It is easy to dismiss people who play role-playing games.

Geeks, losers, nerds, they’ve probably been called all these things and more. As William Shatner said on Saturday Night Live to the costumed attendees at a Star Trek Convention, “Get a Life.”

But if you watch the 2006 award-winning feature-length documentary Darkon, you just might get a different idea.

Darkon is “live-action role-playing game” or LARP. That is, real people create and dress-up as characters in a quasi-medieval world. They also fashion back-stories of the origins of these alter-egos that don’t sound much different from religious and biblical legends. Perhaps Moses was found in the bulrushes by an Egyptian princess, but you can be sure that Darkon players have backgrounds no less imaginative.

The Darkon gamers affiliate with other like-minded souls within the game, inventing national groups who strategize about how to enlarge their country’s domain. In order to achieve this, some combination of negotiation and combat between armies is required. The movie Darkon shows just such activities as they are played out by the “Darkon Gaming Club” in Baltimore.

Both men and women, usually in their 20s and 30s, enact a stylized form of combat involving “weapons.” Those instruments of war must be made according to guidelines designed to insure the safety of the soldiers, but the rules permit imaginary “injury” to be inflicted and one side or the other to triumph.

Enormous amounts of energy and time go into the realization of this fantasy world. Public parks, forest preserves, and school grounds are claimed as the battle-ground upon which occur many of the negotiations and all of the wars.

One player, a stay-at-home dad named Skip, doubtless speaks for a good many of the Darkon enthusiasts, when he talks about feeling “…born out of time… I feel like I have some great destiny and I have just to find it.” Clearly, Skip looks for that destiny, in part, within the game. You may think that such people are troubled as you read this on the computer screen, but Skip comes across as an earnest, intelligent, thoughtful, and principled man within the film itself.

The central figures of the documentary include a business executive in the real world who leads the most successful and largest group of Darkonians, a former stripper who is a single working mother, a college student who works part-time as a barista, a buyer in a fabric store, an assembly line worker, and many individuals who find their real lives boring and anonymous. They make no mark and live lives outside of the game that recall Thoreau’s comment on “quiet desperation.”

For some, including the most successful player within and outside the game, this role-playing world appears to serve a therapeutic function: “Playing (my character) helped me become the man I wanted to be in real life.” Opportunities for leadership, negotiation, and political as well as combat strategy transferred to the streets, offices, and board rooms of everyday existence, building his self-confidence and changing him even when the costume came off.

Meanwhile, others struggle with marginalization both within and without the game, but live in the hope of, quite literally, “reinventing” their characters and taking a more commanding and successful role. Some recognize the need to develop social skills in order to have real-life success. But, one suspects, that others not featured in the movie get caught up in the escapism that any such exercise might provide. They never grow out of the game.

As I watched this documentary I couldn’t help but think of the changes that industrialization and urbanization brought to workers during the period known as “The Industrial Revolution.” People went from being independent solo-practitioners working for themselves as tailors, blacksmiths, farmers, and weavers, to employees of others in larger and larger enterprises. The phrase used to describe what they became was “wages slaves,” clearly no longer free and independent.

Perhaps then, the Darkonians are only looking for what most of humanity has lost in a world of big machines, buildings, computers, and cities: some sense of individuality and uniqueness.

Or, like the ancient Greeks of Homer’s day, maybe they seek honor and glory. Honor in that pre-literate day tended to come in the form of goods, precious metal, slaves, concubines, and the like; in other words, mostly material things or things that could be counted or displayed or used. Sort of like today, perhaps you are saying to yourself. In our world, honor is conferred by status and very similar material things – the size of your house, the amount of money in your bank account, a trophy spouse, the car or cars you drive, a gorgeous vacation home, etc.

Glory (the Greek word kleos) was another matter. What might glory have consisted of in a world in which the idea of heaven had not yet been invented? It took the form of a reputation or fame that continued beyond death. And, since there was no written word, you and your accomplishments had to be sufficiently great to generate discussion, song, and story once you were gone. This was usually achieved by being a great hero or warrior. In war, then, one could hope to grasp both of these things: the honor that came with sacking cities and accumulating wealth, slaves, and sexual partners; and the glory of a reputation for fearlessness, strength, and tenacity that would transcend your death.

In other words, a lot like what the Darkon players hope for inside and outside the universe of the game.

Earnest Becker, the sociologist and Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Denial of Death (a book esteemed by Bill Clinton, by the way) talked about each man’s hero-project: the attempt to distinguish himself from other men. It is an effort that Becker thought was motivated by our fear of death and a desire for a kind of symbolic immortality via achievement. Or, perhaps, a self-delusion made possible through accomplishing important feats, thus allowing oneself to deny the inevitable demise of all living things, including one’s own end.

One Darkonian states that the game is “…like watching TV, but you are the hero. If you could watch Brad Pitt or be Brad Pitt, which would you rather do?”

But, there is also darkness here, as another perceives it, “There is a certain desperation to life. It’s all terminal — we are going to die. Maybe fantasy and religion and all those things are (like Darkon), if not crutches, vehicles to get you from birth to death.”

Sometimes a game is more than a game.

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The above image is a scene from Darkon.