‘King of the Nerds’ season 3 spotlight: Ori Perl looks to play the role of champion

We really want to believe that 2015 is the year of larping. Maybe it is because we still have a designed game that is somewhere in storage, maybe we’ve been watching too much “Galavant” or playing too much “Dragon Age: Inquisition,” or maybe we are just still reeling from the discovery that there is a Renaissance Faire happening nearby right under our very nose. No matter what it is, there is something about the art of the larping that fascinates us. It’s like extreme Halloween, a competitive social exercise where you can enter another world and legitimately exist there without someone throwing candy in your face.

So as a wannabe-larper-of-sorts, it is easy to root for “King of the Nerds” contestant Ori Perl, even if he is probably a larper so extreme, he would freak us the you-know-what out if we squared off against him. We imagine that we would be one of those larpers that diehard players would hate, mostly because we’d be so intent on following the beat of our own drum rather than paying attention to the rules or what is going on. (We say this as someone who plays RPGs and spends 70% of the time wandering around and looking for stuff.)

We haven’t even started this spotlight yet (read the others here), and we know already that this is going to be fun.

Name – Ori Perl

Age – 22

Location – Silver Spring, Maryland

Specialty – Larper. We probably do not need to spell this one out more than we already did, but we will anyway. Ori is one of the intense larperswho really gets into the action and the drama of it all. He even tells a story in his TBS bio about a very-real injury that he suffered during one of his battles. This is a place we personally would be at a divide with larping; we’d really like to carry around a buster sword or an equivalent, but fear that we would end up giving ourselves a concussion or worse trying to spin it.

Nerd cred – In addition to being a larper extraordinaire, Ori is also a robotics expert. Therefore, we ponder if he could either A) build an army of fantastic warriors to compete alongside him in his next battle or B) reprogram Nerdbot, that behemoth of a machine we saw last year, to completely annihilate his opposition.

Yet, how much will Ori really speak of his robotics skills within the game? We like the fact that his strategic wheels are turning, and he recognizes there is value to potentially dumbing yourself down to appear somewhat non-threatening in the early portion of the game. We would exercise subtlety here, though, and by that we mean trying to downplay abilities and avoid boasting more so than claiming you are clueless on a given subject. So many nerds have a tendency to shout their skills from a mountaintop, you can almost survive for a few weeks just by exercising humility, and allowing others to let their individual worlds burn.

Weak points – This is still a social game, and it feels like despite his intense combat prowess, Ori is a rather quiet and reserved guy. He may take a little longer to get to know than other nerds, and when it comes to those first few weeks, people are just looking for reasons to get rid of people. We’ve seen it from experience. He needs to make few friends quickly, since he seems to be covered in most other game-related aspects. He is creative enough to don a costume and play a part, and yet scientific enough to be an engineer. It is akin to him mastering two very different skill trees.

End assessment – Ori’s a good contestant, and a guy we are super-grateful to have on the season. It still feels like larpers in general are an under-utilized cross-section for reality TV. Whether or not he lasts long is a different story. He is an imposing guy in comparison to many of the others, and that could lead to him spending much of his time donning his armor to do battle.

What is your take on Ori? Share now in the comment box below, and take a look over here to acquire some further TV updates on everything we cover via our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: TBS.)