Leaving Mundania

by Lizzie Stark

  The bizarre belief that role-playing games initiate children into satanic cults isn’t limited to the hysteria of the 1980s. One only need do an Internet search for “Fundamentalism and Harry Potter” to see that such beliefs are alive and well. Some Christian fundamentalists launched campaigns against Harry Potter on the grounds that reading the books would draw children into witchcraft. As for myself, I prefer to hew to the defense offered by sociologists Gary Alan Fine and Daniel Martin in their essay “Satanic Cults, Satanic Play: Is ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ a Breeding Ground for the Devil?” Fine and Martin write, “Our belief that fantasy role-playing games are not, as a rule, havens for Satanists, is not proven, but is based on our faith in the secular character of middle-class, adolescent leisure in late twentieth-century America.”6

  The claim that GMs could use their authority to lead children into perdition is at least technically possible, but it’s not unique to role-play. Any adult with authority—a teacher, a priest, a scoutmaster—could abuse that status.

  The fear that a larp might attain such a level of reality that a player could conflate reality with fantasy is not entirely unreasonable on its face, but in three years of observing larp and other role-playing games, I haven’t seen it happen. Every larper I’ve met has understood the difference between reality and fantasy; after all, the fantasy is what makes larp fun. Furthermore, larp groups like that division to be as razor sharp as possible. An individual who really believed he was a dwarven warrior would constitute a danger to other players, not to mention a liability risk. No larp wants that or anything close to it. A few larpers have confessed to me that at one time they were too into the game, but this is usually followed by “and so I left the game for a while to get my priorities straight,” or “and the GM told me I was too into it and asked me to take a break from playing for a few months.”

  The argument that violent behavior in a game setting creates violent behavior in real life is familiar to fans of video games such as Halo, World of Warcraft, or Grand Theft Auto. Unlike a mechanized video game, however, in a larp or other role-playing game there is a human on the spot in charge of setting up the system of problems and solutions, and death in-game has actual consequences. Many of the GMs I spoke to find violence a boring way to solve a problem, and if players try to fight their way out of every situation, they’ll create a scenario in which fighting has a negative effect, such as the end of the world.

  Whether they’re groundless or not, the stereotypes surrounding gaming keep some larpers closeted about their hobby. At parties with norms, closeted larpers would sometimes tell me that “the first rule about fight club is that you don’t talk about fight club,” their special way of reminding me not to out them as larpers. Some larpers tell their offices that they are “going camping with a big group” on weekends, and some say nothing at all, either out of embarrassment or because larp is complicated to explain and they don’t want to go through the rigmarole.

  Then there’s Derrick, who went to great pains to erect a wall between his gaming hobby and the rest of his life. He asked that I not provide his last name in order to help maintain this division.

  Derrick does not resemble the stereotypical gamer. He’s tall, has the powerful physique of a former athlete, and dresses in oversized T-shirts and loose jeans. He’s in his early thirties, has a young daughter, and has been playing the same character at Knight Realms since its inception in 1997. His manner is easygoing and open, as if he could get along fine at any social gathering. To meet him is to feel that the two of you share some old inside joke together. Once, I drove him a couple hours to a Knight Realms event, and he gamely endured a full five minutes out of my husband’s avant-garde noise collection, about five more minutes than I can stand. And, of course, unlike the typical larper, Derrick is black.

  Derrick’s upbringing can account for both his congeniality and his love of gaming. His father was a military man, so Derrick and his five siblings grew up all over the world, in their New Jersey hometown, and in Florida, Spain, and Japan. The constant moves meant that Derrick had to make new friends almost yearly, and he became adept at introducing himself to new people and finding a place for himself within the school yard pecking order. The world travel also exposed him to a variety of different people, locations, and ways of living, which he says helped him learn to respect people who are different from him. Of all the places he lived as a kid, he remembers Japan the best, in part because of his age—he spent his early and mid-teen years there—and in part because the family stayed a relatively long time, five years.

  Derrick first began playing imaginatively in Japan. Around age twelve or thirteen, Derrick and two of his friends spent hours fashioning cardboard boxes into mazes and castles. One of these playmates knew an older kid with a Dungeons & Dragons set, and every Saturday they’d go over to the older kid’s house and he’d GM games for them. Derrick liked being someone else, someone heroic, a knight in shining armor astride a winged horse, battling dragons. Japan also left him with another somewhat geeky hobby—a devotion to anime.

  When Derrick was fifteen, his family returned to New Jersey, and everything changed for him. Before returning to the States, he hadn’t realized there was a stigma associated with playing Dungeons & Dragons. Now, with his reputation at his new high school on the line, he developed two lives and two different sets of friends: one for Dungeons & Dragons and one for sports. In one life, he hung out with white boys, playing war games with miniatures for hours on end, and enjoying mini-campaigns of Dungeons & Dragons in which everyone rotated GM duties. In the other life, he was a track star who made it into the state-wide, and later the national, rankings for highjump. At a national meet during his junior year in high school, he placed in the top ten by clearing a jump six feet six inches high.

