RPGaDay (Day 8)

Favourite Appearance of RPGs in the Media

When it comes to LARP, I'd seriously have to consider "Knights of Badassdom" as the benchmark for presentations of the hobby. It pokes fun, but shows enough of the conventions of the genre in a reasonably accurate light. It gives the impression that someone involved was a LARPer, but that person was removed from later parts of the editing process, and their input watered down. I don't know specifically what happened with this movie between the awesome reviews it got at one ComicCon, through the years it languished in distribution hell, and finally the release it got in an edited version. I'd love to have done a comparison on that first version, but now we'll never know.

More generally, my favourite media representation of gaming has to be the D&D episodes of "Community". Again, they're a bit tongue in cheek, but so is the whole show. They poke fun at the hobby in much the same way that the show pokes fun at everything, but they give the game some context.

I'm trying to think of other media forms that get a run in our house, I vaguely think there might have been gaming episodes of reality shows (I'm vaguely thinking of "Beauty and the Geek" here, but we barely watch regular TV here, let alone that kind of rubbish), I know there have been gaming references in "Big Bang Theory" but none of them really stand out as memorable at the moment. Most of the other references I can think of are still very inept in their depictions of the hobby.