Hamilton Gardens are a peaceful place. They're a place where families go for picnics and stoners go for a cheeky smoke. Its beautifully tended gardens exhibit flora from various regions of the world and create a rich, green tapestry in which to wander on a lazy Sunday afternoon. It's a place where Orcs and hobbits battle ancient gods and cult members, ridding graveyards of reanimated corpses and saving fair maidens from goblins and bandits.

"What?" you say.

Oh yes. On a Friday not too long ago, in the middle of the Hamilton Gardens, I donned a cape, grabbed a sword and took part in a human sacrifice with the intentions of giving life to an ancient stone god. I actually did. Part way through the sacrifice, however, we were attacked by a group of adventurers and we did battle. I ran an ogre thing through a few times before being hacked to death by an Orc and a hobbit. While fleeing the carnage, I fell down a set of stairs and almost broke my arm. But I'll get to that a little later on.

"Seriously, Art", you say. "What the hell are you talking about?"

Just this: When certain cosmic elements come together just right, actual people with actual jobs emerge from their homes and spend a Saturday night running around a public park near you, waving foam swords at each other and casting a variety of spells at their foes. This will most likely sound pretty nerdy to most of you out there in image-conscious student land, but I can assure you of this: it's a hell of a lot of fun. You're also probably imagining a cluster of overweight, acne-laden geeks who have never talked to a real girl and download Hentai porn by the gigabyte. Well, you're wrong on that account too. There were some pretty hot girls there. One was painted green and chased me down some stairs with a giant axe. Another one had perfect red hair and a giant wand with trees growing on the end of it or something. It wasn't her real hair, but it was still pretty hot.

This activity is called LARPing, which stands for 'live action role-playing'. It's an outdoor version of World of Warcraft. Instead of sitting behind a keyboard and telling a little computer generated character what to do, you actually dress up and run around, waving perfectly safe foam swords at whomever you want. It's make believe, but with rules. Complex, confusing rules at times, but rules none the less. There's no "I stabbed you!", "No you didn't!" "Yes I did!" There is a guy called the Game Master (GM), whose job it is to stop people being dicks as far as I can tell.

The fighting is pretty simple. A hit to the arm or leg is worth 1 point, while one to the torso is worth 2 points. Honesty is a big part of the game, but so is not being a dick. For this reason, I did not meet any dicks at this event. If I were to go to a rugby match or even just a pub, there'd definitely be a dick or two about. Having played table top war games, there's definitely more than a few dicks at those events. I've never played any kind of collectible card game, but they look like they'd be dicks. LARP, however, had a serious dearth of dicks. A dick famine, if you would. Everyone played by the rules, got into it and was not anal about anything.

The GM for this particular LARP was a pretty nice, normal human called Jared, who runs a LARP (Knightshade) out of Auckland. Apart from his boots, sword and mace he was just like you and me. Other people I met at the LARP were accountants, IT guys, students of every type and even good looking girls. Did I mention the girls already? Well, yeah, but I'm still really surprised by their attendance. Jared has been into LARP since the late 1990s and before that played a bit of Dungeons and Dragons. "I read Lord of the Rings at age 10 which set me on the path of the fantasy world", he says. Now everyone's seen at least one of the films, but who can honestly say they've read the whole book? The thing's a bastard, and about as fast-paced as a stripper in a wheelchair. So reading it at 10 years of age is a pretty big deal. It's like getting the job as a stripper while you're in a wheelchair. Jared started his own LARP in August of last year, combining his own rules with adapted ones from Quest, Hamilton's own LARP.

Quest was started by one Alista Fow of Waikato University and began in Hamilton in the late 1980s and early 1990s, completely from scratch. His game started off with just him and ended up getting as many as thirty people show up semi-regularly at its height. They didn't allow players to be evil characters and didn't take LARPing terribly seriously - "putting light-hearted, Pythonesque spins on epic fantasy battles makes for a fun game, though," Alista told me. It was the days before the internet and Alista had no sources for his game, so he created rules, props and costumes completely from scratch to use in the game.

