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Strategy and Strategery
Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel on 'Darkon' and the real-world implications of role players at war
BY RICHARD WHITTAKER
When Ian McKellen pretends to be a wizard, he gets $8 million and an Oscar nomination. When a bunch of ordinary working people get together to pretend to be barbarians, warriors, and trolls on the weekend for fun, they get called geeks. Call them instead LARPers – live action role-players – and the subject of Darkon, an overwhelming favorite on the 2006 festival circuit.
In their debut documentary feature, co-directors Andrew Neel and Luke Meyer enter Darkon, a high-fantasy world in which orcs rampage across nations, mages cast arcane conjurings, and dark elves plot in caves. In reality, Darkon is a set of gaming rules, a map of fictional countries, and a series of weekendlong live-action events on borrowed farmland. Players come in homemade costumes, and vie for power and hexes on the map through negotiations, treachery, and intrigue. When that fails, they battle with padded maces and foam swords.
This isn't teens rolling dice in a basement: With 1,000 members, or Darkonians, it's one of the nation's largest LARPing groups. Players are drawn from diverse swaths of society, from high schoolers to happily married managers with no shame about their hobby. Contrary to the stereotype, it's not just a boy's club, as plenty of women, and even whole families, join the fray. With a couple hundred gamers at any live event, Darkon is as much a real-world society as a game. Players keep the same character for years and develop strong friendships. Live-action events may be built around the game, but when the armor comes off, and the characters are dropped, it's also a huge campout, a chance to hang, eat, and catch up. There's an almost unspoken irony that role-players, once the teenage nerds who stereotypically avoided sports, are camping out in the Baltimore winter. Meanwhile, their jock contemporaries have been promoted to solitary armchair quarterbacking.
At SXSW Film 06, against a highly competitive slate of political movies, Neel and Meyer walked away with the documentary feature audience award. Their guide to Darkon was Skip Lipman, in many ways the film's true star. During the week, he's a devoted stay-at-home husband and dad from Baltimore. On the weekend, he's Bannor, warlord of Laconia. Another player/character (Keldar, in-game persona of middle-manager Kenyon Wells) is conquering the lands of Darkon in the name of the Mordom Empire. The mood turns ugly and personal as Wells' "playing" eradicates fictitious nations and created characters. Is he playing the game to its natural conclusion, or is he like the guy who turns a friendly game of poker into a way to take money off his friends? Lipman has to work out whether to call foul on Wells in the real world, or use Bannor's armies to vanquish Keldar on the field of battle.
Actually, it's a mistake to presume that Darkon isn't a political movie. There's the in-game war between Keldar and Bannor, reflected in personal animosity between Wells and Lipman. There's also a hierarchy in the LARPing world. Darkonians, with their emphasis on politics and world-building, look down on those who just bash one another with foam weapons (dismissively called "stick jocks"). Not that there isn't a fair amount of flailing around with plywood shields in Darkon, and while that's shown to be damn good fun, it's the result of a failure of nations. And that's where the real politics comes in. As Keldar starts to rip Darkon and the gamers apart, the players increasingly reflect on war-gaming during a time of real war.
