“Heroes & Monsters” Featured in The Daily

My live-action role-playing game class gets a write-up in The Daily:

Heroes and Monsters
By Kevin Wong
June 2, 2010

All players are encouraged to develop brief character histories for their in-game personas, on which they can further elaborate, in person and online.

“Clak! Clak! Clak!” shouted an army of skeletons on the lawn in front of Denny Hall. Pedestrians walked by, smiling and staring at the spectacle. Others stood mesmerized, while some took photographs on their phones.

As javelins were thrown through the air and a knight swung his sword, two UWPD officers dismounted their bikes to investigate.

“What’s going on here?” one of the officers asked.

Desta Yarrow, a healer from the province of Taus, was in the middle of reviving a fallen adventurer. Yarrow stopped reciting her spell so that she could reply to the officer as Rebecca Slingwine, a UW student.

“We are live-action role-playing (LARPing) as part of a class here at the UW,” Slingwine told the officers.

“It looks like fun,” one of the officers said. After expressing an interest in playing, they left. And then Yarrow, portrayed by Slingwine, went back to healing.

Slingwine is a senior majoring in biology and Japanese. She started her first two weeks of CHID 496A similar to her classmates, by reading, discussing and watching two documentaries about LARP. Afterward, on online message boards and in class, they discussed the kind of characters they wanted to play and how to actually build the character they envisioned.

Thus, through the power of Slingwine’s imagination, Yarrow came to life around the third week of the quarter as a healer from Taus who prefers to wear brightly colored, flouncy skirts and shawls.

“Her body language is open and friendly, and though she’ll fight back if she needs to, she doesn’t like to start fights, either,” Slingwine wrote of Yarrow online.

Full text: http://dailyuw.com/2010/6/2/heroes-and-monsters/

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