The Best Movie About RPGs in 2018 (So Far)

There's been plenty of talk about the future of movies inspired by tabletop games, but the end of 2017 brought a surprise: a movie about a game that doesn't exist. Although it uses video game tropes, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle has a lot to say about role-playing games. If you haven't seen the movie, this discussion contains SPOILERS.

[h=3]"Many Effects"[/h]The concept behind Jumanji was established in a children's book by Chris Van Allsburg: kids play a board game and the game's effects seep into real life. Jumanji was a jungle-themed game where the players would face increasingly hostile animals and characters.

The book was the inspiration for the movie of the same name, starring Robin Williams as Alan Parrish, a boy trapped in the game for over 26 years before Judy and Peter Shepherd unwittingly release him. Like the book, it featured animals and a big game hunter named Van Pelt. Williams mentioned that the name of the game was actually the Zulu word for "many effects," but that's more speculation than fact (some supposedly Zulu speakers have contradicted this claim).

The most recent film, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, is less a sequel and more a reimagining, with a character similar to Parrish trapped in the game, Alex Vreeke. Before he is sucked into the game, Vreeke rejects it with a sneer, saying, "who plays board games anymore?" In a sign of the changing times, Jumanji refashions itself as a video game -- but despite its video game roots, this new version of Jumanji is a lot like a role-playing game.
[h=3]Welcome to the Jungle[/h]The protagonists are four archetypes established by The Breakfast Club: the brain (Alex Wolff as Spencer Gilpin), the athlete (Ser'Darius Blain as Anthony "Fridge" Johnson), the basket case (Morgan Turner as Martha Kaply), and the social media-obsessed princess (Madison Iseman as Bethany Walker). They're in detention for a variety of reasons, which turns into an exercise in recycling magazines by removing staples. It also just happens to have the video game version of Jumanji, which of course our four hapless teens decide to play. That's when the fun really starts.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is as much a deconstruction of poor game design as it is a takedown of high school tropes. Spencer's avatar is Dr. Smolder Bravestone the archaeologist (Dawyne Johnson, intentionally playing against type as Spencer's nebbish germaphobe). Fridge picks Franklin "Mouse" Finbar the zoologist (Kevin Hart), because he misread his name as "Moose." Mouse is slow, weak, and vulnerable to cake, but he carries the backpack for our hero -- an inverse of Fridge and Spencer's relationship, in which Spencer does Fridge's homework for him. Martha ends up as Ruby Roundhouse (Karen Gillan), a redheaded "dance fighter" who wears skimpy outfits. Most hilarious of all is poor Bethany, who is transposed into the "curvy genius," Professor "Shelly" Oberon (Jack Black).

Jumanji goes beyond mocking video games into what it means to role-play someone else who is radically different from you. Each character has three lives, which means that the players take more risks early on and become more cautious as the game progresses. At heart Jumanji wrestles with what Live-Action Role-Players (LARPers) call "bleed".
[h=3]Bleeding Out[/h]LARP scholar Sarah Lynne Bowman explains what bleed is in the context of role-playing:

Participants often engage in role-playing in order to step inside the shoes of another person in a fictional reality that they consider “consequence-free.” However, role-players sometimes experience moments where their real life feelings, thoughts, relationships, and physical states spill over into their characters’ and vice versa. In role-playing studies, we call this phenomenon bleed.


Bowman classifies bleed in two forms: bleed-in, in which feelings of the player affect the character; and bleed-out in which events in the game affect the player. Bleed-in is the source of much humor in Jumanji, where the strong are now the weak, the weak now the strong, and females are now males. The players discover that they must rely on other strengths than the archetypes associated with them (strong, attractive, smart). In doing so, the characters help their players grow emotionally: Spencer learns to be brave, Fridge learns to be a team player, Martha becomes more confident and Bethany learns to sacrifice for others.

Although Jumanji is nominally about video games, it emphasizes teamwork as necessary to survival. Co-creator of D&D, Gary Gygax, would agree:

The essence of a role-playing game is that it is a group, cooperative experience. There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you’re involved in, whether it’s a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things.


In Jumanji, the only way the players can succeed is by working together. It's a lesson we can only hope the upcoming D&D film will feature prominently.

Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, communicator, and a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to http://amazon.com. You can follow him at Patreon.
 

