Hello readers! No apologies for the break, as you have more than enough material to read. Inspired by M and B's LARPcast post, I have been working-- for quite a bit--, on the documentary film representation of LARP players. カンタンではないね！(It's not simple, is it? Sorry, I have a placement exam today, and Japanese is on the brain.) Although the good gentlemen of LARPcast reference both fictive and non-fictive cinema, my interest is, mainly, in documentary style approaches. Why? I find it much more interesting. Irregardless of your feelings on The Wild Hunt or Role Models, they, ultimately, exploit the LARP universe in order to tell an unrelated narrative. (In the first example, this film uses LARP to tell the story of a Lord of the Flies type drama; Role Models is a comedy, and LARP is used to facilitate a story of nerdy-rags to geeky-riches via role-playing games. Both have merits and disadvantages.) Ultimately, the fictive narration of any drama relies on appropriation of a genre. This involves much simplification and over-generalization. And so? To documentaries we move.
As any viewer knows, documentaries are farm from objective. Documentaries are a painstakingly edited product that, like their fictive kin, attempt to tell a story. While they may hide behind the moniker of "Non-Fiction," most readers and watchers understand that, despite nons, the lines between the two are blurry.
I start my inquiry with Monster Camp and Darkon. For whatever reason, the latter has been more or less heralded by those within and outside the LARP community. While individuals argue its specific flaws, it has been congratulated as a decent non-fiction film. This is, perhaps, because it more closely resembles narrative coming from mainstream Hollywood. However, Monster Camp has been universally panned as "milktoast dimdram abyssal sludge." While it is admittedly low-budget (and features, problematically, an almost entirely male cast that adheres to tired stereotypes), it is far from a simple piece of drivel. And so, I invite you, frequent and infrequent readers, to start commentary on Monster Camp. This is, of course, part of a much larger project about characterization. Staying safe, I have actually started with Darkon's Becca Thurmond, a single mother who plays an "Amazon," but I encourage you to start elsewhere. This is very nascent, and merely provides fuel for the fire-- so to speak. So, get going! Leave comments below.
As any viewer knows, documentaries are farm from objective. Documentaries are a painstakingly edited product that, like their fictive kin, attempt to tell a story. While they may hide behind the moniker of "Non-Fiction," most readers and watchers understand that, despite nons, the lines between the two are blurry.
I start my inquiry with Monster Camp and Darkon. For whatever reason, the latter has been more or less heralded by those within and outside the LARP community. While individuals argue its specific flaws, it has been congratulated as a decent non-fiction film. This is, perhaps, because it more closely resembles narrative coming from mainstream Hollywood. However, Monster Camp has been universally panned as "milktoast dimdram abyssal sludge." While it is admittedly low-budget (and features, problematically, an almost entirely male cast that adheres to tired stereotypes), it is far from a simple piece of drivel. And so, I invite you, frequent and infrequent readers, to start commentary on Monster Camp. This is, of course, part of a much larger project about characterization. Staying safe, I have actually started with Darkon's Becca Thurmond, a single mother who plays an "Amazon," but I encourage you to start elsewhere. This is very nascent, and merely provides fuel for the fire-- so to speak. So, get going! Leave comments below.
I think were Darkon falls short is that in making the film TOO cinematic. In playing out the story line they created without really talking about how the story and plot is created, they make the players feel more like [poor] actors and the interview scenes feel like a behind the scenes interview with the cast. Too much focus on those with drama and not enough on people who larp and have perfectly healthy lives, like Kenyon. Now as for Becca, I think that she is treated in a middling fashion. She is painted as one of many people involved who came to Darkon with some sort of social/emotional shortcoming and who, through playing and socializing, grew as a person. Now I see nothing wrong with personal growth through larping, but Darkon makes it seem that ALL larpers start that way. From Kenyon [who is now a successful manager type person] to Danny [Who is only just being able to talk to girls] Darkon is displayed as a social therapy program for the incapable. So wail I have seen and aplod this ability in larp it's not the only thing it has going.
ReplyDeleteCwig, that's a fair synopsis, but I have a few qualms.
DeleteMy major issue with DARKON, and the documentary genre in general, is adherence to "story." The filmmakers, like most good filmmakers, are also decent storytellers-- they want deep characters who all fit into the plot of a greater narrative. While perhaps noble, this storytelling, in DARKON, hinders portraying LARP accurately. This is demonstrated by the awkward editing cuts-- seemingly, we watch a non-interrupted saga of Skip, with splurts of the scenic West Coast, villain scheming from Kenyon, and... uh oh. That awkward Denny's moment. Don't plan and pancake, friends.