Before you pseudo-jocks and tight-jeans-wearing hipsters decide to find whoever started this game in the first place and beat him up in order to gain some cool points with whatever social clique you're jonesing to be a part of this week, you might want to listen to this. LARP was not started by a singular person. In the 1970s and early 1980s, all over the world, different people started LARPing. Just like civilisation, it spread across the world from as many as a dozen different places almost simultaneously, ranging from Washington D.C. to London to Australia. This might not seem so impressive today, but you have to realise that this is a time before the internet and the sharing of ideas across the world took a lot longer than it does today. It's almost as if some cosmic force came to Earth and brought LARP with them.

Dungeons and Dragons, a role playing game spent around a table with lots of statistic sheets and twenty-sided dice rolls, is the single biggest factor in the birth of LARP. People grew tired of sitting around tables and rolling dice and wondered whether they could do what they were doing on paper in real life. LARP was born.

Now it is a worldwide phenomenon. It's not as big in New Zealand as it is in Europe and not just because of population numbers. In New Zealand, LARPs take place in gardens and parks, with people wandering through and asking players what it is they're doing. In Europe you can rent a castle, fill it with a couple hundred LARPers and let 'er rip. I challenge any guy (and many girls) to say that running around a castle in Germany, wearing armour and waving a sword, would not be an ass-load of fun.

"A bunch of different types of people attend LARPs," Alista told me. "The most annoying are people called 'power players'. They want to play LARP with god-mode on. They tweak the rules, create new rules and pretty much make themselves so tough that no one else has a chance of ever killing them. These people destroy LARP events. New players won't want to come if they're just going to get slaughtered by the same god-like guy over and over again. Veteran players will get sick of playing with someone who refuses to play at the same level as anyone else."

It sounds a lot like a super-advanced version of ball-tiggy in primary school: no one likes the bastard who refuses to acknowledge they've been hit by the ball. Eventually you just stop throwing the ball at them and they go to the corner of the field to cry like a bitch. Stupid eight-year-olds.

Another type of person who LARP attracts is the "dress-ups". These people love getting dressed up, but don't really enjoy getting hit with foam swords so much, especially seeing they may have paid several hundred dollars for a medieval dress. They can play under their own set of rules, which separates them from combat but still gives them a part in the story as "non-player characters," or NPCs.

There were a few of these NPCs at the LARP I went to. Some were being villagers and looked well-awesome in their frilly sleeves and flowing dresses. It made me wonder if a drag queen would be welcome in LARP. Could I go and demand to be the fairy princess Esmeralda with +10 to my boobs?* Other people I saw who would probably fall into the 'dress up' category included three young women who were Fates or Furies or somesuch and they wore massive black robes with black masks. They stood there for an extended period, laughing by candlelight. While creepy, it seemed a little redundant. The only people watching them weren't involved in the game. They kept up their characters until the actual players arrived.

Actors, oddly enough, are also attracted to LARP. They get completely into the character and are almost exclusively Aucklanders. "They prefer playing with other actors, so they can experience a more 'real' role-play," Alista told me. Truth be told, some of the role-play acting at Knightshade was pretty piss poor. On the level of a third form production of Les Miserables. At a school other than St Paul's.

The final group of characters Alista described were role-players. Role-players apparently attend role-playing games. Go figure. "These are the people who get into the spirit of the game, without going overboard like power players. They're also terrified of being called power players." Role players are the people who keep LARP going. Actors are too elitist when it comes to performance, 'dress-ups' don't really get involved and power players are dicks.

Alista told me of the golden days of LARP in Hamilton, when dozens of people would turn up regularly and everyone would have a good time. Banquets were held with people staying in character and eating medieval style food. Then something dreadful happened.

"World of Warcraft," Alista says, "stole a lot of players from LARP. Now people can sit in their own home and interact with people from all over the world, rather than just New Zealand." World of Warcraft offers sweet 3D graphics, surround sound and beautiful landscapes. It is, to put it bluntly, way better than real life. Another bonus, not mentioned but implied, would be that no one would ever see you running through a forest waving a sword and yelling like a dickhead.

Of course, I am all about that kind of thing, so when I came across a chance to join a group of Kiwi LARPers in Hamilton Gardens, I jumped at it. Newsboy Grant came too, to take notes and photos.

