Leaving Mundania

by Lizzie Stark

  The players’ response to the mock pandemic failed spectacularly. Because officials didn’t quarantine the airports, the virus quickly spread to cities across the nation. Key decision-makers sickened, slowing response to the disaster. The slow release of information to the public resulted in riots in Rocketville and elsewhere, as locals rushed stores since food and other supplies were dwindling. Hospitals couldn’t keep up with the stream of sick and dying as doctors and orderlies sickened, mortuaries overflowed, and people looted pharmacies as they realized that the remaining stock of anti-viral drugs were reserved for emergency workers. As more people sickened and died, food, electricity, and Internet service became increasingly scarce. Levels of panic and lawlessness spread across the United States. There were not enough healthy police officers and National Guard members to quell the unrest, and many of the player characters died of the lethal flu strain.

  At this point, after four hours of game play, simulating three weeks of epidemic, the game ended, and the players spent the rest of the day in breakout sessions discussing what happened and how to avoid it. During the wrap sessions, some players said they had gotten “caught up in the moment” and “did not consider longer-term consequences of their actions,” as Stephen put it in the paper he contributed to Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.1 His point is that it’s easy to say you’d close airports when sitting around a table during a planning session, but when an official is in a room full of business owners whose livelihoods might be damaged by the action, that decision becomes much harder, and there may be horrific consequences either way.

  During these sessions, the groups came to several realizations, Stephen said. One was the importance not only of first responders but of people who played supporting roles—the orderlies at the hospitals, funeral directors, morticians. If these people are too sick to come to work, hospitals can’t care for the overwhelming number of patients, and the bodies of the dead can’t be carted away. The group also noticed some secondary logistical worries—if truck drivers sicken, who will get heating oil to houses in the Northeast when winter rolls around? They had focused instead on the high-tech elements of keeping businesses running at the detriment of infrastructure. For some of the military players, the big realization was that civilians, especially panicky civilians, won’t listen to people in uniforms and let them do their jobs unless the reason they should is explained. And finally, the blue dot stickers brought home to the crowd how quickly an epidemic can spread. Hearing the numbers and statistics about virulence wasn’t as powerful as seeing it happen. During the real-life swine flu epidemic of 2009, Stephen said he saw policymakers taking some of the steps outlined during the breakout sessions, handling the epidemic quickly and rushing vaccines into production.

  Unlike the army’s war games, Stephen’s games are aimed at uncovering the interpersonal dynamic between people, the reasons things happened as they did. Like a piece of literary fiction, they aim beyond entertainment and toward enlightenment. Stephen tries to create epiphanies for his players, eureka moments similar to his own eureka moment gleaned so many years ago during his Necronomicon game. In short, his games suggest that larp can be much more than an immersive game; rather, the hobby has the potential to become art.

  10

  Larpapalooza

  Stan and Sylvia were searching for weed, and not in a subtle way. They asked a butcher with a blood-spattered shower-curtain apron, a small woman with pale blue hair that matched her corset, and a tall, blond man with feathery paint around his eye, to no avail. Finally, they petitioned the Merchant, the man who had drawn everyone together in New York tonight for some shadowy purpose. Stan Helsig, a pothead with an insatiable appetite for kind bud, worked in the film industry, renting videos out of a small shop in New York, while his sidekick, Sylvia Sigfried, worked at a gothic floor show on Eleventh Street as an usher and, on certain nights, as the woman who gets ceremoniously sawed in half and then made whole. She lived in a rat-infested apartment in the Bronx and took care of her sick parents. Deathly afraid of the sky, she carried a parasol with her at all times to block it out.

  Both of them knew that supernaturals populated New York alongside its ignorant human population. This did not trouble them.

  Two years after I made my larp debut with the help of Molly Mandlin, I returned to DEXCON with a different mission in mind. By this time I had accustomed myself to the convention experience, which involved wandering around the floor during the day, doling out smiles and obligatory hugs to people I knew from Knight Realms or from seeing them at conventions. In the evening I ambled around the hotel, check-ing in at room parties, and making a friend here and there.

