Stranger than Fiction

“Makaveli spawns next to the rocket launcher; Thresh spawns by the railgun. Rockets light up the room, but to no avail. Makaveli scores a rail, and finishes Thresh off with a shaft for the first frag of the day. A cat and mouse game ensues; both players make sure they have plenty of armor and health before engaging. They meet again, and Makaveli’s height advantage lets him soften Thresh up with rockets, then he gets in a rail shot, and finally leaps down to finish him off with his shaft. The one-minute warning sounds as both players race for that last frag. A fully loaded Makaveli catches up with Thresh only to be greeted by grenades. Makaveli charges anyway and frags Thresh with rockets for the last frag of the match.”

A military training simulator? A TV sci-fi action hour? No, this is just your average Quake death-match. Two players engage in combat in a virtual world, blasting away with rockets and lasers, “fragging,” or killing each other’s avatars, all in the name of good clean fun. While computer gaming has been a popular pastime with the young since the days of Pong, it is only since the advent of the Internet that gamers have been able to reach out from the confines of dusty basements and smelly dorm rooms to challenge their peers from around the world. And in recent years that hobby has shown signs of blossoming into an industry in which young “cyberathletes” can turn their online “skillz” into cold, hard cash.

In Adam Rapp’s Stone Cold Dead Serious, young Wynne Ledbetter, confronted with the poverty and misery of his suburban Illinois family, sets out to save them. His vehicle? The Superchampionships of the fictional Tang Dynasty computer game, in which the victor pockets one million dollars. This competition is the product of a fertile imagination, to be sure. But is it so far-fetched?

Indeed not. Professional computer gaming, while still in its infancy, is attracting more and more contestants, and the prizes are getting larger and larger. The two players in the earlier deathmatch, Thresh and Makaveli, are two stars of this sport. Makaveli, Victor Cuadra to his parents, is a hardcore Quake contender, and his best showing was at the Razer CPL (Cyberathlete Professional League) tournament, where he placed second and took home a $20,000 purse.

But his opponent, Thresh, is the undisputed king of professional gaming, called by many the Michael Jordan of this twenty-first century spectator sport. Known offline as Denis Fong, Thresh burst onto the scene in the summer of 1997, when he took top honors at the Red Annihilation Quake tournament. His prize? A cherry red Ferarri 328GTS, gently used by the co-creator of Quake, John Carmack. Over the next year, his nimble fingers and strategic mind netted him over $100,000 in winnings and endorsements from hardware and software companies. His success was noticed even by such pedestrian media outlets as The Wall Street Journal, Good Morning America, and Salon.com, which called him, “possibly the best spokesman gaming could have.”

But like Jordan before him, Thresh found that he could be a great deal more successful by marketing his name. Wynne Ledbetter dreams of using his winnings to start a computer repair business and put his sister in rehab, but Thresh’s ambitions aimed higher. In 1999 he hung up his mouse, raised $11.5 million in venture capital, and started Gamers.com, a web site designed to bring gaming news from around the Web to new players (“newbies”) and the hardcore alike. With more and more gamers jumping online, both through PCs and next generation console systems like Sony’s Playstation 2 and Microsoft’s X-Box, Thresh saw a need for centralizing gaming news, tips, and strategies, and his web site brings together content from across the Net.

But even as Thresh exits professional gaming, the influx of players is changing the sport itself. The focus has moved from one-on-one splatterfests like Quake to more strategic, team-based play. The new game of choice is Valve Software’s Half Life: Counterstrike. In Counterstrike, one team pursues an objective (generally a scientist or piece of equipment), and the other team must prevent them from seizing their goal. At the Cyberathlete Professional League’s premier event this year, the Counterstrike World Championship in Dallas, teams will compete for prize money totaling over $150,000.

But Wynne Ledbetter’s task is not so simple, for in the world of Stone Cold Dead Serious, the Tang Dynasty championships endanger not only his frag count, but his life. In these Superchampionships, Wynne must not simply play the game, but engage in hand-to-hand combat with three highly-trained, heavily-armed mercenaries. They must fight to the death with wakizashi blades, and the winner is the one left breathing.

As outlandish as it may sound, this too has some basis in real life, in the form of live-action-role-playing games, or LARPs. In traditional role-playing games of the Dungeons and Dragons variety, players enter a fictional world. Armed only with paper, pencils, and dice, they are lead through fantasy or science-fiction universes by the Dungeon Master, who sets the stage and arbitrates any conflicts. Battles are fought, but with statistics and random dice rolls. The world is created solely through words and pictures, and the players’ imaginations fill in the details.

LARP players take this one step further. They gather to enact physically the scenarios. They come in costume, dressed as fairies, dwarves, aliens, and monsters, and over the course of a weekend, take over the world. In most LARPs, combat is still resolved through storytelling and statistics, but in some hardcore varieties, the combatants actually duke it out, using protective clothing and weapons padded with foam. The online LARP community (beginning at www.larp.com) is littered with instructions for crafting the ideal broadsword or laments over the disappearance of the brand of foam that, when fashioned into a shield, resounds with the perfect “thwack” when hit.

While this may sound dangerous, all LARPs are governed by a strict set of rules. The ultimate goal of a LARP is to have fun, and close supervision ensures the safety of all participants. According to the website of the Live Role Playing Society (www.lrps.ca), “Role Playing Games promote a healthy lifestyle. They pull kids away from the TV and get them reading, talking, and sharing. They develop the imagination. They teach kids to solve problems presented by the Dungeon Master. And, because they are usually played in the safety of a living room or basement, they are easily supervised by concerned parents (unlike trips to the bar, or drug parties).”

Unlike Wynne’s championships, both LARPing and online gaming are fundamentally positive, social activities. Just as Thresh’s deathmatch instincts serve him well in the cutthroat dot-com world, LARPers learn strategies of creative problem-solving and teamwork that benefit their real lives. And, like Wynne, they can pit themselves against powerful opponents and save, not just their families, but maybe the world itself. On the weekends, at least.

Kyle Brenton is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.