The Gamers

My friends Don and Joanna were kind enough to lend me their DVD of "The Gamers" by Dead Gentleman Productions post-GenCon. They'd just purchased it, but had seen the movie before, so were willing to let me borrow it, and so I'll start this entry by thanking them.

"The Gamers" is a short film made by gamers for gamers (it won a prize for best fan film at GenCon 2003), so it has to be judged by the standard of other films made by non-professionals. It's obviously low budget, and the acting isn't polished, to say the least. That said, it's enormously entertaining stuff if you understand the references.

The film follows a group of gamers as they're playing a session of an ongoing Dungeons & Dragons campaign, intercut with the same actors playing out their adventures in character in full costume. The game is obviously D&D, though the serial numbers have been filed off to keep the filmmakers out of trouble. The movie even begins by showing the character sheets on screen as part of the opening credits, so you know something about the D&D characters even before they've been shown on screen for the first time if you know the game. One memorable joke involves the character of a player who didn't show up for this particular session. The character spends most of his time standing around doing nothing, utterly uneffected by everything going on around him no matter what happens, because the player isn't present to say what the character is doing, but the character's presence has been established as part of the story's continuity. This wouldn't be especially funny to the average person, but for any gamer who has had exactly that thing happen in their home campaign (and it's happened to almost anyone who has played an ongoing campaign), it's frickin' hilarious to actually see it on the screen. Another of the best jokes is funniest if you're familiar with a particular common D&D rule (though they do a good job of setting up an explanation to make it work if you don't happen to know the rule).

They've hit this one out of the park, in that they obviously know their audience and play to it beautifully, knowing exactly what common elements of RPGs will look utterly ridiculous on screen. The low budget and weak acting works very much for them because it fits the context so perfectly. I recommend this film highly if you've done any amount of roleplaying, especially Dungeons & Dragons. I don't think a non-gamer would laugh nearly so hard, but it's not made for them.

The disc is filled out with a bunch of other work by Dead Gentleman Productions, which I can't recommend. The two Syphilitic Ninja Vampires sketches are mildly funny, in the way that those lame Saturday Night Live sketches involving a one-joke character beaten into the ground sometimes are. Their theme song is the funniest part of the sketches, and I suspect it was written before the sketches were. The remaining material just isn't that good. It reminded me of weak Second City TV material, and I'm not a fan of SCTV in the first place.

In short, if you've ever played D&D, pick up this disc at a convention some time and watch "The Gamers", even though the non-gamers in your life probably won't get it, but don't expect much from anything else on the disc. Call it 8 out of 10 for "The Gamers" and 3 out of 10 for everything else for the few mildly amusing sketches.