Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Little Brother, stars a former larper.
[quote]I have a dark secret: I used to be a LARPer. LARPing is Live Action Role Playing, and it’s just about what it sounds like: running around in costume, talking in a funny accent, pretending to be a super-spy or a vampire or a medieval knight. It’s like Capture the Flag in monster-drag, with a bit of Drama Club thrown in, and the best games were the ones we played in Scout Camps out of town in Sonoma or down on the Peninsula. Those three-day epics could get pretty hairy, with all-day hikes, epic battles with foam-and-bamboo swords, casting spells by throwing beanbags and shouting “Fireball!” and so on. Good fun, if a little goofy. Not nearly as geeky as talking about what your elf planned on doing as you sat around a table loaded with Diet Coke cans and painted miniatures, and more physically active than going into a mouse-coma in front of a massively multiplayer game at home.
The thing that got me into trouble were the mini-games in the hotels. Whenever a science fiction convention came to town, some LARPer would convince them to let us run a couple of six-hour mini-games at the con, piggybacking on their rental of the space. Having a bunch of enthusiastic kids running around in costume lent color to the event, and we got to have a ball among people even more socially deviant than us.
The problem with hotels is that they have a lot of non-gamers in them, too – and not just sci-fi people. Normal people. From states that begin and end with vowels. On holidays.
And sometimes those people misunderstand the nature of a game.
Let’s just leave it at that, OK?[/quote]
Cory Doctorow is the high-profile blogger who once linked to the Youtube video of the Stone Golem on BoingBoing. He called it “jaw-droppingly awesome”. Now look!
I’m one session in and the book is brilliant - lots of high-tech delinquency in a super-informative and easy read. The larper-esque qualities of the main character are evident: adaptable, ingenious and resourceful. It’s available in book stores now or here as a free download.
If you visit Amazon by THIS LINK then search books for “Little Brother” and buy it, nzLARPS will get some of the profit too.