  The weight of expectation hung heavily on Derrick. His parents expected him to do well, in part because they had six kids and they wanted him to get a scholarship to college. As a track star, he felt like a minor local celebrity and feared that if he got into trouble, it would appear in the newspaper—it would be a big deal. He felt he had to maintain his image, and gaming didn’t fit with “star athlete.” If he were discovered, if his status as a gamer were made public, Derrick knew he would face ridicule. The fact that he occasionally hung with “geeky white dudes” baffled his athletic friends, including his best friend, prom king and star basketball player Dave.

  It was hard to hide such a major part of himself from both his friends and his family. Derrick kept his game books in his closet so that he could close the door and lock away that part of his life when necessary. One day, though, fate intervened. For some reason, he had put his gaming manuals on his desk. As Derrick tells it, Dave came into his room, saw the books, and said something to the effect of, “What in the white bullshit?” But Dave kept an open mind and kept Derrick’s secret, and the friendship survived.

  Years later, one of Derrick’s gaming buddies showed up for a session with a pamphlet about a new game called Knight Realms. Derrick went to the first event, which took place in a park and involved a lesson on how to make a boffer and a few tactical battles. He loved it. But the still-teenaged Derrick was involved in track at college, and it would be a big deal if he were injured. Derrick enjoyed the new hobby so much that he thought, “Track be damned, kill the vampire!” He didn’t tell his coach about his new hobby; he made up stories any time he was bruised or tired from a weekend battle.

  Eventually his family found out what he was up to. Derrick never told them, but his siblings deduced his secret from the equipment he kept in the house—they saw his boffers and started asking questions. The news spread like wildfire through his large but close-knit family. Derrick’s devout, church-going parents still believe that Dungeons & Dragons is a devil’s thing, that his gaming hobby is neither healthy nor holy. While he disagrees strongly with that attitude, he also respects his straitlaced parents and tries not to bring it up or make an issue out of it in front of them.

/>   In his late twenties, Derrick made a brief attempt to come out of the larp closet. He admitted to Dave that he is not just a gamer but a larper, ’fessed up to two friends he’s had for more than a decade as well as the on-and-off girlfriend who is the mother of his daughter. He had what he dubbed the “I’m-not-insane conversation” with them. Sharing his hidden gaming life with his friends hasn’t been easy. His non-Knight Realms friends are, as he put it, “urban” and come from a certain mindset; getting them to understand larp and the desire to larp is like getting a fish to ride a bicycle.

  Derrick has tried to keep news of his secret life from spilling beyond his immediate close circle of acquaintances, because he still fears the consequences of making his hobby known. He’s negotiating the realm of geekery and the complicated expectation placed on him by family and society, the expectation that he be a strong black man. On one hand, American society sees black men as scary and intimidating, potential criminals, he says. That racism works in myriad subtle ways, the way someone in a car might lock the doors when he draws near, for example, because they see his race first and foremost. His family and his culture expect him to rise above that, to prove to the world that its expectations of him are wrong. A black man is supposed to be hard, he tells me. A black man is supposed to be strong. A black man like Derrick is supposed to work his butt off to prove to the world that black men can be hardworking, can provide for their young daughters. What a black man does not do, he says, is go into the woods on the weekend to engage in the childish activity of dressing up. That’s soft. And he can’t let it be known that he’s soft. In fact, he says that as far as black culture goes, being unemployed, drinking booze on a downtown stoop would be more acceptable than being a larper.

  For Derrick, Knight Realms is a huge stress reliever, a place where he doesn’t have to live up to expectations, a place where he feels like he doesn’t even have to be black, and a place where he can let his imagination play. Nevertheless, the way race plays out inside the game is complex and, at times, problematic. Most directly, Knight Realms, like many games, has a sort of pan-Asian race, in this instance called the Khitan. The race attracts players who are fond of anime and Asian culture, people who want to portray samurai, tea men, and maidens, wear kimonos, and behave as if dishonoring their people or their families is the highest evil. Derrick’s longest running character, Shen, is a Khitanian and allows him to pay homage both to his love of anime and to the time he lived in Japan. On the other hand, such roles amount to essentially racial dress-up and, with it, the potential to be insulting. One Asian American player, who plays a garden-variety human, is constantly asked if he’s Khitanian, his out-of-game appearance confused with an in-game race. It is insinuated, in one set of the usual pregame rumors posted on the Internet before an event, that the Khitanians have been killing cats and selling them for food at Market Faire. Is this racism? The Khitanians may be a fictional race, but they function as standins for Asian people. By proxy, dragging up this old racial saw was offensive enough that several players posted on the boards calling it out as a cheap, racist shot.

  “Racism” is permitted and encouraged in-game between the races that exist in Travance, which further complicates the picture of race at Knight Realms. In the rules, bigotry is written into certain race descriptions. Elves think humans are beneath them, for example; humans distrust Khitanians; and of course, everyone is afraid of dark elves. These ingrained likes and dislikes make the world of the game more complex and realistic, a closer mimic of the flawed world in which we live. The stipulated bigotry of the rules can help new players develop their characters. A good-guy paladin who hews to the societal dislike of Khitanians, for example, has certain unique blind spots in his way of approaching the world, and a player then has to suss out that complexity.

