Of course this indictment of LARPing in the USA is itself an exercise in role-playing. "Kalle" is Viennese performance artist Johannes Grenzfurthner, who loves to mix geek culture with bizarro art and strange scholarly endeavors.

via Larpen Tumblr

Condon told me that he's directing something called SonsbeekLive: The Twentyfivefold Manifestation. It's an art project/live action role playing game happening right now, in a Netherlands forest, with 200 participants. The event coincides with an annual outdoor art display in Sonsbeek forest, and the art is incorporated into the LARP. Set in a distant future where industrial civilization has fallen, the LARP unfolds as the characters come to the forest to worship the art and go through a series of ritualistic rites-of-passage. The haunting, beautiful art in the forest really does look like futuristic monuments.

Influenced by playing a lot of computer games as a kid, and participating in what he calls "an experimental LARP group" in the 1990s, Condon focuses on how games create small moments of abstract beauty — sort of like modern ballet.

What I find intriguing about Condon's work is the way it suggests that participatory, amateur performances like LARPs are nearly indistinguishable from art. Games have always verged on being art, and have certainly been part of art for thousands of years. But gamers have not usually been granted the status of artist. I love Condon's work for showing how LARPers and other kinds of gamers can be artists in their own right, creating public fantasy narratives that are just as worthy of attention as a piece of theater performed at your local rep house.

So does Condon see SonsbeekLive as art, or is it gaming? He says it's ambiguous:

Tis both i suppose. I dont really ask those questions. Art isn't a thing, it's a place/context/discussion. The base of my work is modifying existing games, so - I made a LARP, then I'm modifying it (usually I'm modifying existing games- in this case my own) to create random motion performances in the park around the sculptures. It's like making a live game engine that spits out random performances.

Want to learn more about SonsbeekLive, or participate? Find out more on the website.

SonsbeekLive [official site]

Terrorwerks is a Live Action Role-Playing scenario put together at game conventions by PST Productions and Airsoft. You don't need any experience to enlist - they put you through a ten-minute boot camp before you hop on your jump-ship and head planetside. The whole scenario lasts about an hour and costs $18.

Your mission is to clear an off-world mining colony of alien critters. Problem is, your ship crash-landed, communications are down and the colony has no power. You need to escort the drones from Corporate and your precious engineers to restore systems and escape, all while fending off alien attacks. You're armed with an Airsoft rifle that shoots soft BB-like pellets, strapped into a tactical vest and helmet, and then it's, "Move ! Move! Move!".

The Terrorwerks crew let me tag along on a mission as an observer, but someone handed me a rifle and before I knew it I was shouting "Contact!" and firing on full auto along with the rest of the greenhorns. It's difficult to convey the awesomeness with photos, because the scenario takes place in a huge hall cordoned into rooms and corridors, darkened and filled with smoke and lighting effects. Throbbing, evocative sound effects add to the tension. What sets it apart from your basic game of Lasertag are the NPCs, the Terrorwerks Marines, Corporate suits and aliens who never break character. My moment with the guy from Corporate was amazingly cinematic, and running around in the flickering light with people yelling, "Medic!" was flat out the most fun I've had in ages. We may have been the most poorly trained squad of Space Marines ever, but most of us got out alive, and we even retrieved an alien egg. Terrorwerks will be offered at next year's MegaCon in Florida in addition to hourly run-throughs all this weekend at Orgins.