When I was a little kid, my best friend and I had some imaginary friends. Their names were Ferdinand and Isabella (hers and mine, respectively) and they were tiny dragons, just up to our knees. I don't remember what hers looked like, but mine was lime green and hot pink, and I have a vivid sense-memory of imagining how it would be to cuddle a dragon.

We'd play with Ferdy and Izzy, as we called them, constantly. Whenever we built forts out of our parents' furniture, they were dragon caverns. We'd tell each other stories about them. We drew elaborate maps of where they lived, and if we'd had access to video cameras, I'm sure we would have tried to make home movies about them. When we went to school and were asked to do writing assignments, we wrote about Ferdy and Izzy. There was no part of our lives that they didn't touch.

When my best friend and I sat down and told each other stories about our imaginary dragons, we were just doing what came naturally - imagining, dreaming, hoping. It was just as natural for us to get up from the couch and go do something to extend that story into the real world: "Okay, you build a couch fort. I'll draw the map. Then we'll record a song that Ferdy and Izzy like to sing on the tape-recorder. And then let's watch a movie about dragons!"

Lately I keep getting into arguments in which I defend larpers.

To understand why one would get into such an argument, you have to understand what a larper is. LARP stands for Live Action Role Play. Larpers, then, are grown adults who get dressed up in elaborate costumes, arm themselves with boffers and Nerf guns and tennis balls, and go running around pretending to be someone else for a day, play-fighting and play-acting and generally making asses of themselves as far as “normal” people are concerned. In the Geek Hierarchy, larpers are pretty close to the bottom.

So I keep getting into these arguments. People make a joke about larpers (“I cast Magic Missile into the darkness!”) and I feel compelled to respond. My point is simple. Don’t you wish that, just for one moment, you could enjoy something as earnestly as larpers do? Don’t you remember what it was like, when you were a little child, to play cops & robbers, or to sit down to a tea party with your friends and stuffed animals, and to really completely give yourself over to that sense of play?

Isn’t that how you feel when you watch a really great movie? Aren’t you suddenly transported back in time, to when your mother or father told you stories, and you just wanted to live forever in that story world? When you stopped critiquing, stopped thinking like a grown-up, and just took it all in?

That’s alchemy. That’s the moment when lead turns into gold.

Next time: telling stories & making believe - childhood play as the prototypical transmedia experience.