The above image is from an an amazing series of images of Russian live action roleplayers (LARPGers are people who act out images and scenes inspired books and video games.) In this scenario, they are LARPing the wildly popular post-apocalyptic video game series Fallout, in which your character escapes from a subterranean vault to explore the post-nuclear United States. I'm a huge fan of Fallout -- I've played it from its early PC incarnation in the 1990s all the way through to the luscious graphics of its Xbox 360 incarnation.
The Russian post-industrial landscape lends a marvelous verisimilitude to the LARP, complete with bombed out warehouses and subterranean retreats.
What I love about these images is that they are inherently social -- social in the physical world, that is. I ran into these shortly after hearing a funny quote from a former senior State Department official last week who was lamenting that the problem with virtual worlds (and by association games) is that people will neglect the importance of physical world interactions. This is a common refrain in government -- and especially among cultural and public diplomacy people for whom much of their work is centered around facilitating person-to-person discourse: They fear that using Internet-based social media technologies is some how binary, or a zero-sum game in foreign policy. As Rita J. King and I stated throughout our Understanding Islam through Virtual Worlds project, virtual worlds should augment, not replace physical world interactions.
These images demonstrate the opposite of neglect. Multiplayer games and virtual worlds in this context are social and creative catalysts, inspiring people to create new art together.
View the rest of the Fallout 3 LARP images here. (Via Wonderlandblog!)
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