Serious LARPs

When I was in middle school and high school my friends and I played lots of different kinds of games. For some years, we played AD&D almost every weekend. We also played different board strategy games like Conquest of the Empire. We also organized paintball tournaments, which got quite popular so there were dozens of kids running around in the woods. All that stuff was very fun but those things also had the tendency to fizzle out for reasons that were mysterious at the time, and even with 40+ years of hindsight, I'm not sure why they fell apart.

By contrast, the "official" activities like organized team sports or various music or performance oriented activities like band or plays, happened year after year and consumed probably hundreds of hours of mine and my friends lives per year. The ad hoc play activities which were generally much more "fun" competed for just a few hours of time per month maybe.

I was in several high school band activities and was good at playing so eventually I had a scholarship in college for it, but I was never that interested in it, and never contemplated it as a vocation. I knew all along I'd stop playing once I was free from school. I sold my sax the same day I graduated from college. I probably played two times in the subsequent decades.

High school band is a weird ritualistic activity. Most kids who are really into music are interested in pop music, rock and roll and other genres which are mainly guitar based and all about getting the attention of the fans. However, when I was in school, there were never guitar parts in band, nor any opportunity to learn or play guitar in school. At least 50%, probably more like 75% of the kids in the band were not even interested in music as a hobby or as an important element of their life. They were in band because their parents thought they should do something like that because colleges wanted kids to be in extra-curricular activities.

In retrospect, it's obvious that organized high school sports were a version of the same thing, but with some game involved. In our school, football was the big sport, and it was even more pointless and ritualistic from the point of view of life prep than even band was. Some of the high school football kids suffered life changing injuries like completely blowing out their knee, or took steroids to be on the team and got nothing out of it beyond high school.

As far as I know, none of the kids in my graduating class went on to play division 1 college football and nobody in the history of my high school ever played professional football. Just a handful of my classmates that played high school football went on to play football in college for small liberal arts schools where the sports programs were de-emphasized to the point it was more of a liability or an opportunity cost to play.

In spite of that, in the years since I graduated high school, the community plowed a huge amount of resources into the high school football team, literally millions of dollars to build a fancy new stadium, but the program continues in the same mode as the late 1980s in terms of not creating NFL players or Division 1 quarterbacks, etc...

Anyway, this is just another investigation into what people consider "serious" versus "play". All the official high school sanctioned activities like football or band were in the "serious" category versus our paintball games, however, as discussed above they're all basically the same kind of thing, basically LARPing.