Category Archives: larping

On "Shattered Dreams"

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“Shattered Dreams” is a real-time simulacrum of a drunk-driving accident that is staged by local law enforcement and fire authorities to raise awareness in teens about the dangers of drunk driving. The simulacrum is staged with real props and real people over a two-day period in Hewitt at Midway High School (near Waco, Texas). One young person dies every fifteen minutes in the United States because of drunk driving. The simulacrum is supposed to awake strong feelings of trauma, loss, and tragedy in the “surviving” students. Actual students play the dead, the injured, and the drunk perpetrator. The entire thing is filmed, and the actual parents of the students playing the different roles are filmed at the hospital, at the morgue, at the jail. The parents of the “dead” must write an obituary for their child before the simulacrum begins. As the day progresses students are spirited away by the “grim reaper” at the rate of four an hour, reflecting the current statistics of teen deaths in America. This can be a brutal experience for those involved even though no one really dies, goes to the hospital or goes to jail. The emotions are real, the tears are real, and the difference between reality and fantasy blur. The entire process was topped off today with a memorial service for the dead, who do not attend their own service, adding a strange note of verisimilitude to the entire process. The police are real, the fire/rescue squad is real, the district attorney is real, the handcuffs are real, only the blood is ersatz. I believe this is necessary because our teens are already too jaded about violence, have been raised with easy access to entertainment and gaming that take violence and death for granted. I believe it is almost impossible to shock children unless you make them the focus of the violence and death, but the question of how to do that without really hurting them is complex and paradoxical: how do you raise consciousness in a population that is jaded by Hollywood fakery and special effects? So yesterday students disappeared, some went to the hospital with horrible injuries, others to the morgue, others to jail. This is one situation where the simulacrum makes the experience real for both the participants and the spectators. A smoldering wrecked vehicle, injured and dead students lying in the middle of the wreck, real ambulances, real firefighters all add to experience that looks, smells, and seems actual and real. In the end, everyone knows that this is not real, but the emotions are very real and give real food for thought. Drink, drive, wreck. One thing is to be told that this is bad. It is, however, a different ballgame to experience it first hand, especially when your friends are involved. More information on the program may be found here.

On larping and Don Quijote

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I learned this really strange word today, “larping,” which means “live action role playing.” “Oh, you mean the problem Don Quijote has?” I asked. Larpers, if I may use the term so loosely, are people that re-enact things like the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, storming the Bastille, the sinking of the Titanic, the running of the bulls (no, wait, that’s real), besieging a castle, dying of the plague, burning a heretic, that sort of thing. These people play these roles and take their “playing” very seriously, almost to the point of absurdity. I understand this perfectly because I have been living with Don Quijote for over thirty years, and he might have been one of the first live action role players in the history of the planet if you exclude Cleopatra, Nero, Caligula and Liberace, who were all doing their best to play real people, but sort of failed somewhere along the way. I digress. Don Quijote, or Alonso Quijano, his real person name, is rather unhappy with his boring life as comfortable landed gentry in central Spain. He basically collects rents, reads lots of books, and gets older. He decides at some point in his mid-life crisis that he wants more–more adventure, more danger, more sword fights, more intrigue, more women. So he decides to play a knight errant. The only problem is that nobody else is in on his game. Larping hadn’t been invented at the beginning of the seventeenth century, so the people that he ran into were rather uncooperative regarding his fantasy world of giants, damsels, knights and magicians. A fiasco ensues, to say the least, but it’s a rather humorous fiasco with a very high entertainment factor. Quijano sets out to be a knight, putting on his great-grandfather’s old rotting putrid armor, because in real life he is socially awkward, a little alienated from society, a natural loner, but he is also someone who really does not control his own destiny. He is stuck being boring Alonso Quijano with no real objectives or goals in his life. Live action role playing is very attractive because for a moment he can step out of character, be someone heroic and valiant, dream the impossible dream, and save the day. He larps, and part of that larping is a pre-arranged bout with insanity, fighting a windmill, attacking some sheep, making friends with some prostitutes, performing a vigil while some pigs sleep. It’s complicated. To make a long story short, he feels like, for first time in his life, he is in control of something. Is that really any different than what any of us wants out of life?