There is a more troublesome issue, however. Cwig, you address this. By editing the Darkon world to fit within a plotline, the directors also fictionalize the actual experience. Watching the docudrama, viewers might believe that Darkon is a month-long, high-action fantasy game. In fact, it seems like the game is actually more based in strategy and combat.(The fiery castle, by the way, was produced by the film team.) This over-dramatization results in the need for PC characters to fall in easy good-bad-lawful-chaotic stereotypes (not to mention gendered ones-- another day). Is this fair? Perhaps. However, it also underplays the real-life normality of the actual players.
The players become, as you point out, Cwig, patients in a social therapy program. They enter broken, battered, and inept, and emerge socially competent citizens. I give you, for one, Danny-- the obese young man, who "cannot talk to girls" and enters the game as "Cardboard Man." But what, of Danny, is perfectly good and mainstream? (He works at Starbuck's, cleans cat litter, and seems to have nice parents, for three.) Another good example of this "social therapy program" is Becca-- two years ago she was a stripper/single-mom working to feed her young son. Now, she's an Amazonian queen with a day-job. Thank you, LARP! Skip and Kenyon follow similar awkward-to-able chronologies. But how accurate is this? Is it fact, fiction, or some combination therein? A bit of all three.
In reality, all of the players have more than a bit of weird pain in their real-world background. However, they also lead relatively normal, happy lives. (An obvious disclaimer-- I have never met these people nor the filmmakers. This is all from film and related media.) So what do I mean by "normal"? Well, I'll pose a few questions. Why, for instance, is Skip's wife so underplayed? (Well, she probably thought this whole documentary thing was a terrible idea...) And why don't we, as viewers, learn more of the Lich-guy? (Other than that he doesn't think Denny's is a great place for IG political drama. Sorry Skip.) Kenyon, pretty blatantly, tells us he keeps LARP and his career separate. Becca, however, gives the majority of her LARP interviews from her workplace (at an industry-size toy store). It's difficult to figure out who really lives on the social margins. Who has emerged from LARP a better person? Who, from the very start, was pretty ok? Again, this is a larger problem with the social drama documentary drama.
Just for you, I rewatched Monster Camp. If you haven't seen them, the trailer "Dragons are Real" and the Director's commentary in the DVD extras are somewhat illuminating. I think the trailer was made before the staff got so burnt out, and it has a much more positive vibe.
ReplyDeleteI was really surprised to hear you say it's universally reviled. I'd honestly never spoken to anyone who hated it before. Thought it was a bit sad, certainly over-simplistic in parts, but abyssal sludge?
So, here's thoughts:
The Ugly:
Monster Camp is not a documentary about LARP broadly. It's about a specific NERO game, at a specific time (2005ish) when it happened to be struggling. Perhaps some of the problems it captures are unique to NERO, or that community. Certainly Accelerant, Red Button, and many, many other US adventure larps (as distinct from theatre-style, or Amtgard-derivative heavy fighting larps like Darkon) have built their models around avoiding some of the issues that RJC, Ian Lemke, and others saw in NERO. They decided to prioritize immersion, streamline rules, create higher standards for props and costumes, etc. But those games are in some ways reactions to NERO, and can be understood as part of a conversation of what LARPing is about. If we don't look at NERO, especially mediocre-to-failing NERO, we're not hearing half of that conversation.
While many in those newer LARP communities are now playing differently than they did, there are still lots of games all over the country where people are playing in a way that looks pretty much like Monster Camp looks. I've played those games, and the film does a pretty good job of showing us what they look like. The NPC costuming is often bad. The rules are insanely complex. There's gobs of OOG chatter. The staff and NPCs are too few, overtaxed and underskilled. No one can agree on a comprehensive philosophy of LARP, so the game stagnates a bit, torn between the drama nerds, the stick jocks, and the guys who think it was better back in 2nd Edition. But the players love every minute of it, and tell dumb stories and get excited over silly things. It's a different kind of game than what many of us have gotten used to, but those who play it still have a blast. Some people juggle geese.
The Bad:
We don't get enough of the girls. The Director is sad about this too, and specifically mentions how he wanted to get more Holly, Amber, Becca, etc, and they were very reluctant to be filmed.