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Michael Tresca

Michael Tresca

For the same reason you don't discuss religion on ENWorld - portrayals of religion are going to be controversial. A quasi-pagan cleric shown performing rituals is going to offend the religious. Whereas, if they provide some degree of cover and hat tip the 'cleric' in the world as being compatible to an active real world religion, then they run the risk of offending the irreligious and even the very people they were trying to mollify because you did something about the portrayal wrong. I mean, fundamentally, the actual mistake that they made was having monsters in the game be called 'demons' because the word itself invokes religious belief and experience in a way that they seemed clueless about. It's absolutely best to sanitize a show - particularly a children's show - of any overt personalized religion.

This is a little ridiculous. Lots of movies have spell casting. Did you see the Harry Potter movies? Is the problem due to the fact that some of the spell casters may be religious?
 

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This is a little ridiculous. Lots of movies have spell casting. Did you see the Harry Potter movies? Is the problem due to the fact that some of the spell casters may be religious?

The problem is that someone might be comfortable with obviously silly spellcasting using Canis Latinicus probably won't be comfortable with a character that cast spells by appealing to some spiritual power, especially if dressed in some sort of religious garb. Sure, there are always going to be some people that think Halloween is Satanic, but the closer you get to looking like religion, the more it looks like occult ritual, and the more people you make uncomfortable.
 

I don't think Gygax intended to offend anyone, and I think he was rather surprised when he did, and even more surprised at the endurance of the moral panic. And I think that one consideration that is different is I don't think Gygax ever imagined his product being sold to eight and ten and twelve year olds, or considered exactly how parents might respond to that.

Well its a game, why wouldn't 8 to 12 year olds want to play Dungeons & Dragons? Kids have lots of time on their hands, unlike adults who have jobs. Anyway the people who were offended had a misunderstanding, the demons and devils were fictional, no actual demons were ever summoned during the playing of the game!

It is better to think of a god or a goddess as simply a powerful being rather than confuse them with the Christian God spelled with a capital 'G'. Godlike beings are also a staple of science fiction, if you recall 'Q' from Star Trek for example. Pagan deities may be thought of as powerful beings, they have powers and are immortal, but they aren't infallible and they can be killed. They are simply more powerful than your standard human, but they aren't cosmic beings, they aren't all powerful, all knowing, or omnipresent in the way the Christian and other monotheistic versions of God are presented.

You mean Gygax? Wasn't his job at TSR at the time official getting the brand into new media? Surely Gygax was the primary advisor from TSR on the cartoon?



Sometimes.



No, not at all. Most gaming tables do nothing of the sort. I've never yet been at a D&D gaming table in 35 years of play where the cleric engaged in actual ritual, recitation of spells, used any religious paraphernalia as props, or even to any really significant degree regularly played out the duties of being a priest of priestess. In my experience, players also are either disinterested in that or would be offended by it or more likely some combination of both. When spells are cast, they are cast very much as they are cast in The Order of the Stick - by declaration of the spell to be cast, that is to say, "Cure Serious Wounds!" or, "I cast 'Cure Serious Wounds'" And that works fine at a table and it works fine in a comic stick figure cartoon that regularly breaks the 4th wall, but I can't see that working in a cartoon. Somethings don't translate between media. You can't actually film, "The City and the City", or if you could, you'd have to use a number of really creative visual techniques. The device that Heinlein uses in "Starship Troopers", where he only reveals that the protagonist isn't white halfway through the story cant' be done in film. The playful hiding of gender in Ancilliary Justice behind ambiguous language works less well in a live action film. And so on and so forth.

The visual presentation of a cleric and how one is played at the table is very different.



Let's just say with the attitude (finally) breaking out in Hollywood, I think it would be a bad idea to associate the brand with the Forgotten Realms.
Why would Hollywood have problems portraying the Forgotten Realms? They did Middle Earth after all with the Lord of the Rings movie and the Hobbit. Hollywood also did multiple versions of Clash of the Titans. and don't forget the television shows Hercules and Xena, those too featured various pagan gods. I don't see the Forgotten Realms as all that different from what was done before.

You made your point about the D&D cartoon, maybe they were overly concerned about people's religious sensibilities, but there was another D&D cartoon which did have clerics and gods in it. There was a cartoon made out of the Dragonlance Novel Dragons of Autumn Twilight.
 