  At DEXCON 13, held in July 2010 at the Morristown, New Jersey, Hyatt, I stayed with a couple of these friends, including Brendan O’Hara, a slender man with curly black hair and short, groomed stubble over his cheeks. I had met Brendan at Knight Realms, where he played several characters, including a drunken satyr who told exaggerated tales culled from 1980s B-movies and then antiquated, and Portia’s hookah-loving chum Marcus. He and his girlfriend, a diehard larper with short, curly blond hair, were sharing the bed, while I and a mutual friend of ours, also one of the Knight Realms hookah crew, Jeramy Merritt, camped out in sleeping bags on the floor. Jeramy’s flamboyant dress meant he was hard to miss. Tall, slender, and with a huge mass of curly hair that hung down his back, Jeramy routinely wore brightly colored suit jackets he’d found in the women’s section of secondhand stores. His uniform also included pajama pants, often homemade, striped black and red or black and green or dizzy with paisley. Gene Stern swore he resembled a slightly sinister David Bowie, and in general, Jeramy preferred the 1980s to other decades.

  As usual, this DEXCON offered more than thirty larps, along with countless numbers of board games, miniatures games, quizzes, and tabletop role-playing games. I intended to take advantage of the variety of larps and attend as many as I was able over the course of the four-day convention, in hopes that the variety of styles would reveal the essential nature of larp itself to me, offering me a perfect moment of immersion in some fantastical world. I had originally dubbed this search the Larpgasm, after the “Civil Wargasm” road trip that Tony Horwitz took with Civil War reenactors in his book Confederates in the Attic, but one of my larpers told me in no uncertain terms that there would be “no gasming of any kind.” Brendan named my experiment “Larpapalooza,” and so it was fitting that I embarked on this journey with him, or rather, that I embarked on this journey by trailing after Brendan, aka Stan Helsig, during the Shattered larp, a game set in a world loosely based on the Buffyverse, the world presented in the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Although there were fairies, werewolves, and vampires, Stan and Sylvia, the characters we were playing, were simply garden-variety humans with the garden-variety desire to score some pot.

  As it turned out, we had no involvement in the main plot of the game at all. Our game play consisted of asking various characters for drugs, sometimes obtaining them, play-smoking them outside of the pale function room, and then behaving as if our characters were stoned. The game had an actual plot. As Stan and Sylvia returned from smoking, explosions erupted directly behind Stan; we only knew about them because the GM announced such things and because Brendan and I could see from the way other players had gathered around the GM, character cards in hand, that a combat or other encounter was occurring. But Stan and Sylvia had no part in it, and I never took out my character sheet or called a skill, but then, since the rules had not really been explained, I probably would have been too timid to try to use my levitation spell, for example, because it’s always awkward to do something you’ve never done before.

  Even though Brendan and I were locked inside the narrow world of our characters (find pot, smoke pot, repeat), we still had a great time. The capstone of our experience, this game’s perfect larp moment, resulted from the minor action of another player, Michael Pucci, a devout Buddhist in upper management at U-Haul Connecticut. He w
as thirty-two, of medium height, and stocky, and he carried himself with the confidence of someone who knows who he is and where he is going. Michael had been gaming and storytelling for over ten years and had recently started up a wildly popular zombie apocalypse boffer larp called Dystopia Rising in Connecticut. He also played a gypsy, one of the Yhatzi family, at Knight Realms. Tonight, at Shattered, he was playing a fairy from the winter court, complete with ear tips, in part because he thought it would be fun to discard his humanness and play a character that was totally alien. Early on, Sylvia had tried to talk to Michael’s character, Mr. Vendemere. Mr. Vendemere’s attitude toward the humans was that the worthless flesh-sacks ought to be quivering in their boots with gratitude because the fey had deigned to make an appearance. Michael quietly told me that he looked like a normal human, say an eight on a scale from one to twenty. Then he says something to the effect of, “As you look at me, it’s like a veil lifts, and for a moment, I look like a twenty-three. I am ungodly beautiful, so beautiful that it’s frightening. And then the veil comes down, and I’m back to an eight.” Clearly, that human body was just a disguise.

