Stopping in to review the posts, I couldn’t help but commenting on some of the comments, given that I am one of the organizers of the Wasteland airsoft game.
The median age of the participants was closer to 30 than 23, though there were plenty of 23 year olds there as well. The range of the age of the participants was from 18 to 50. The occupations of the participants included professional soldiers, professional SWAT team members and bodyguards, corporate CEOs and General Managers and Managers, members of various Ministries, engineers, doctors, storeowners, plumbers, electricians, stonemasons, art restoration specialists, bouncers, musicians and what not. Some of us had also experienced actual combat or life-threatening assault. The economic variance of the participants ranged from jobless to extremely wealthy, the social range from “married with children” to young, single, and full of testosterone.
About 20% of the players were Fallout fans; the rest had never heard of the game or played PC games. On that day, however, everyone lived Fallout. The reason was simple: the LARP was a scenario-based simulation, the weapons were fake, airsoft replicas of actual firearms, but the building was real. By default, some of the dangers were real as well.
The hotel where the game was staged has been derelict for twenty years. The accessible metal within it, as well as the furniture and anything that could be carried away, has been taken by scavengers. Elevator shafts remain open and one can theoretically fall to their deaths. The masonry is crumbling in areas. There are no railings. Holes in the floors and walls appear in the middle of nowhere.
The four basement levels are dark, full of dust, mold, rats and bats. Some of them were modified to resemble abandoned vaults. Players moved around in the dark, carrying their own independent light sources.
We had only one major accident, a young man falling one story and breaking his arm; he was attempting to run away from pursuers. But the emotional and psychological state of the players fully reflected that of this particular young man: they lived the experience. I will provide two anecdotes as an example: “Set’s” lair was in one of the lower cellars. One had to go through a dark maze of sorts to find him, a tribute to, and reminiscent of, the trip to Vault 12 under Necropolis. 50s era music was broadcasted by the ghouls through the still-extant network of ventilation ducts. One young man crawled through these ducts for two hours trying to get to Set. Another man, a professional policeman and bodyguard, with experience of actual conflict and an expert shot, was terrified of “Set” after actually finding him – he was so caught up in the experience that he stated it was one of the most frightening moments in his life.
Every aspect contributed to the experience: the dust, the crumbling masonry, the mold, the darkness, the enemy combatants shooting at you (and yes, plastic BBs at 350 FPS sting and leave welts), the role playing of the NPCs (Dick Richardson’s theme was continuous betrayal), the music and noises and props. The game was a quest-based non-linear experience where the player could choose to play as he wished: If a player wanted to drop his weapon and proceed by stealth and guile, he had that option (no one did). But most important of all was the fiction conceived by Tim Cain et al – we witnessed its effect on people who had not experienced Fallout or played PC games. They were captivated by it, caught up in it. They lived it. It was like a shadow on their own lives that they could not stop thinking about.
For us, as Fallout fans, that was what made all the effort worth it. When we arrived there in the morning, there were maybe 20 Fallout fans present as players. When we left, there were 80. And that in the end is the answer to the question “why would adult professionals with families and lives spend a day traipsing through a ruin, taking a risk at injuring themselves, firing at each other with fake guns, dressed up in post apocalyptic costumes and set to task by amateur actors?” Because the storyline of the original Fallout game is so powerful, it made them want to do so.
