The column was titled "LARP & Player Generated Content" by Angela Webb, where she explained her experiences in LARPing.  She also started the column with this picture, which was a very smart choice on her part:

In many LARPs, players have a choice when they attend an event: work or play. When players work they actually play the monsters and the NPCs. When players are the monsters and NPCs, they become the content and that is the purest form of PGC there is.

This is exactly how I started LARPing. At my first event, I was given a boffer weapon and a costume, a few instructions, and off I went to terrorize the town as a level-2 goblin. I had a blast ambushing players on dark trails with my foam weapon that did a crappy two points of damage. I was such a noob. But, I learned how to use a sword, contributed to the fun of others, and figured out some basic rules of the game.

 Now, I've been playing tabletop RPG's since I was 12; maybe younger. (I'm 33 as I type this)  But LARPing was something entirely different.  It was something nerdy drama students did, or poser girls that went to goth clubs did, or social outcasts with no shame did on the weekends at the local park.  They were a rung lower than even me, a tabletop gamer, in the hierarchy of people mocked by society at large.  Hell, I'd recently mocked a group of dorks at the local park that had graduated from LARPing to Quidditch.

But I was getting burnt out on tabletop.  Creating new personas every few months and trying to inhabit their mental space just didn't appeal anymore.  D&D4E played as a straight up dungeon crawl was sounding better and better but none of my regular group were interested.  Then this column comes along and trying out a LARP as a monster focused solely on combat suddenly didn't sound so bad.

I'd either hit the bottom of the gaming barrel or the start of something new.