Director: Cullen Hoback
Monster Camp takes us away to a fantasy world few of us have ever seen. One weekend each month, hardcore gamers gather at a secluded state park for live action role-playing fun at NERO Seattle. NERO is the name of a role-playing game and such events are held throughout the country. For 48 hours software engineers, department store managers, high school students, and other normal folks by day transform into heroes and villains, sorcerers and dwarves and all manner of fantastic creature. There are costumes and plots and scenarios and battles complete with magic potions, evil spells, and a 250-page rulebook. It’s quite a thing to see.
Now granted, this may not be everyone’s cup of tea for a weekend trip. But once you watch this documentary you see that it is not as fringe and odd a thing as it might at first seem. It’s an escape, just like sports for some, reading or writing or movies for others. On the down side there is of course the danger of getting too addicted to the fantasy and not spending enough time away from gaming to be a good father or student, as a couple of participants find, or even becoming too lost in the game and taking the whole thing too seriously. But, in general, it’s a harmless escape that for those who may be shy or socially awkward in the “real world” gives them a chance to test out different sides to their personality, to be someone else with traits and strengths they wish they could have, and to make friends in an accepting environment with others who share their interests. Friendships are made, sometimes even romantic relationships blossom. A man with a flirtatious character learns to take those skills beyond the game and get a real girlfriend, and a little girl with no friends learns to open up and get friends beyond the game. After that the girl has less time for gaming but enjoys it more, because now she does it because she wants to not because she needs to. As long as that perspective is kept, to each his own. Monster Camp is interesting, warm, charming and dispels the fringe element stereotype, showing the participants to just be real people. Well, when they aren’t trolls, witches, and elves that is.
Lucy Cruell