In a LARP, players get together in some outdoor setting--usually a park or football field or wooded area of some fashion--and then proceed to act out their role-playing games with sometimes elaborate (sometimes hysterical) costumes and foam-rubber swords. In a nutshell, it's this.
I don't like to hold judgment over people for their hobbies, no matter how dorky they run. In truth, enjoying sports (and especially fantasy sports) is equally as nerdy as anything a role-playing junkie would engage in. I play video games, I watch a lot of movies, I enjoy sci-fi. I am as nerdy as they come.
That said, LARPing is one of those activities I have always treated with a sort of casual disdain. It's just so aggressive in its dorkiness that it's damn near impossible for me to even overhear people talking about a LARP without my eyes rolling back in my head. So it was with cautious fascination that I delved into the not one, but two LARPing-oriented documentaries currently available on Netflix Instant Watch. Between Darkon and Monster Camp, two films with wildly different tones, yet highly similar themes of people with catastrophic social lives looking for a measure of escape and acceptance, I now feel I understand the mentality of the LARPer, though I am no less gobsmacked by the concept in practice.
Darkon is a movie that treats LARPing with a kind of highly dramatic seriousness, albeit one that feels more than a little tongue-in-cheek. The title of the movie is also the title of the game that the people at the center of this film play. Combining the sort of swords-and-sorcery fantasy trappings of Dungeons and Dragons with the sort of territory claiming mechanics of a board game like Risk or Catan, Darkon's players make up a variety of factions, and take their role-playing really, really seriously.
Thus, he plays Darkon as Bannor, leader of one of Darkon's many nations. Within the context of the game, he commands a powerful army, and seeks to destroy a larger, imperialistic nation headed up by the power-hungry Keldaar, who in real life is Kenyon Wells, a workaday IT professional.
Darkon players come from all walks of life--a single mom and former stripper; an Iraq War veteran looking for an outlet for his traumatic experiences; a Starbucks employee who just wants to find the confidence to ask a girl out. Two things bind all of these people: an unyielding need for escape from the circumstances of their day-to-day lives, and an overwhelming social awkwardness. Even the most confident players, Wells chief among them, carry with them a palpable sense of deep-seated immaturity when it comes to socializing and interacting in the real world. The line between the fantasy of the game and the reality of, well, reality, frequently blurs, with real-life friends frequently getting into heated discussions over battles and politics of the game world well outside the realm of the game itself.
At the same time, they treat their subjects with care and heart, refusing to out-and-out make fun of them, while still being able to have some fun with how serious they take this game. They simply let them be themselves with no overt judgments about their lives or their chosen hobby.
On the complete flipside in style, tone and tenor is Monster Camp. All the manufactured melodrama Darkon deals in is replaced with a heaping helping of good-natured chintziness here. The players at the heart of this movie are equally awkward, equally distressed with their lot in life, and equally varied in their origins, but the way they're portrayed (and the way their game is portrayed) is with a much more lighthearted, if comparably downcast vibe.
Part of that is that Monster Camp is a far less "produced" documentary. It willfully ignores the in-game plot in favor of putting its focus exclusively on the people who play it. In that regard, this feels more like a dyed-in-the-wool character study, albeit one with a greater ratio of tragic human comedy than most.
The players of NERO are as varied and off-kilter as that of Darkon, though they seem less interested in carrying their fantasies outside of the game. NERO appears more a much-needed escape than a second reality for them. The only people who live and breathe the game are those plot writers, headed up by chapter owner Shane. Shane organizes everything, including the space rentals, making sure costumes and materials are available, and making sure his players don't starve or freeze to death.
As bleak as some of the social experiences were in Darkon, Monster Camp contains far more embarrassing moments where you don't know whether to laugh or cringe--usually you end up doing a bit of both. Take David, one of the plot members and a severe WoW addict. He is a single father raising a young daughter, and when is daughter tells him one day that he's spending too much time playing online, his response is not to apologize and pay more attention to his daughter, but instead to get her a WoW account.
Monster Camp is fraught with people whose decision-making seems less-than state of the art. Take the two roommates, one of which works at Fred Meyer, and seems to have little ambition beyond perhaps, maybe going back to school one day, and coming home to play WoW every night. His roomie sits at home all day, playing a seemingly endless supply of Japanese RPGs, not cutting his fingernails, and musing about the fact that he's been in his senior year of high school for five years. Then you have Fern, a 30-something ginger who still lives with his self-described "bi, poly, kinky person" mom. Clearly raised in one of those "too understanding" households, Fern seems to primarily use NERO as an excuse to bring girls along in the hopes of nailing them. He's like some kind of mama's boy Lothario, if such a thing can exist.
Both Darkon and Monster Camp are funny, peculiar, depressing, and, ultimately, fascinating in their own unique way. By all means, give both films a shot, as neither is a particularly rough investment of time. An investment of tolerance for your fellow geek, perhaps, but not time.