  It’s all fine, so long as the racism stays completely inside the world of the game. When humans are racist toward goblins, for example, the racism seems abstract and permissible to me. On the other hand, dark elves are a common racial trope in fantasy games and one that plays uncomfortably on racism in the real world. Dark elves in Knight Realms have coal-black skin and white hair, and they live underground. They have a tightly knit society; those who go aboveground are branded, effectively excluded from the society, which seems an interesting reversal of the real-world risk Derrick feels he would run if his underground hobby were discovered. Marked dark elves are also commonly feared in-game; the race is considered terrifying and mysterious. In order to portray a dark elf, as a character or an NPC, all players, regardless of race, must cover exposed skin with jet-black makeup and either wear a white wig or spray-paint hair white. Literally, players must put on black face.

  Derrick is famous for running dark elf plots in the game. I fondly remember NPCing for him at night in the rain once. He led a herd of us, dressed in and painted black, toward a clearing where we would ambush the town. He held a boffer shield over his head to block the rain. I was soaked and shivering on that autumn night and not exactly looking forward to hitting people. I needed a pep talk. Before we arrived at the clearing, Derrick turned around and said something like, “OK people, it’s the weekend, and we’re all out here in black face paint in the woods. We’re all big dorks. Now let’s go have fun.”

  After eleven years playing this game, he knows what he’s talking about.

  Derrick’s not the only larper who doesn’t want to be discovered. Meet “Brian,” a police detective in his mid-forties who is slight of build and full of fear. Brian is terrified that his coworkers might discover his weekend hobby and asked that I withhold his real name and the city where he works to help maintain his anonymity. For the last three and a half years, he’s been attending a larp with one of his sons.

  Like many larpers, Brian played Dungeons & Dragons throughout high school and college. After college, he began attending area gaming conventions, and in 1997, at one of these conventions, he tried out a vampire larp, in which, at random, he was cast as a police detective investigating the occult. Brian enjoyed the game so much that when the GMs decided to run it on a long-term basis, he kept attending. The game, part of White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade franchise, relied on the premise that vampires keep up the “masquerade” by concealing their presence from humans. The game that Brian attended met in public places, from bars to go-go nightclubs, with the idea that if a player attracted the attention of the general public he or she could be penalized for revealing the masquerade. No one ever noticed Brian’s group. Brian became fast friends with some of his fellow players, who recommended that he try out the game he now attends regularly.

  At first, Brian attended this game at the behest of his middle child, and he’s continued going with his younger son, “Peter” (not his real name), who is currently a tween. Brian credits the game with helping Peter break out of his shell. When they first started attending, Peter didn’t feel comfortable talking to high-level characters. Now he’s not only comfortable talking to high-levels, he’s also started making friends of his own. As a father-son activity, Brian says the game has deepened his relationship with Peter, that it has provided the opportunity for father-son talks, that his son is now comfortable asking him questions about how to flirt, for example. Brian also seems to enjoy the game for its own sake and spoke to me fondly about leveling up his character and practicing his improvisational skills. Sometimes, he even attends the game when Peter can’t come.

  The way Brian describes it, a police department is gossipier than a supermarket tabloid. When they’re transferred, officers are checked out on and off the job, and if you’re involved in any controversy, it follows you from post to post. I met Brian a few blocks from his office, and we walked in the opposite direction to get a coffee. As a police truck drove by, he mentioned that this single sighting might open him up to gossip that he’d been seen with a strange woman in the city. Much as Derrick described the confines of what it means to be a black man, Brian described the confines of being a police detective. Officers a
re supposed to be all business all the time, whether they’re on or off duty. They’re supposed to be serious, sober people with serious, sober hobbies. Certain games, like card games, fantasy football, and family board games are acceptable, but nothing weird would be. And “weird” is a pretty large category for police detectives. As Brian put it to me in an e-mail, “There are coworkers who play computer games and even they are considered geeks, so you can imagine what a larper would be called. Psychotic comes to mind.” Larp is at odds with the machismo of police culture, a machismo that manifests itself through endless teasing. In Brian’s office, for example, if someone found an old yearbook photo of Brian with a mullet, they might tack it up on his desk. And if Brian removed that photo, he would have lost the challenge—to remove such a thing would be to prove that it had gotten to him. To this culture, the idea of a grown man “frolicking in the woods playing dress up” as Brian put it, would be downright preposterous, a trace of blood in the water to the circling sharks. If Brian’s hobby was ever discovered, it would spread around the office rapidly, and he’d never be able to live the jokes down. As he wrote to me, “In police subculture, one is only known for his last screw-up. Meaning that no matter one’s reputation, a cop will be known for a foul up, either on duty or off duty. I could not deflect any razzing I got related to larping. It would follow me FOREVER! All of my good arrests would be forgotten. Think of grade school bullying of a nasty variety and you may get the idea.”