Yesterday The New York Times published an article about a Theatre LARP happening in Peasantville, New York. It will go in the print version tomorrow on the 6th September 2015. The general public are being invited to participate in a short run of The Dance and The Dawn as a way of encouraging new people to try out the hobby.
There’s also a mention of a regular Vampire: The Masquerade group in Hawthorne, New York – pretty good publicity by anyone’s standards.
Within the LARP community there always seems to be a reluctancy to see major media outlets running with stories on roleplay. I guess it’s a throwback to when people looked down on the hobby and treated those who spend their time roleplaying as somewhat beneath them. However the world is waking up, it’s cool to be into sci-fi and fantasy, and the market for LARP is only set to get bigger.
There can be crossover too with other hobbies. Last year my own LARP photography was sought out and published in the biggest photography magazine in the world, one with a half a million person readership. And as a journalist I’ve been steadily using my images of LARP to illustrate my articles for almost three years. They go down well. The high visual immersion of the games I attend always helps – of course – but I’ve never had a bad word said to me about the subjects of my photography.
Perhaps it’s time to start talking to the mainstream media and press about our hobby and trying to put what we do our there in a controlled way. We have the skills in the community to show ourselves in a brilliant light – so how do we make this happen?
The PDF is here for archival purposes: Becoming a Vampire – The New York Times
1 Comment
“Dance and the Dawn” isn’t a vampire larp – its a straight out theatre-style / freeform, though with a lot of structure (its also one of the best there is – seriously, 20+ runs since 2006, in at least 4 different counties? I’ve run it 3 times, and it is great).
I think the coverage stems from it being run in a theatre and advertised at that market. Which means it gets arts reporters showing interest, and looking at the wider hobby. There’s a marketing trick here for theatre-style, I think…