yelled for silence from everyone not on the council, and the young avatars grumbled because it was boring to listen to the council argue about who should go where to save Cody. Eventually, someone had the bright idea that the lower-level characters might be able to band together and go on a separate journey that might help Cody. We left the council arguing and departed with Avie and Kate as our GMs, who would run a new scene for us.
This was exciting to me. Instead of sitting around making small talk, Avie and Kate were going to take us on a journey where something would undoubtedly happen. Fifteen or so of us, plus Avie and Kate, still dressed in their ball gowns, meandered down to the second floor of the hotel.
On our trip down, several of the more experienced characters told us that if we all believed enough, when we stepped left we would be in a place to help Cody. Apparently, in the Nexus, a person’s force of will makes them who they are, and pure belief has the power to alter reality.
We sat in a balcony area that overlooked the hotel’s lobby. One side of the balcony led to the parking garage through a glassed hallway.
Avie asked if everyone wanted to “step left,” and we all closed our eyes, stepped left, and were transported to a marble chamber that contained two mysterious doors. We decided to open one of the doors, and Kate dragged a chair behind the real-life door that led into the glassed hallway and stood on it, explaining that when we opened the door we saw a large, burly man. In a cockney accent, he told us we couldn’t go through and then whipped out his cell phone to call the man behind the other door, played by Avie, who stood behind us. As they talked, we took advantage of their distraction and rushed through the hallway doors, trading on the large men’s slowness.
The scene unfurled from there, with Avie and Kate guiding us, describing what we saw, and playing the characters we came across—also termed the NPCs, or nonplayer characters. The players yelled out what they wanted to do, asked questions of the cyborg we met on top of a dais, for example, and announced that they were fiddling with various bits of our imaginary scenery. As the cyborg, played by Kate, called someone on her cell phone, the real-life doors behind her, which led into the hotel’s parking garage, opened, and two young men walked through. The cry went up, “Normal people! Normal people! Let ’em through!” Someone also yelled “Car!” as if we were children playing outdoors on the street.
The vampires, gangsters, samurai, maidens, cartoons, sentient trees turned human, and animated floating sparks parted as sleekly as Superman’s hair and hugged the walls on either side of the hallway. Two men walked through the gauntlet, glancing from side to side and picking up their pace, as the yelling continued, “Normal people! Normal people!”
I was smoking a fake cigarette out of a holder, wearing an old ball gown of my mother’s, and could not, by any stretch of the imagination, consider myself “normal” in this context.
As they exited the hallway, it was “game on!” and in our minds the throne room clicked into place.
The rest of the scene was a blur. We jumped down the hole and found ourselves in a study in sixteenth-century Venice. Some more norms walked through the hallway. “Normal people!” “Car!”
“We’re not normal!” they called to us. “We’re here for the Volkswagen convention.” Oh yeah? I thought. Liking cars seemed the epitome of normal to me at that moment.
We walked across a rainbow leading out of the window of the study to a tree house in the mist. I couldn’t tell the significance of this. Soon, we began to sing the Doba song again, fifteen of us in a hotel hallway, and the magic of the song returned us from wherever we’d been. As we began to regroup to return to the council meeting upstairs, some more people walked through the hallway, and I too took up the call, “Normal people!”
2
Growing Up Gamer
Once upon a time, there was a tall, broad man named Dave Stern, who loved his two boys, Gene and Renny, very much. Each night, Dave would tuck his boys into their bunk beds, sit in their darkened room, and tell them a bedtime story. He rarely read the stories out of a book; rather, he spun tales that his sons were part of. Gene, who was around five, became Garth the Strong, a fighter in armor that gleamed, while Renny, who was three years older, became the great wizard Ralphard. Garth and Ralphard went on many adventures together. They battled orcs and goblins, sought treasure, and saved a princess. Dave described the surroundings in which Ralphard and Garth found themselves and allowed them to describe back to him what they were doing. Mythology, medieval fantasy, and fairy tales inspired Dave. Garth and Ralphard had Lord of the Rings moments, when they fought alongside the Riders of Rohan, and Hansel and Gretel moments, although unlike the titular children, the two boys had a chance to attack the evil witch with swords. Sometimes the boys helped Hercules, who starred in their favorite show, defeat Ares’s most evil monster.
