RPG Documentaries: The Dungeon Masters, etc..

[jonesy]

Hairy hobbits' feet Jonesy They're like something out of the Extraordinary League of Gentlemen.

I'm really not getting what you're seeing. They look like perfectly normal people to me. I don't understand how two people can look at the same video and get such an opposite reaction from it.


Umm, has DnD ever had any sort of official introduction video? Something professional looking? Anything? Did TSR ever produce one? Or WotC? Besides Dragon Strike.

 

[nedjer]

I'm really not getting what you're seeing. They look like perfectly normal people to me. I don't understand how two people can look at the same video and get such an opposite reaction from it.


Umm, has DnD ever had any sort of official introduction video? Something professional looking? Anything? Did TSR ever produce one? Or WotC? Besides Dragon Strike.

If I remember correctly, (and it was a while ago), it was all guys, darkened room, leather chairs . . . a bit of a stereotype. Not wrong but IMO hardly representative of what RPG gameplay and social meets have to offer to a much wider audience.

Personally, I always put on a dark cape, vampire fangs and a dribble of fake blood before I GM - hopefully I'm not representative either

 

[S'mon]

Black jeans and a Caprica t-shirt do not a hipster make, it's the uniform of the sci-fi nerd.

This was 2002 & 2003, way before Caprica.

Anyway, you realise you've just made a nerdy comment about correctly IDing hipsters?

Edit: All I know about hipsters, I learned from an episode of King of the Hill. If it's good enough for Mike Judge, it's good enough for me.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Anyway, you realise you've just made a nerdy comment about correctly IDing hipsters?

I'm making the mistake of thinking too hard about hipsters!

They are very intriguing though, much harder to pin down than goths or punks or skate kids. I've even been hipster spotting with some friends when I was down in London, near Spitalfields Market and in Camden, both very student-y areas.

I've been to a fair number of rpg conventions and roleplayers definitely don't look the same as hipsters imo. A big difference is that the vast majority of gamers don't think much about their appearance and don't put much effort into it. Hipsters otoh are, I think, particularly image conscious, even compared to other yoof subcultures, because developing one's own individual look is so important.

 

[jonesy]

I'm making the mistake of thinking too hard about hipsters!

They are very intriguing though, much harder to pin down than goths or punks or skate kids.

A month or two back a major newspaper here (Helsingin Sanomat) did a story on hipsters. They travelled around Helsinki looking for people who looked like them, and interviewed them. They only found one person who identified himself as a hipster. They had to disqualify him too when he said he'd done it deliberately. Story about hipsters, no hipsters.

 

[Lord Captian Tobacco]

Black jeans and a Caprica t-shirt do not a hipster make, it's the uniform of the sci-fi nerd.

I prefer my 'Jayneublic Relations' shirt, thank you.

 

[Vartan]

I'd also like to see a good documentary about roleplaying games, something resembling an actual work of journalism that features interviews with relevant figures in the RPG industry and gives some perspective on the hobby's history, the gamer subculture and the influence of RPGs on popular culture.

Such a documentary would need to cover the more eccentric behavior of some gamers, as well as the negative stereotypes of gaming in the media, but it would be nice if it were just one of many topics covered. I'm not crazy about The Dungeon Masters because it went out of its way to make its subjects look bad. On the other hand, I wouldn't be much more interested in a "RPGs saved my life" or "hey, eccentric geniuses are okay too" documentary. I'm most interested in seeing a documentary about the hobby than one about my fellow hobbyists.

It would be easy to make a puff piece about gaming. It's obviously easy to make a "Trekkies" or "Confessions of a Superhero" clone that seeks to profit from the living stereotypes in the RPG hobby. Unfortunately, making a documentary about RPGs that is worth my time would take too much work for too little reward. Then again, good docus have been made about high school policy debate and crossword competitions, so I suppose anything is possible.