야 decide I I One afternoon in late spring, I traveled to a Girl Scout camp in Burl, New Jersey to see the apocalypse. Coming from an office in Manhattan to 200 acres of field and forest, I felt like I had stepped into some empty dream world. What I was about to get into was more like Mad Max. This is Dystopia Rising, a live action role playing game set generations after a disaster that wiped out civilization as we know it. So you're with the Birch. I am. You are not sure if you want to play out here. Oh no, I totally play. Do you want to play? Do you have anything else to wear? I mean, I have another t-shirt and another pair of jeans. Okay, we can put something together. With a lot of help from veteran players, I made up a fighter whose race, sorry, strain, had been horribly disfigured by radiation. I was covered in hideous, oozing open sores and gigantic body armor. It's probably the closest I'll ever get to being able to scare someone in a dark alley. I might have looked tough, but I still had no idea how to fight. When you're doing combat, I'm going to show you what a strike feels like first. And I'm going to catch you by surprise when I do it so that you don't tense up, you don't freak out, and you don't think, that is as hard as it's ever going to hit. And then when you strike, we do what's called a three strike flurry system, which means you can only hit someone three times before you have to pause for a second. This is to prevent someone from just wiggling their blade and doing silly shit. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and hit you and I want you to block the first strike and then strike back at me. As it turns out, fighting in Dystopia Rising is sort of like fencing while doing math in your head. You hit someone with a stick, you yell a stat. You get hit, you calculate how much more damage you can take. I would do plenty of fighting, but it's a small part of the overall experience. You spend a lot of time trading, making friends, or just listening to someone play acoustic daft punk covers at a bar. It feels like 24-7 improv theater. Sometimes the role playing was fantastic, but other times it was absolutely terrifying. My character was supposed to be tough, but because I really had no idea what I was doing, she ended up as a socially awkward wallflower. I kept feeling like I had to break out of character to think about what she should be doing, and I kept wondering, was I holding up my end of a conversation? Should I be more creative? Was I being too forward? It was like a cotillion at the end of the world. Then I died. We're going to be leading a lovely irradiated undead horde into town. There is going to be another player waiting for us. We're going to hook her and we're going to kill her. Alright, sounds good. Cool, let's go. Alright, perfect. Before it happened, my character was supposed to be running on a broken leg. Coincidentally, I twisted my ankle that morning and decided to walk it off. It was an incredibly stupid idea, but it was also the thing that would bring us together. When she limped, I was limping. When she got knocked down by a giant zombie, I couldn't stand back up. For something that made us both yearn for death, it was great. This may be theもsip薩injui that killed us, but follow the Nooooooooooooooooooooooo! Welcome. Can you speak? Yes. Do you want to live? Yes, I want to live. Remember always that you are one of death's chosen. I'm done with you. So yeah, take a minute if you need one, but you'll be in character once you come out of here. I had my sword somewhere. Can someone down there pick up the weapons from the floor and bring them back up? Thanks. When I came back, I learned someone had looted my weapons and armor, and I was genuinely afraid. I'd built a character who could barely do anything but fight, and now she was basically useless. That was, strangely, the moment something seemed to click. My character had gone crazy from dying, and I was in pain. Everything I did somehow seemed natural for both of us. We studied a religion that worships TV signals, joined a gang, and finally got back on our feet. Oh, yeah, I mean it hurts, but yeah, that's the part. It was like the stupidest raider battle injury ever. I fell into someone. Well, no, they ran into my leg. Did you have fun with it? Oh, yeah, well, kind of flinched out, but it was very realistic. I still never quite figured out what I wanted to be. LARPing can be about leaving yourself behind, and some of the people I met before the game seemed totally different during it. But sometimes it seemed like I was just amplifying a few things about myself. Sometimes the best things, sometimes the worst, and adding swords. Then again, the swords were fantastic, and I'm pretty sure the more I had known about the world before going in, the better prepared I would have felt to create something new. But I'm probably overthinking it. Most people I met were there for one reason. To have some fun at the end of the world. Thanks for watching! I'm not sure if you can see this, but I'm not doing the video properly. I'm trying to find the best angle to show the world. I'm trying to make it look like I'm in a real world. I'm trying to make it look like I'm in a real world. I'm trying to make it look like I'm in a real world.