The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [123]
The setting was contained and thus considerably more believable. It was a “cybercafe” and tightly focused on one spot in the universe. The thrill was in the players acting their roles—there were few props indicating a futuristic setting other than what characters said and did. There weren’t even any mechanics.
After interacting with several characters, I waited my turn to speak with a young lady. When the player ahead of me finished speaking with her, I sat down and began my dialogue, trying to figure out what was going on at the local spaceport. Much to my surprise, the male player returned and, interrupting our dialogue, asked the girl out. It took a minute to work out that the other player was not playing in character: He was asking the actress out, not her character.
I was yanked out of the immersion. Players were talking about events outside the game. To say that I was shocked was an understatement. The player, who had interpreted her in-character flirting as an advance, took her interaction with his character as a sign of her personal interest in him. The girl was understandably flustered, and this was further complicated by the fact that she was much younger than the guy thought. The female player was acting in a role in which she was more confident, which made her seem older than she was.
For me, the moment was ruined; it was difficult for me to play a confident, brash character when reality intruded so abruptly. I couldn’t react to the turn of events, because they technically didn’t happen in game. I left the game, frustrated and upset and not entirely understanding why. I didn’t play LARPs for a long time after that.
There are times, of course, when the mixing of role-play and real life can have a positive effect; my own wedding at Medieval Times is an excellent example and it certainly isn’t the only one (Fortugno 2007:265).
Player
Different LARPs have different levels of player engagement. Generally speaking, players in a LARP are expected to be in character first and then signal their desire to speak or act out of character second, the reverse of a tabletop game.
No discussion of LARP roles would be complete without an examination of the events of April 15, 1979, when James Dallas Egbert III, a Michigan State University student, disappeared (Hatley 1999). Dallas, as he was known, was a 16-year-old computer genius, so smart that he had been repairing computers for the United States Air Force since he was 12. He was a typical gamer geek and smart enough to attend college early. On August 22, private investigator William C. Dear was hired by Dallas’s family to find him. As a highly successful PI and friend of the Egberts, Dear agreed to take on the case.
During his investigation, Dear theorized that Egbert may have confused his role in the game with his role in real life, an unfortunate statement that would have repercussions for Dungeons & Dragons well beyond the investigation. The disappearance was reported widely in the press, and Rona Jaffe’s fictional book Mazes & Monsters soon followed. Inspired by Egbert’s case, Mazes & Monsters concerned Robbie Wheeling, who snaps while playing a Dungeons & Dragons–like game in the steam tunnels of Grant University (Jaffe 1981). It was later turned into a movie starring Tom Hanks.
The danger of role-playing immersion posed by Mazes & Monsters stoked Hollywood’s fertile imagination. In the public mind, Mazes & Monsters was conflated with the Egbert case. The damage was done; Dungeons & Dragons earned a reputation for dangerously corrupting children. It wasn’t until 1984 that the facts were laid out in William Dear’s book, The Dungeon Master: The Disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III.
So what really happened? Dallas, a D&D player, was fond of playing a LARP in the steam tunnels under MSU’s buildings, a distinction the media failed to mention. Depressed and driven to perform in school, Dallas