We don't get enough of the more ordinary/successful parts of people's lives, for a number of reasons. The director mentions that there were a number of people with very public careers (teachers, state employees, police, etc) who didn't want to be filmed or identified outside the game. So that unfairly weights the burnouts and the dropouts, for sure. Shane mentions in the trailer that the majority of the players are college students, who we don't see much of. Maybe they're too busy doing their homework to be filmed. But it makes sense that we don't hear much about their careers.
There are some inaccurate generalizations. The director seems to feel like WOW is more relevant to LARP than it is, and gets sidetracked about it. He mentions in the commentary how he's pretty unsympathetic about it, in a way that he isn't toward LARP.
The director is a little obsessed with relationship/sexuality drama, and so I think the degree to which it figures prominently in the film is a tad unnecessary. Apparently one of the 'storylines' that got cut was about dark elf guy and horned elf girl, who are a couple, which is sad.
The director made a deliberate decision to focus on mechanics, community, and OOG motivations for larping rather than IG story and art, because he thought those things were more interesting and easier to handle. Which is a bit sad, since we don't really know what their game is about. But 90 minutes is not much time to cover these things, so it's not unforgivable.
The Good:
ReplyDeleteI love hearing Kelly's daughter talk about her tearful roleplay with Amber's vampire girl. I love JP (whose animated-ness reminds me not a little bit of Lucius's player). The director talks about him being someone who is highly successful in the game, but also very well-adjusted and charismatic OOG. Paul seems obsessed to our eyes, but what 17 year old isn't obsessed with whatever he's into?
I love the bits of amazing makeup you catch. Zebra guy. Holly/Slice. Sea elf with her faux-dreads. The focus is on Monster Camp, which is often shlumpy, but there are some awesome looking PCs in that game too. Apparently one of the events they shot at was the coldest weekend Washington had seen in like 10 years, so costuming was not at its best.
I love the way they follow Matt and Brittany around as new players. The way they learn the game is piecemeal and problematic, but that's pretty accurate to my experience.
I love Val and her conversation about her chair. The way she's handled is a bit heavy-handed, but it drives the point home sympathetically.
I love the LARPing families. The dad and daughter bickering over IG pocket money is adorable.
About a third of the way into the film, Amber articulates this statement that is arguably the thesis of the film, according to the director. She says that these people aren't just into LARPing, they're into fantasy, because they want to escape from their (dismal) real lives. The director says that he thinks the truth of that is debatable. I wish he'd spent a little more time exploring counter-theses, but two or three strongly stand out to me:
*The larp as personal growth/therapy thing. It's problematic, but I don't think it's coming out of the mouths of the editors, the players seem to think of it that way. Also, I think we're sometimes overly antsy about that vocabulary-- people talk about soccer or running as their therapy/stress relief/escape all the time and we don't worry about it too much.
*The guy who talks about how we pretend as children, and how it's healthy to give ourselves permission to play as adults. I think he articulated it really well, but I might be biased cause I agree with him.
*The passerby couple who get into an argument over whether play aggression is weird. In an effort to demonstrate a 'normal' game, the woman brings up red rover. The man says something like "Oh, the game where you bum rush and clothesline people? Yeah, that's so much more peaceful." I think that makes the point of 'this is normal behavior, just with unusual trappings' in a totally unaffected, accidental way.
The first time I watched the movie, I remember feeling like the ending was really negative, with folks talking about moving on, what they've gotten from the game, or how they will or won't focus on things in their non-game lives. But Amber has a line in there I really like, about being able to enjoy the fantasy play more when there was no desperate need for escape (indicating that LARP is not something that all functional people grow out of). And Shane's burnt-out conversation of how he wants to be done with larping and move on with his real life drips with irony, since he's playing WOW as he says it. So I think the takeaway is more "Here's this thing, that some people do in a healthy way, and others in an unhealthy way, just like anything else. They build real friendships, and have real communities that are important to them." Yeah, it's a bit screwed up, but I still found it fairly endearing overall.
(I should R-E-A-L-L-Y be doing homework, but... this is interesting.)
ReplyDeleteJyn has most excellent insights here, as she very often does. Zoe, being that you are particularly fascinated with NERO, might I note that I think her observations on that front are dead-on. (Player-of-Locke also entertained me at one point by noting that he could tell via reading over the Accelerant system that there were certain situations clearly planned to be avoided -- kinda like how you can tell by bizarre warnings on various products that oh gee, someone somewhere DID try to eat this soap, for example.)