Four hours after meeting up with the LARPers, exactly nothing had happened. A big problem I found while LARPing was waiting. Waiting for the game to start. Then, once the game finally starts, waiting in your position while the characters muck around in a bush for half an hour. Waiting for someone to turn up with beer because you're in a lot of pain and really just want to drink a bunch. I spent a couple of hours following the players around and watching them sword fight and throw magic at one another. Then Jared came over and asked if I wanted to be involved in the LARP proper. "Sure," said I. "What's the worst that can happen?"

Fucking heaps, that's what could happen.

So wearing a borrowed cape and sword, I set forth to defend a stone god from the adventurers. The stone god was a seven foot tall rubber suit, carved to look more or less like The Thing from the Fantastic Four. In it was a very sweaty young man. As soon as the adventurers got near, he put his head on and swung into action. I really mean swung. He could wave his arms round like a washing machine and wreck the shit of anyone who dared step within about a metre and a half of him.

Slowly the adventurers picked us off one by one until I was left alone, hiding behind the stone god. A tall woman painted green ran, grunting, at me with an axe, ready to finish me off.

"Fuck this," I yelled, turning as quickly as I could and running right toward a set of stairs I couldn't quite see in the fading light.

I fell as I ran, bouncing down four stairs and sliding a short distance over the concrete. At first I thought I was fine, until Tom Biesly ran up and poked me with his sword, yelling "You're dead, bro! That was a sweet death!" I chuckled, but only as a way of letting those around me know I was still alive. Let people in capes and armed with swords see me cry? Never! Slowly, as the sounds of death faded away, I dragged myself along the concrete and got to safety, leaving a bona-fide trail of blood. Then a wizard and a warrior tended to my wounds. A one eyed Dutch warrior! Oh, the jokes I could make..... but I digress. The next day at Angelsea they signed me up for some mean penicillin and put my arm in a sling. It's not broken, but the final damage tally saw me with a sprained wrist and some worryingly impressive holes in my arms and torso. Feel free to send me flowers anyway.

I haven't the slightest idea who "won," although that's probably not the point. The story played out as a story should, and the heroes probably won, as they do. I can report that much fun was had by all, even me - and seeing as I had expected to spend my time internally pointing and laughing, this is impressive.

After the battle, we went back to the LARP lair of one of the guys. He had a wife. We drank alcohol and talked about LARP some more. I'm probably going to go again, only this time not fall to my death and leave little chunks of my arm all over the Hamilton Gardens.

*Not that I would. It's a hypothetical.

Other LARP Events Around NZ

Alf's Imperial Army is possibly the most famous LARP group in New Zealand. They were founded in 1972 and dress like late 19th Century British soldiers, complete with redcoats and awesome facial hair. They're not true LARPers in that they're not specific characters, merely acting out a general idea. They're also a pacifist warfare organisation, using paper swords and flour bombs. Alf's Imperial Army are staunch monarchists and carry out attacks in the name of Queen Elizabeth II of New Zealand. Famous battles in the past include a large confrontation with the Republican Greens (made up of Green Party members) in Oamaru in 2000. They also fought a long campaign against the McGillicuddy Highland Army, Jacobites and general Queen-haters. The McGillicuddy Highland Army no longer exists, but was once based in the verdant foothills of Mt Pirongia.

Requiem happens on the first Saturday of each month in Auckland, on the grounds of Auckland University. This one is about vampires, werewolves and mages. Sounds a bit like Underworld from what I could find online.

St Wolfgang's is about a secret Catholic Order who hunt down the things that go bump in the night. You're in medieval Europe and there's undead things that need to be smashed in the dick. Will you help smash zombie/vampire/ghost dick? In May they're running a weekend camp near Auckland, complete with food and costumes provided.

Star Wars is an obvious story line. You play as rebels fighting the bad guys. Possibly the coolest one because you don't use swords. You use laser guns bitches! Also: Star Wars is eternally awesome.

Check out the Alf's Imperial Army at www.alfs.hnpl.net. All the others can be found through www.nzlarps.org.