  For the rest of the evening, Stan teased Sylvia about crushing on Mr. Vendemere. Later, Stan tried to hit on a reluctant woman in a light blue wig while asking her for pot. He mentioned Mr. Vendemere, and the two of us went into verbal attack mode. I began describing Mr. Vendermere’s pulchritude to this woman with rapid-fire speech at the same time that Brendan began explaining how the two of us had arrived here this evening and what we’d done. At first, the blue-haired woman was confused and looked from one to the other of us in sequence. She tried to make interjections, but we steamrolled over her in tandem with our improvised ramblings, both finishing at the same moment. And then, almost as one, all three of us put our hands on our heads and laughed out-of-character. Back in-game, the blue-haired woman took a phone call from her daughter that enabled her to get away from us, and we went onward to find more marijuana.

  Around midnight, after four hours of Shattered, I began to grow tired of it. I’d had a great time joking around with Brendan in-game, but our goal of obtaining increasingly potent larp drugs had gotten old. We’d taken a few breaks from the game and visited our hotel room for a discreet drink of real alcohol, and we’d taken a role-play detour to the actual hotel bar, situated directly next to the function room that held Shattered. A couple of our fellow gamers, still in-character, had ordered dinner and a beer at the bar, and we’d briefly joined them. But by midnight, and with four hours of game to go, I was ready to leave. We’d missed our opportunity to be involved in the main plot, we’d had our good time, and frankly, everything since our steamrolling conversation had been second-best. With a quiet word to one of the GMs, we departed for the evening.

  Interestingly, Michael and I, the veteran larper and the novice, had similar game experiences. He’d spent Shattered embroiled in fairy politics; the winter court of fairies had tried to goad the summer court into battle. Neither of us had really interacted with the GM-run plot. Michael thought that the game’s strength lay in its diversity of character concepts, from vampire to fairy, which made for interesting player interactions early in the evening. But from a storyteller standpoint, he thought it would be difficult to craft a plot appealing to any significant segment of those differentiated characters. The characters were so diversified that any one plot was only likely to appeal to a small faction, leaving everyone else to create goals for themselves.

  I’d gotten Shattered half-right, reaffirmed my idea that it’s good to have a concrete goal to pursue in a larp, such as scoring weed or finding your father or writing a Chronicle—such activity helps do away with one of the great problems of larp, which I think of as dull cocktail party syndrome, when I end up milling around a room waiting for something to happen. Hanging around a player with a strong personality also pepped up my larp experience. Brendan and Michael belong to the class of gamers that I think of as planets; the force of a planet’s personality and his or her skill at role-playing creates a gravitational pull that sucks other players into orbit. I had spent the game orbiting Brendan; in pursuing his character goal, we’d had a boisterous, hilarious run, but ultimately, the fun of acting stoned and ridiculous burnt itself out. The danger of being too self-involved in a larp was you might miss your entre into the game’s plot and become bored with your character goals.

  On Friday night I tried another flavor of larp, a game called Deadlands, set in a Wild West that included gothic elements such as demons and magic. The game, run by FishDevil, had a hard-core following of gamers, ones who were slavishly devoted to costuming. Before the convention, I had gone over to Gene’s house and rolled up my character in order to avoid the line of new players onsite. I named my character Eloise Vichyssoise, and I “rolled up” this character with a deck of cards, randomly drawing them to determine Eloise’s stats and the number of skills she was permitted. In addition, a player could take “edges” and “hindrances.” If you took a hindrance, you gained additional points that could be put into skills or could be spent on an edge, an advantage for your character.