It has been a while since I saw either of the documentaries -- and yes, I loathed Monster Camp and loved Darkon. So I can't have a quality discussion about most of the specific individuals portrayed, but I can at least examine the love vs loathing.
Monster Camp -- it especially comes down to Mr. WoW-playing, chapter-buying Butterfly Thing. Too much of the documentary dwelt on stereotypes to begin with, and I just really did not find Butterfly to be likeable, and his abundant screen time was just Car Wreck City to me. (It DOES entertain me that the unlabeled interview that I was finding to be especially intelligent -- if a bit compromised by check-in noisiness -- meant that Kat and I turned to each other and blurted out "it IS Max!!!" Nothing like spotting a long-lost friend onscreen.)
Darkon -- I got the impression that it was more of a wargame than a LARP, per se; to me, well, roleplay is my bread & butter, and I didn't get the idea it was heavily featured if at all. But you know what..? I felt like I was given the chance to learn something about these people, and to find them sympathetic. THAT, I think, is what made all the difference to me.
There is a certain amount of that the individuals in question in both cases are, indeed, more or less sympathetic in and of themselves -- and, of course, a certain amount of prejudice and choice and skill or lack thereof on the parts of the documentarians. Let's put it this way: if you are the "bad guy" on a reality TV show, even if you are cognizant of it and trumpet what your role is throughout, even if editing plays a huge part, there is STILL an element of that if you are consistently behaving badly and treating others poorly, you might really NOT be that awesome. So I think it is always a mix of BOTH the subject AND the chosen portrayal.
I've even been IN a documentary, as it so happens. I kind of had to watch it through my fingers initially, cos hey, I normally express myself unselfconsciously. And even from that experience I learned that even if the filmmaker comes to their project with a thesis, it will be a question of whether they get footage that bears it out; it will be a question of whether their own opinions and questions morph over time; it will be a question of SO MANY THINGS. I think I might go mad as a documentarian, MOST ESPECIALLY if I had the intention of "proving" particular points. Also, I may have watched too many niche documentaries. And I should really really depart.
Thank you both for your responses! Jyn, thanking you for rewatching MC for me-- I've seen the extra bits, and I wish they had formed the bulk of the film. Jen-- huzzah! I'm glad you made it on.
DeleteMmkay... Mickey, of MM and Invictus, really wants me and the other half to make the jump to NERO. I can't say that I particularly want to-- I'm happy in Accelerant land. Which, as you noted Jen, has been tailored to avoid certain NERO situations. But... I still have that strange pull to experience alterna-LARP; I satisfy this urge by watching movies and listening to cautionary tales. Admittedly, these may or may not apply to me. I'd love and loathe to see an Accelerant documentary. We're a different flavor of game, and we offer a much different community. But how to approach this?
No wait wait I have to come right back cos I remembered something else I wanted to consider. And that is: people working out their various issues. Not just having an escape or a stress release; actively consciously addressing their various bits of baggage.
ReplyDeleteI have very mixed feelings about this. (Oh NERO, goofing on the Army with "be all you CAN'T be.") I understand that roleplay can be a profoundly powerful part of therapy; I guess it may be exactly because of that power that I am uncomfortable with the idea of people perhaps indulging in SELF-therapy in what are often very imperfect circumstances.
I had a dear friend and gaming partner who stopped playing a particular character -- not because the character's story was done, not even because he himself was done with the character... at least for what I would view to be the "usual" reasons. No. He was done because he'd wanted to work some issues out for himself as a player, and felt that he had now done so. I and our other friends were flabbergasted. He himself was in no way unstable, but still (BUT STILL).
Too, there was a certain truly awesome Madrigal player who said to Beth flat out, "you know I'm using you to help me work through a few things, right?" (Beth responded that she SO TOTALLY DID KNOW.) In this case, I was not freaked out, and I'm not necessarily sure why. Perhaps because this person was that much more exquisitely self-aware? Also, too, because I had at least already been exposed to this idea?
I think there can be a tremendous amount to be gained by pretending to be someone else -- being more apt to try things, say, when there is no painful change in your "real" life that might then not even work out -- but I think it can be risky as well. The circumstances, have we mentioned that they are often not ideal...?
Well, it's not so much that I want you guys to jump to nero as it is wanting some good npcs at a.n event I'm running. You guys should not play NERO regularly, it would drive you nuts.
ReplyDeleteMickey
Heh, I know, Mickey. I know. I don't think I would mesh well with the combat system.
Delete