Rewriting Fantasy
The Changing Face of LARPing and Geek Culture
The chatter and hubbub grow quieter as I step into the court. All eyes are on me as I take my seat at the long-table. I am trailed by a knight and a prince, each adorned in spectacular and elaborate homemade costumes. The lights are low, banners hang from the rafters, Hardrun patterns the white-boards, and a fire is projected onto the screen. The court is relatively empty tonight, only 13 members are seated.
The Queen sits with the grandeur and decorum one would expect, at the front of the classroom. A beautifully decorated home-crafted foam sword is at one side of her, the court advisor on the other. The court members bow to the pair as they enter. Newly passed initiates, called Squires, scatter the courtroom. They each play their own role in the court. The Squire sitting next to me is a freshman who joined the club at the start of the semester. She is taking notes to be entered into the ever expanding and delicately documented 40-year-long history of the court.
Head of Clan Ia-Gondol loudly enters in chaotic and jester-like fashion, a set of bells jangle from his waist. The jester makes a round of the court, distributing bottles of Gondol juice, a fictional in-universe “alcohol” that looks and tastes a lot like Martinelli’s sparkling apple-cider. It’s 8:30 p.m. on a Thursday night and I’m in Hoover 005 as I’ve never seen it before.
Welcome to the weekly meeting of Whittier college’s own LARPing club, AOKP. AOKP (The Artorian Order of the Knights of Pendragon) is a society that has existed on campus since 1983. The society is a fantasy style LARP (Live-action role-play) club, crafting and living out a continuous narrative and history that dates to its genesis.
“Picture Dungeons and Dragons, but you physically do everything… You make the world whatever you want it to be,” explains court member Crow Caton.
Caton is a sophomore who joined the club in their first semester at the college. They have always been involved in fantasy and what is affectionately described here as geek-culture. “It’s never not been a part of my life,” they tell me. “I have been going to and helping with running renaissance fairs since as long as I can remember there is a picture of me in my Mom’s arms as a one-year-old with a renaissance garb on. So, I have been super involved with fantasy spaces and just medieval spaces ever since I was little.”
However, they say they have found something uniquely special here. “We are essentially one big family we treat each other with mutual love and respect. Oftentimes, it just feels like a bunch of friends that truly just love each other and love being around each other and we just happen to have club meetings,” Caton continues. “This is the most involved and the most fun I’ve had because I have so much autonomy.”
“This is the most involved and the most fun I’ve had because I have so much autonomy.”
Autonomy is a common point of praise regarding AOKP. “It just has a lot more freedom than other groups” says Josh (Captain Iggy, in Matrix), a member since 2007. “AOKP is incredible in that it somehow manages to remain free in a lot of ways that other laps do not,” Josh explains. “There’s not a lot of rules lawyering down to the ground what you can or can’t do.”
For example, he mentions that earlier in the evening someone made a clam joke and someone followed up the joke by leaving and coming back as a clam. “Like you can just sketch it and its done here,” he says excitedly. “Other clubs are like ‘that’s not a species on our lore list, that’s not approved.’”.
Perhaps a more prevalent commonality between members of the club is a shared interest in gaming. Kira (Queen Aneka Bannier Caradoc, in Matrix) joined the club in 2012 in search of friends to play Portal Two, a popular video game. “There’s a LARP club, that LARP club is filled with nerds, nerds like video games, so maybe if I join it there’ll be someone who likes portal 2 and I can make one friend who’s into this one game at least and that is why I joined,” she says. She made several friends to play Portal with.
Which isn’t to say that Whittier College’s accomodating LARPing club can shield AOKP members all of gaming culture’s excesses.
“Holy shit! so many of these gamers are so toxic, and it’s just because they think they’re better than everyone else!” says Caton. “And they don’t have friends! And they don’t have a community where they can play this game that they like so much and so they play it by themselves and they get upset with themselves that they’re not doing as well as they want to or getting upset with other people for not doing as well as they expect.”
Caton says they have been harassed at times by male gamers. “Because of how I sound, they’re misogynistic to me as well. So, male gamers can often be just very toxic and misogynistic.”
Caton identifies as non-binary and is involved in the college’s E-sports team. They spend many hours a week in the E-sports lounge playing Valorant, a competitive fantasy first-person shooter game. They play in ranked lobbies with others from around the world. I got a taste of how disparagement looks when I joined their party and hopped into a few unranked (less competitive) games.
Though experienced with video games, I was new to Valorant and playing on PC. I scored a few kills, and we won a couple of rounds but it’s fair to say I was not winning it for the team. I came to learn communication was key to this game and that without adequate teamwork, a team was at a disadvantage. Voice-chat is a necessity, and that’s where things can go amiss.
“I’ve been called a soy-boy” says Wren Paul, a new member of AOKP. The insult stems from an online right-wing conspiracy theory that the Phyto-estrogens in soy products feminize men. Caton has experienced similar harassment “‘Go back to the kitchen’, people have told me since I sound like a girl. They aren’t very original,” they say. In that atmosphere, voice-comms become unusable and the entire game is made the worse for it.
“AOKP is absolutely not like that,” Caton tells me, and my visit to the court supports that perspective. The court assembled in Hoover was made up of a diverse group of women, people of color and those from across the LGBTQ+ spectrum.
AOKP remains a bright spot in the otherwise polluted ecosphere of geek-culture. Is it by design or happy accident?
“‘Go back to the kitchen’, people have told… They aren’t very original.”
