Car News

Michael Tresca at the Examiner has broken the news about the upcoming
film on the life of Gary Gygax, and if you haven't already heard, here
are the juiciest bits - George Strayton (scriptwriter for the Hercules
and Xena TV shows and an animated Dragonlance feature) will be doing
the writing, the budget is set at $150 million, the plot will switch
between details of Gygax's life and the fantasy realm of Dungeons &
Dragons, and the lead will be played by a "huge star." (So it looks
like at least part of the casting is already complete.)

There have been rumblings in RPG blogs and forums about the
feasibility of such a project - will it have any public appeal at all,
how well could such a film do at the box office, and could it ever
hope to recoup its budget - and I'm sure some excellent points have
been made on both sides of the argument.

But I'd like to leave those arguments where they are, and talk about
the actual content of the movie. This film could have a lot of
potential to help the roleplaying hobby, and I'm hoping that at least
four areas will get some attention.

Here's what I'm hoping this Gygax biopic will do:

- Give a bit of time to the negative backlash against the game in the
early 80s through the 90s. This is a big opportunity to set the record
straight on a lot of the misconceptions that people had about the
game, and I hope they take it. It would be helpful not only to the
hobby, but to helping everyone improve their critical thinking skills.

- Demonstrate how the game is played. Many people still have a big
misunderstanding in this area, and a simple demonstration of how the
DM and players interact to create a story would help a lot. Sure, it
will be fun to see big and loud fantasy scenes explode across the
screen, but I'm hoping that it will be made clear who is really making
those things happen - the DM and the players - and how they're doing
it.

- Show how much fun it is. This may be a given, or it may not. Since
the focus is on the early days of <i>D&D</i>, there may be some
temptation to portray all of the players as stuffy science nerds who
show no outward signs of enjoying themselves. What I'm hoping for here
would be the exact opposite, obviously.

- Demonstrate what Gygax started, not just what he created. After D&D
became popular, a few other RPGs sprang up to appeal to fans of other
genres, and then the hobby exploded with new games through the 80s and
90s and into the new millennium - from small press affairs of blotchy
photocopied rulebooks to full-color hardcover tomes to the self-
publishing PDF revolution. The influence on video games, celebrities
inspired by the RPG hobby, the Vampire television series, references
to D&D on shows like Freaks & Geeks and Community - Gygax provided the
spark, but to really do justice to his accomplishment, they should
show how far the fire really spread.

Almost eleven years ago, many of us were hoping that the Dungeons &
Dragons movie would help inspire a renewed interest in the roleplaying
hobby... and were sadly disappointed. Here's hoping that won't happen
again.

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