Published: Monday, April 26, 2010 in The Whitworthian.

We’ve all been through it. Education, I mean. Or, at least, I assume we all have. If not, then you’re way ahead of the game, a point that I’ll demonstrate shortly.

In pre-school and kindergarten education was pretty straightforward. We learned to read, mostly, and do other simple tasks like steal extra crackers at snack time. In elementary school education shifted from book learning to life-lessons about cooties and such. No education of any kind happens in junior high and high school except perhaps lessons on how to survive for several hours in a janitor’s closet waiting for the jocks to stop looking for you. Or maybe that was just me …

So we see a general downhill pattern as we advance through the grades. By the time we hit university we’ve actually been engaging in anti-education. Where in preschool we learned to read, in college we actually learn to not read. (Nobody can actually read all that stuff they assign in Core. It’s a fact.)

That’s not to say we don’t learn anything in college. I was reminded of this fact last Saturday when I walked out of the Hixson Union Building and found myself suddenly running for my life from a large man dressed entirely in duct tape wielding a massive trident made from PVC pipe.

Yes, it was the LARPing event. It was probably the coolest thing to ever happen at Whitworth and, at the risk of being mugged in the night by the Disciples of Ultimate, I suggest it replace Frisbee as our go-to pastime.

In the spirit of this column being about education, however, I must pause here and inform you that what happened in The Loop on Saturday was not actually LARPing.
LARPing stands for Live Action Role-Playing. It’s an activity that finds its roots in the creepy backyards of nerdy high-schoolers with way too much time on their hands who had taken their obsession with the pen and paper game of Dungeons & Dragons to an unhealthy level.

Even if you’re not a geek, you’ve probably heard of D&D, but you probably heard about it from your parents who told you that it was a game that Satan liked to play when he wanted a break from murdering puppies.

There’s a certain amount of truth to that, and LARPers are to blame. I confess to enjoying a little bit of D&D on occasion, but historically there have been those who were not satisfied with rolling 20-sided dice and felt the need to learn actual occult spells and do real blood sacrifices and a whole host of other activities that fall solidly in the “Annie get your gun and hide the children” category.

Now, I’m all for giving 110 percent to your passion. But as you walk through this life, gentle readers, it’s important to remember that it’s a bad idea to invite the devil to your parties, just because of the off-chance that he might actually show up. I think he’d really ruin the atmosphere of a party. He’d probably kill your puppy, too, just for fun.

So, all that to say that the activity held in the Loop last week was not actual LARPing, and thank God for that.

Of course, there’s a chance that it could inspire real LARPing in misguided underclassmen. If you run into any of these people, change your route and begin wearing a shirt of +20 Nerd Warding. You can pick them out of crowd fairly easily because their aura will cause an irresistible urge to punch a kobold for critical damage.

Whatever the heck that means.