To find out, I spoke to Dayquan Moeller, a student employed by the Gender Equity Centre here on Campus. He had several explanations for both the toxicity of online spaces and the lack of toxicity in AOKP.
“I think it is a kind of like subculture that is changing now that gaming is becoming more integrated in the mainstream,” Moeller tells me. “A lot of gamers are nerds and outcasts and they’re attached to gaming. When you’re isolated and you need refuge from mainstream society, you cling on to a space and you get very territorial with it.”
Moeller suggests much of the toxicity exists in response to a perceived threat, that online geeks act in a hostile way to deter women and other minorities from entering into “their” space.
Moeller’s comments reflect the long and well-documented history of Gamergate. Gamer gate was a loosely organized, reactionary social movement in online gaming culture against a perceived feminist threat to geek and gamer spaces. The movement coalesced around and was allowed to fester on 4chan and Youtube where several content creators garnered hundreds of thousands of subscribers and millions of views through obsessively attacking feminism as an outside force that was ruining male-dominated culture. Videos entitled Feminists & SJW’s vs Video Games collected over five million views. The backlash also produced a 13-part video series entitled Why do People Hate Feminism? comprised of videos, each reaching up to 50 minutes of emotive ranting about the feminist menace.
One content creator who rose to challenge this movement was a semi-professional Star-Craft player and ex-toxic gamer turned progressive politics streamer Stephen Kenneth Bonnell II, who goes by the Pseudonym Destiny. He came to prominence in 2017 through a two-hour-long, 2.2 million viewer debate with popular geek youtuber Jontron, in which he lambasts Jontron for his ethno-nationalist positions.
In a Nov 12th interview about misogyny in gaming Bonnell said “Internet communities are a big ‘boys club.’” He explains his experience of playing CS:GO, a predecessor to Valorant, with a female friend of his, and his experience of hearing the same jokes leveled at her again and again “It took one day of that experience to realize it’s not about being insulted, it’s this othering feeling: that you don’t belong.” Moeller and Bonnell both call attention to the same thing: hostility in gaming exists not only as simple nastiness but serves an exclusionary function. It “protects” these communities from perceived outsiders, ignoring the fact that women, people of colour and queer people have always been a part of gaming and geek culture.
Why is Whittier’s AOKP club relatively free of this sort of toxicity?
Tanner Higgin, a PhD who has written extensively about gaming culture and digital media, suggests the toxicity centres around guarding technology. “A need to protect the male exclusivity and control of technology has been evident in geek spaces” he writes.
As Higgins see it, online harassment is part of a larger history of male dominance and guarding of technology, spanning back to way before the conception of computers or games. Whittier’s OAKP club doesn’t have proprietary technology it is trying to maintain “ownership” over.
Moeller thinks much of the difference could be attributed to the difference between online and in-person communications. He suggests digital spaces — particularly gaming spaces — lower empathy and allow for more indecent behaviour due to there being less accountability in gaming spaces. Moeller adds that even in online spaces, moderation and small amounts of accountability do make a difference.
Moeller points to Ubisoft forums, a chat room for the discussion of games published by Ubisoft, as an example. He recounts that while voice-chat players could call him slurs with impunity, “the Ubi servers are moderated so if you say the racist slurs you get banned.”
Accountability and moderation are significantly more prevalent in AOKP. You are there as a student on a small college campus. Your face is inextricably attached to your behavior. You are more connected to those you may be attacking, they are across the room from you, it makes you think twice — if not out of empathy, out of fear of consequences. “Its a lot more difficult to be an asshole face to face- across the table from someone,” says Caton.
“Its a lot more difficult to be an asshole face to face- across the table from someone.”
Perhaps, further than accountability, there is something about the club itself which deters the same exclusionary environment from forming. “One of the great things about AOKP is it’s always been led in large part by very strong female leadership,” says Josh. This was true even in the late 2000’s when he first joined. A short film made by the club shows it was anything but the “boys-club” one might expect.
Fantasy itself may not be the boys club we expect. Moeller notes that “there is a rich history and connection between marginalized people and fantasy… alot of queer people are attracted to fantasy.” He attributes this to both the desire to see oneself and one’s own identity in stories and an attraction to the freedom of experimentation and toying with identity that fantasy offers.
The queer connection is supported by OAKP member Kira who says, “You could just play with whatever you want your character to be and so that gave a lot of people avenues to even kind of express themselves differently.” She says that even in 2012, the club was “very gay” but that a lot of people were only open about their sexuality or gender identity within the club. In other words, AOKP ha long been a queer safe-space.
The strong woman-led nature of the court continues to this day. Kira’s character is Queen of the court. This position is (ironically) elected by all members of the club. A queer woman of color being elected leader of a geek group defies the white-male dominance of the Gamergate ethos.
AOKP, though, defies assumptions. From the seed of a geeky club formed by Lord of the Rings obsessed college students on a small Southern California liberal arts college in the 1980’s, the club has grown into a vibrant, loving community. All are welcome and all put in serious work to make this club a fun and comfortable space where students have been able to craft innovative stories and express themselves freely for almost four decades.
Josh humbly sums up his feelings towards the club “It’s just a really awesome club, and the fact that the story has been going on since the 1980's and it’s still happening… It’s still alive it’s still growing it’s one hell of a thing,” says Josh, humbly.
The group continues to meet every Thursday and will take in a new class of initiates at the beginning of the Spring 2023 semester.
