WARP

Revision as of 17:29, May 29, 2019 by Jra5 (talk | contribs) (→‎Vicarious Living)


Tomorrow's free time, today.

Early History

WARP (the Williams Association of Role-Players) is a club dedicated to roleplaying and similar Odd Quad-type activities. The club is noted for its laissez-faire organization; traditionally WARP only holds one meeting, at the beginning of the year, and thereafter organizes through its listserver in smaller groups. (If it sounds fragmented and chaotic, that's because it is.) Although roleplaying is a primary focus of WARP, it coordinates a variety of similar activities. Among them are bopswording, Laser Tag, board games, card games, and whatever else comes to mind. Starting in the 2008-2009 year, WARP has also held free movie showings in Paresky on the weekends and organized outings to conventions like NonCon. Unfortunately, this also ended in the 2008-2009 academic year with the onset of the Dark Ages of WARP.

The Dark Ages

WARP has generally sustained itself on its ability to entrap a sufficient number of naive, interested freshmen before they come to realize that undergraduate education is actually a time-consuming undertaking. On only one situation did this fail to occur: the Dark Ages of WARP, when the club plumbed the depths of laissez-faire organization by essentially dropping completely off the map. For example, WARP was represented by a stack of books and a sign-up sheet at the 2011 Purple Key Fair. The vaunted listserv became nearly completely abandoned; activities were carried on, preserving the club's lifeblood in secret, but without any sort of formal organization.

Next Generation of WARP

In 2011 a mysterious nobody managed to recruit about 50% of the Japanese department into playing an extended campaign of Dungeons and Dragons 4E, followed by a significant number of other students. With this, WARP was reconstituted in its current incarnation, which focuses on tabletop RPGs, LARP, and nominal supervision of campus-wide live action games such as Humans vs. Zombies and the ever-popular KAOS. Movies, video games, and other forms of entertainment have generally taken a backseat to these activities, but are still carried out in a much diminished form.

Vicarious Living


The WARP listserver, in addition to serving as the coordination tool of the club, also serves the valuable purpose of a spam conduit, down which people send links to strange news articles, online games, and other procrastination aids. The listserver is also a good place to settle important fantasy-battle questions, like "who would win in a fight: a cave troll, or a pack of velociraptors?" Finally, the WARP listserver is an excellent place to observe WARP crust in action, since many WARP members never leave the listserver even after graduation.

Unfortunately communication on the Listserv has fallen off dramatically because new generations of WARPies tend to just use email. Probably should let the alumni know we're still alive, huh.

Organization

Traditionally WARP has two "real" officer positions: the Figurehead (president) and the Shadowy Grand Vizier (treasurer). In practice, WARP has a long hierarchy of ever-fluctuating ceremonial titles, the most enduring of which is the Not-Pope.

Past leaders have included:

Around 2013, the "Triumvirate" formed because Quinn, Rinna, and Nigel all wanted control of WARP, and had different visions for the club. Quinn desired more role-playing, a return to a more old-fashioned sort of WARP, whereas Rinna was more pro-board games and LARP, and Nigel was concerned with large-scale roleplaying (KAOS and Humans vs. Zombies). If it has not been modified, WARP's constitution still contains reference to the authority of a Triumvirate, but it is no longer enforced.

In Spring 2016, President Sam Ok Park ('18) dissolved the Triumvirate and established several new positions. WARP's Board for 2016-2017 consisted of

WARP's Board for 2017-2018 consisted of

WARP's Board for 2018-2019 consisted of

WARP's Board for 2019-2020 abandoned Sam Ok Park's ceremonial titles in favor of corporate-sounding titles:

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