Dave Stern was a practiced storyteller who routinely GMed Dungeons & Dragons for his friends, and he used his storytelling ability to teach his sons morals and problem-solving skills. Gene and Renny vividly remember the time that Ralphard and Garth encountered a man holding a scroll in the middle of the road. The man declared that with this scroll, he’d control Garth and Ralphard’s hometown. As was their custom, Ralphard and Garth attacked the man, destroying him and his scroll. When they returned home, they saw it had been pillaged and burnt. Evidently, the scroll had contained the man’s master plans for taking over the village, and if Garth and Ralphard had talked to the man, instead of killing him, they might have been able to acquire the scroll and prevent this destruction. The lesson that unthinking violence is not the solution to all problems stuck with both of them.
As Renny and Gene grew older, the bedtime stories became bedtime adventures. Dave would arrive in their bedroom with papers, dice, and figurines and would run them through short scenarios. The boys knew what to do with each of these items, since they’d watched their father play Dungeons & Dragons with his friends. The papers, emblazoned with a form, served as their character sheets and contained lists of numerical attributes called statistics, which had been randomly generated with dice and controlled what a character was able to do. Their special skills and equipment were also written down on the sheet, along with any items they found during adventures. The various dice were used in conjunction with the character sheet to determine whether their characters overcame a challenge, such as climbing a cliff or swinging a sword at a monster. The inch-high figurines were used during combat to visualize logistics, with a tiny Garth and Ralphard standing against one or more tiny monsters.
These latter-day bedtime games were not quite as complex as fullblown Dungeons & Dragons but were a step up from the bedtime stories, and they taught the boys the basics of how to role-play. Of course, their father said, if they wanted to play the real Dungeons & Dragons, they would have to read the rule book. Both boys couldn’t wait to play D
&D, thanks to their bedtime games and because they idolized their father as the greatest man alive. They wanted to be like him. Since Renny was older, he was able to read the rule books for himself first. Soon, Dave and Renny began to play together at various sci-fi and gaming conventions.
Conventions were a fixture of life in the Stern household. They frequented many conventions in the tri-state area, but chief among these was Lunacon, a large annual New York convention celebrating the science fiction genre. Lunacon had many attractions, including panels with authors and artists on them, an art gallery, a room for watching anime, and a large dealers’ room where conventioneers could purchase costuming, books, toys, and many other items. On the fringes of the convention there was a small area for playing games: role-playing games, board games, and card games, which Dave and his wife, a card and board gaming enthusiast, ran. As the joke went, Renny started attending Lunacon as a toddler, while Gene attended his first convention in utero.
Aside from Lunacon, the family attended the yearly series of gaming conventions run in their home state of New Jersey by Double Exposure, as well as several other local conventions. Most of these conventions had one thing in common: RPGA games. The RPGA, the Role-playing Gamers Association, is a group backed by the publisher of the Dungeons & Dragons books, and it allowed players to take their characters from game to game at numerous conventions. The RPGA track offered a couple four-hour slots, with breaks during each day of a convention. During each slot, several short adventures, called modules or mods, would run, and players could pick among them. Only the official rules, as written in the Dungeons & Dragons rule books, were allowed. “Homebrew” rules, rules that a GM might bend, say, when he was running a game at home, were not permitted. To Renny’s delight, most of the players were adults, and as a kid, he thought it was cool to play this grownup pretend. At conventions, Renny and his father often adventured on the RPGA track in all three slots, gaming for up to twelve hours. It was their alternative to playing catch in the backyard.