  I thought the hindrances were terribly fun. On the advice of Cappy’s girlfriend, I took the “enemy” hindrance, which meant my character had an enemy somewhere; in this case, it was a chef who had shut down my restaurant in Paris. I also took the “grim servant of death” hindrance, which meant that bad things happened to those around me, a hilarious problem for a professional chef. The way the in-game mechanic worked, if my attempt to use a skill failed—if I drew an ace from my deck—the worst possible outcome would happen to my party.

  I created a French character because I wanted to be part of Team French, consisting of Brendan, his girlfriend Liz, and a couple of their friends. Team French did not mess around when it came to costumes. Liz had purchased a tuxedo jacket with a high waist and tails for Brendan, who also donned a red vest, a cravat, and a gigantic top hat for his role as Jean-Luc LeFleur, an old-money fop who had journeyed from France to invest in Cairo, Illinois. Liz played Amalie Giroud, a woman with a demure demeanor that belied her skill with guns. She wore a tiered faux-satin skirt in dark red, with a fusty black blouse and matching red coat. A black wig covered her hair, and she pinned on a hat laden with black silk flowers and trailing mesh. I made do with an outfit gleaned from my closet. I wore my white chemise from Knight Realms and added an apron with a dishcloth hanging off the waist, a wooden spoon, and a whisk from my kitchen.

  After all of us were dressed, we went down to the larp, which was held in the same room as Shattered had been. It was located right next to the bar-lobby area, and so people in costume waiting to start Deadlands milled about with wide-eyed businessmen there for a Friday night drink. In the larp community, venturing somewhere public in costume is commonly known as “freaking the mundies.” But for tonight, at the convention, the freaks far outnumbered the mundanes in this hotel lobby bar.

  The FishDevils had taken great pains to dress the set inside the beige hotel function room. They had set up a casino, laying printed green felt meant for blackjack, poker, and craps over a variety of tables. Xeroxes of confederate money had been cut to size to provide the currency for this evening of gambling. One end of the room had a rolling bar set up at it, complete with stools and “alcoholic” drinks that consisted of soda, since the convention’s policy didn’t permit alcohol on the convention floor for a bunch of reasons, including liability and to prevent underage drinking. Screens sectioned off opposite corners of the room; one concealed a special poker table, the other, a museum with framed papyri, a small African mask, a silver-encrusted dagger, and other objets d’arte that the GMs borrowed for the event.

  People began free role-playing, talking in-character, although the game hadn’t officially started. I soon discovered that my French accent was worse than awful. Michael was there, wearing suspenders and drinking from a flagon, talking fast, making claims, and offering flattery to the ladies. He was playing a snake oil salesman named Dr
. Waites. Eventually, the FishDevils explained the rules, a little quickly for my taste: conflicts were determined by a stat level, plus a skill level, plus a card draw. The seasoned gamers caught on immediately. I felt immediately confused but figured that someone would explain what I needed to do if and when the time came. All thirty of us milled for an hour and a half, gambling and chatting, while seemingly nothing happened.

  I was finding this game harder to get into than Shattered had been, in part because it was a continuing larp. Shattered ran for the first time at this convention, while Deadlands had run twice a year at the Double Exposure conventions for about five years. Many of these players had established characters with private plots they eagerly anticipated. And while my character was playing Brendan’s chef, we didn’t have much reason to hang out in-game—he was involved in continuing the story of his character; I was new to town and still finding my way.

  In the meantime, Michael parked himself at the craps table with a few other gentlemen. He’d heard that the local union was involved with the casino, and Dr. Waites wanted to bankrupt the bank backing this new casino, in hopes that the money would be gone when the northerners arrived. He enlisted several characters with the in-game “gambling” skill to his cause, and they collectively broke several of the tables. At one point, as a combat was beginning, he scooped all the remaining money off the craps table, said thank you, and slowly walked out of the room, the highlight of his game experience, a spectacular theft hidden in plain sight. Then, for Michael, it was beer o’clock and time to head toward bed.