Once in a while, everybody needs to take break from the rigours of being themselves. You let the mask fall, whatever it is, and let loose -- it's cathartic to be someone else for a few hours.
These breaks can take many forms. I know a painfully shy man who becomes a raging nut the second he ties up soccer shoes -- it's an absolute fugue state for two hours until the Dockers go back on. In entertainment circles, organized play-acting has been categorized as role-playing, and it is popping up with increasing regularity on-line and off.
I'm going to give three examples that have come to my attention this week, but first a stab at one reason for its rise: The modern economy has led to a glut of dull occupations in the Western world and Asia. Or at least I term them dull because I don't much care about the fluctuations of markets, the movement of paper between divisions of large corporations or the writing of the software codes that increasingly make everything work.
Really avid role-players, I have noticed, tend to have such day jobs, and they say they live for the time when their labours can be forgotten -- and who can blame them for being starved for a little magic, for trying on a new hat now and then? It's just a guess, and it comes from a grown man who plays games for part of his living, so take it with two grains of salt.
Now, the first example is a story that originated in World of Warcraft, the fantasy role-playing game with more than six million subscribers paying monthly fees to quest in an on-line world. A post in the game's Web forums has been picked up by a number of video-game blogs and it is causing a stir. It is a thank you from one player to his guild for financially coming to his aid after a battle with cancer. Players in WoW join these guilds to get through challenges in the game, but the writer says his fellow questers, most of whom he had never met in person, teamed up to raise money to pay expenses as he got back on his feet. These on-line games may lead to new types of relationships, part real, part imaginary, but stories like this confirm that they are communities in every sense of the word.
Then there are the role-playing situations where the participants leave their homes, don costumes and act out scenarios. This is called live action role-play, or LARP, one of my favourite new verbs: Jack and Jess went LARPing on Saturday. (If you have never seen this, I highly recommend the documentary Darkon, which goes behind-the-scenes of a large club of LARPers based in Washington, D.C.)
This week, a chain of U.S. resorts, Great Wolf Lodges, announced that it is getting in on the act with a high-tech game called MagiQuest. Guests are given a remote control disguised as a wand that can be used at various stations around the resorts. They then act out stories that look like Harry Potter crossed with J.R.R. Tolkien. In a nod to LARPing, this has been called Live Action Retail Entertainment, and it is aimed at families.
And finally, a Canadian company, S.R. Entertainment, is launching an "on-line, live-action interactive murder-mystery movie" today. Mystery at Mansfield Manor (add ".com" to the name to find it on-line) is being billed as a game of Clue meets a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and it lets the player take on the role of a detective named Frank Mitchell. You watch a movie that sets the deadly scene and then, after paying $5 for 72 hours of access, start solving the crime by choosing Frank's path. It should take two to three hours to find the guilty party, and there are multiple outcomes.
The Mansfield Manor production values impressed me, but I'm not sure any of these role-playing opportunities are for me. For the sake of balance, I need a game or a theme weekend where I wear a suit and tie and crunch numbers -- when they start up Accountant: This Time It's Tax-Deductible, I'm there.
Summer reading list
Plans for a Plugged In book club have been set back by my inability to bond with Douglas Coupland's latest novel, jPod. It is about a group of bored employees at a Vancouver game-development studio and the adventures they lead between 16-hour shifts writing code. But Doug Coupland the writer keeps showing up as a character whenever the plot gets especially ridiculous, which is often, and every time he does, I put the book down for a week or so. I will keep trying.
In the meantime, two new releases look tempting. Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, has put his hypotheses about the digital economy into a book called The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. It makes the argument that "our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and moving toward a huge number of niches in the tail."
Julian Dibbell would agree. He jumped into a niche -- on-line role-playing games, to fit today's theme -- and the result is Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot. By all accounts, including the one at his bank, he got the balance between real and unreal just right.
