Leaving Mundania by Lizzie Stark

Author:Lizzie Stark
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2012-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

8

Playing War

Everything boils down to war for Jeffrey Mclean. It is the common denominator of history for him, the core act that defines the world we live in. Jeff studies it now as a college student, but as a veteran, he lived it for more than a decade. And he’s spent most of his life playing war as a larper and a World War II reenactor. War, for Jeff Mclean, is an inevitable consequence both of history and of leisure.

The collusion between Jeff’s real and fantasy lives is not unusual in larp, where some aspect of the player appears in every character and the game world always mirrors facets of the world we live in. Occasionally this leads to explosive situations, as in the case of Lady Nina’s trial, but more often the mixture of the real and fantastical is a good thing, proving that larp can be more than an escape or vacation from real life, more than a flimsy shell behind which a player hides his or her true intentions. Sometimes, larp is a profound expression of identity, a vehicle for self-discovery, and a therapeutic outlet.

As a child in suburban New Jersey, Jeff and his neighborhood friends would get together and declare, “Let’s play war.” Kids with fatigues would put them on, and they’d creep through the woods with their toy guns, shouting “bang bang” at one another. The wounded dropped to the ground and counted to sixty before rising miraculously to rejoin the fight. When his dad brought home a set of big boxes, Jeff used the cardboard to make a helmet, shield, and sword covered with duct tape. They weren’t very realistic, but Jeff played knight with them, pretending to be a hero.

Around age ten or eleven, he began playing D&D, and a few years later he started his lifetime love affair with miniature war gaming, a style of game in which players pit armies of tiny figurines against one another on a game terrain. Jeff particularly enjoyed painting his own figurines, finding satisfaction in assembling his own army. In his early teens he played paintball and laser tag, which tapped into something written into his own DNA, the desire to become a soldier. With so many gaming hobbies, it was perhaps inevitable that Jeff would become a larper. When he was fifteen or sixteen, with a head full of J. R. R. Tolkien and the old movie Excalibur, he visited his local hobby shop and picked up a black-and-white pamphlet for NERO NJ. His first character was a warrior, and he arrived at the game looking for an authentic medieval atmosphere. Like so many other larpers, his first event hooked him. He couldn’t describe quite why. Larp for Jeff was the roar of the crowd for a basketball player or the quiet of the woods for a hunter—something about the atmosphere drew him, made him feel this game was the real thing, not a mere dress rehearsal. As a kid he’d always wanted to be a hero, and now, as a warrior at a larp, he had the chance.

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