It’s All About…Being There

By Dan Comstock

 In every movie, every TV show, every commercial, we see people living rich and exciting lives, glowing with vitality. We watch them get in gunfights, fend off the zombie horde, steal cars, escape from exploding buildings, and save the world. We are detached as if watching them through a window. The exciting world seems to be a world of images and illusions, the glass of the television screen is the impassable border between the exciting and the tragically mundane. From our armchairs and movie theater seats, we watch a flickering image of William Wallace, of Neo, of Frodo, of Buffy. We hunger to be like them, we hunger to live lives of idealized violence, of tragic drama, and to deliver bad one-liners smugly to our nemesis during a climactic final battle.

We are surrounded by action heroes.

But the movie ends, the credits roll, the lights come up, and we go back to being who we “really” are. We go back to facing our mundane challenges and mundane rewards. Many of us go back to being bored, or boring, passively sliding down the day-to-day rut.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Many people are discovering that there are alternative ways to have fun. It’s possible to go have real, live adventures, and break out of the gray-normlands, the everyday zombie-state.

To me, it’s an attitude. I try to engage in every exciting activity I can, never turning down a potentially fun experience. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo steps up and decides to take the ring to Mordor despite the risks involved. At the beginning of The Matrix, Neo is given the “red pill / blue pill” choice, beckoning him to approach his destiny rather than run away from it. Rather than dodging the proverbial bullet, he bites the hook, and takes a dangerous step towards freedom. This, basically, is what separates the Hero from the Supporting Cast, and what separates the Live Adventurer from a life of routine boredom.

You could wait forever for the One Ring to fall into your lap. It’s entirely possible that a madcap misadventure will appear, unbidden, on your front doorstep, beckoning you to action and excitement. More likely you’re going to have to find your own adventures.  In order to see them, you have to see the world for the playground it is. I believe that the universe does not want itself taken so seriously.

I’m worried about people who have run out of vitality. I’m worried about people who spend their vacation watching TV. I’m worried about people who will drive hundreds of miles to go play a Live Adventure game, and then just sort of play along, waiting for something cool to happen to them. It’s not going to happen, in a game or in life, unless you want to engage rather than merely participate.

Adventurers these days have to go looking for their narrative.

Part of the joy of Live Adventures is the departure from the mundane, the escape from the day-to-day into the scene, and the experience. Here are some examples of people who make regular daytrips into that realm:

Regina and Jasmine dressed up as fairy-tale Princesses and locked themselves on the second story balcony of a building. They called out to aspiring heroes passing on the street below to come inside and rescue them by unlocking the door. Inside the building, there was a foam sword on the stairs, and a masked villain pacing the hallway before the balcony. To save them, a random stranger off the street would have to defeat the villain in a duel, and unlock the door to save both Princesses.

The Obnoxious Jerk Cabal of Stamford, Connecticut, a guild of zen-lunatics, has a monthly “Time Travel Adventure”. In a typical reality experiment, they wear the garb of different eras (cowboys, knights, ninjas, flappers, mad scientists, et cetera) and hand out flyers to anyone who happens to pass this public spectacle. They claim that their motivation for this absurdity is, in part, “to make everyone’s day a little weirder.”

The Pirate Action League, of Purchase College, in New York, will bury treasure in random places on campus, and draw elaborate maps of where it’s stashed. Weeks later, they’ll dress up as pirates, get drunk on rum, and gallivant around the campus following the map. When they find where X marks the spot, they reclaim their booty and celebrate… with more rum.

I snicker to myself whenever I overhear someone complaining about how “there’s nothing to do around here!” It can be a boring place if you’re only looking for fun in typical places, in typical venues. You could go to a bar. You could go bowling. You could watch a million movies and when it’s all over, you’ll have even less in common with the characters that have movies about them.

At the end of a large battle in NERO Avendale, (the game I run) I was talking to a friend of mine who was very new to the hobby, and still a bit self-conscious about it. When I asked him if he enjoyed the fight, still pumping with adrenaline, he explained,

“At first, it felt really weird to put on a costume and go do something this different. But when the music peaked and the line of monsters crashed into the line of knights, and everyone was screaming, trying to defend them selves. I was there. That was awesome. I’m so glad I came this weekend.”

I’m reminded of Elizabethan plays. In the days of Shakespeare, the theater-goers would cheer and boo at the actors, throwing roses or rotten fruit. The audience really got into it! You’d never expect that kind of reaction from a modern audience. The screen has us trained to watch, detached, at a distance.

The new dramas, the kinds I enjoy, are all about the experience of getting out, being there, and engaging. I’d rather fight in a battle than watch one. I’d rather live my own story than observe someone else’s. The action hero of an illusionary world is still a hero, more so than the person sitting next to him on the bus who’s not much fun to talk to and passionate about little. There’s little reason to settle for a routine life. There’s little reason to be satisfied with what is, when the what-could-be is exciting, vital, virgin territory.

You’re the hero of your own movie. So what’s your story?

Dan Comstock is a young, up and coming LARPwright in southern Connecticut. When he’s not immersed in imaginary worlds, he enjoys the company of his cat, Flapjack. He is always prepared with thirty feet of rope.