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Well its a game, why wouldn't 8 to 12 year olds want to play Dungeons & Dragons? Kids have lots of time on their hands, unlike adults who have jobs.

Gygax seems to have vacillated between trying to get historical wargamers to buy his product, and realizing that his kids were most amenable to it. He had worked so hard to get adults to play his game that even though his kids (and more specifically, his daughter) were early players it was clear he didn't think the money was there. Gary knew how to hustle, and it wasn't until later that he realized making D&D for kids (the Basic series) was an untapped market. I wrote about this in more detail at: http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?3457-Who-Was-D-D-Meant-For#.WmNJzDdOmgo
 

The problem is that someone might be comfortable with obviously silly spellcasting using Canis Latinicus probably won't be comfortable with a character that cast spells by appealing to some spiritual power, especially if dressed in some sort of religious garb. Sure, there are always going to be some people that think Halloween is Satanic, but the closer you get to looking like religion, the more it looks like occult ritual, and the more people you make uncomfortable.

If they try to appease people who will be offended by that, then this movie will suck. This is a fantasy world with fantasy religions where gods give powers to mortals in the form of spells. They will have to boycott the movie.
 

Probably the some strict "Bible thumpers" didn't watch Clash of the Titans, and didn't watch the shows Hercules and Xena either, because the featured "false pagan gods" and not the "true God of the Bible" if they boycotted those films, then they were still a success without them.
 

If they try to appease people who will be offended by that, then this movie will suck. This is a fantasy world with fantasy religions where gods give powers to mortals in the form of spells. They will have to boycott the movie.

Before people here get into some big religious argument, can anyone name some fantasy movies that featured, or even included, religion that were financially successful? Without going and digging around, the only thing that comes to mind for me is the Star Wars franchise, because it is science-fantasy and not science fiction, and the Force is a pseudo-religion.
 

Before people here get into some big religious argument, can anyone name some fantasy movies that featured, or even included, religion that were financially successful? Without going and digging around, the only thing that comes to mind for me is the Star Wars franchise, because it is science-fantasy and not science fiction, and the Force is a pseudo-religion.

Two questions:

1)Who's definition of "financially successful" are we using?
The real worlds or Hollywood/Studio Accounting?

2) Who's definition of fantasy are we using?
Because one man's religion is nothing but fantasy to another.
 

I think that is a little harsh on Peter Jackson. He had already earned an Oscar for the screenplay of Heavenly Creatures and made a number of movies before LotR which were critically well received. It's also worth noting that Lord of the Rings was considered unfilmable by many beforehand - with only the peculiar and incomplete animated movie from the 70s as any genuine previous attempt. Jackson was good at getting the whole of New Zealand enthusiastically behind the production of the film and delegated well in an epic that required a whole team of on-set directors that needed a lot of co-ordination.

The problem is that most of his work since has largely attempted to do the same approach in terms of script writing as he did in LotR. King Kong was way too long, and we all know about The Hobbit "trilogy". In the latter case, it should be noted that Jackson initially was just a producer and he had initially had Guillermo del Toro down to direct it. del Toro had wanted to do two movies, and they would have probably been standard two hour movies from my understanding. Unfortunately, due to a prolongued Union strike, del Toro dropped out and Jackson had to take on the direction himself. I think that disruption led to most of the problems, honestly.

I take it you've never read the Hobbit.
Because most of the problems come from greed. They took a one-and-done 90some page story & stretched it into a trilogy of movies that mandated inventing at least 6hrs of additional content.

I'm still awaiting the super-special BluRay edition where they edit out all the excess crap & just show me The Hobbit.
 

I take it you've never read the Hobbit.
Because most of the problems come from greed. They took a one-and-done 90some page story & stretched it into a trilogy of movies that mandated inventing at least 6hrs of additional content.

I'm still awaiting the super-special BluRay edition where they edit out all the excess crap & just show me The Hobbit.
Try this, read the Hobbit from beginning to end and time yourself. How long does it take? Now watch the Hobbit Trilogy by Peter Jackson and how long does that take? Now tell me which takes longer, reading the Hobbit or watching the movies? The Hobbit Trilogy is one of the exceptions to the rule that one must cut out parts of the Novel when converting it to a movie, in fact they added stuff! JRR Tolkein wasn't thinking about writing Lord of the Rings when he wrote the Hobbit.
 

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