I'm not sure if this is even the right forum for this thread, but it seemed appropriate. Also, I
am not a member of this or any other
role-playing club, and I'm not selling it.
Just finished channel-hopping in the wee hours and watched a kind of disturbing documentary on the Independent Film Channel, an offering called
Darkon. You can check out the movie trailer here:
Darkon the Movie Site
For those who don't know — and, up until a couple of hours ago I was among them —
Darkon is a fantasy war gaming club that is apparently
thriving in the Baltimore/Washington DC area, boasting a membership of about 300. Here's their website:
Darkon War Gaming Site
I'm not and have never been a member of any role-playing group — I'm kind of dealing with
REALITY on a full-time basis, which doesn't
leave me much opportunity for
schizophrenic escapism.
Which pretty much describes
Darkon to a tee. Except that
Darkon is overtly
violent, and that's the disturbing part.
Darkon is sort of like what
Dungeons and Dragons would be if all the D&D players regularly congregated in a mob down at the municipal
park and beat the living hell out of each other.
Now, I will confess that I've played a few rounds of paintball in my time, and I know paintball can escalate into a mindless melee, as well. I'm
happy to report that, after taking a few dozen rounds at close range to exposed flesh, the novelty of paintball wore off for me. As far as I'm
concerned, there's not enough adrenaline reward in the sport to justify the monetary expenditure and the sense of shame.
I think that's how most people are, you know — trying out something new and quirky until the novelty wears off, then growing up a little more and
moving on to more sophisticated games... Like
making the mortgage and car payments.
But I know there are
some out there who never seem to break out of the fantasy and who go on in an endless loop of escapism. In an earlier
decade we would have called them
Nerds or
Trekkies or
Liberals, living in a perpetual dream world that can probably be diagnosed
as schizophrenia.
Okay. So imagine a few hundred
Trekkies regularly congregating down at the municipal park and beating the hell out of one another. Now
you're starting to get the flavor of
Darkon.
Judging from the several interviews in the afore-mentioned documentary, I'd say most of these
Darkon members could very easily be diagnosed
with severe neuroses (or even psychoses), and I'm willing to bet you money that many of them are on disability for mental disorders. Watch the movie
when you get a chance before you tell me I'm wrong.
Darkon members are largely the social misfits you remember from high school, and they readily state this themselves in the film. They were
bullied, they rode the short bus, and now they blame everyone else for their problems, which is their justification for retreating into a fantasy
world of
Middle Earth gobbledegook and, yes, waging
physical war on each other.
What's more disturbing than the violence is the fact that it's self-perpetuating. I mean, these people become more and more engrossed with the
fantasy until it consumes their lives — not only
their lives, but the lives of their
children, as well. Yes, they
breed, and
their little kids exhibit these same violent tendencies. They even
encourage it.
Now, if it was just a bunch of social misfits with Nerf swords and shields pounding the daylights out of each other, that would be one thing. That
would almost be amusing in a grotesque way. But it's what these
Darkon members reveal about themselves in the movie that is most chilling.
Some of them equate their
fantasy with
religion. Some of them use phrases like "terrorist" to describe themselves. They tell
war
stories about their mock battles — they believe
they know what real war is all about, based on their
Darkon experience. One guy
made people so nervous that they reported him as a potential school-shooter; this same guy says he sometimes fantasizes about taking his Nerf sword
and attacking the customers at the fast-food place where he works.
These people need to be in therapy, not
reinforcing their malcontent dispositions through
war gaming.
When and if you watch the documentary, you can
try to keep an open mind, and you can
try to tell yourself that this sort of
extremely
violent role-playing is a "positive outlet" for these people's bubbling frustrations... But I will warn you that
you will start to feel
ill-at-ease as the film progresses and as you come to know some of these
Darkon members.
Something aint right with hundreds and hundreds of social misfits practicing
medieval slaughter down at the municipal park on weekends,
okay?
— Doc Velocity
[edit on 4/8/2009 by Doc Velocity]