If you love tabletop gaming, you will love The Gamers: Dorkness Rising. If you haven’t played any tabletop games, this movie will make you wish you had.
The Gamers: Dorkness Rising is an indirect sequel to The Gamers, a super-low-budget film released in 2002. Dorkness Rising tells the tale of a group of tabletop gamers with a DM who is stuck while trying to write a new module. He is able to get past the writers block enough to get the module started, and appears to write the story as things progress. The film shifts back and forth between LARP-style footage of the players literally acting out their character’s actions, and the players sitting around the table playing Dungeons and Dragons.
The first thing you will immediately notice is the authenticity of this film. The banter that goes on around the game table and the type of arguments they get into is about as close to reality as you can possibly get. Their DM suffers from an issue that many real-world DMs have suffered from: getting caught up in the world they have created to the point where they aren’t taking their players into consideration. There are some slight liberties taken with spells, rules, and stats…but overall, this film is a highly accurate portrayal of the game.
The LARP portions of the film where the gamers act out their character’s actions were by far the best part for me. The costumes and acting are all the equivalent of a mid-budget LARP, and the sets are laughably low budget (yet wondrously executed.) If you have ever wondered what LARPing is really like, watch this film. Ignore the low-budget CGI that appears in a few spots, and you now know what it is to LARP (but with a more comedy than most serious LARP groups would allow.) The low-budget look of everything added to authenticity of the film, and makes you feel like you are watching a recorded LARP event rather than a low budget movie.
The comedy in this film is top notch. Having a basic knowledge of tabletop games is all that is required to get most of the jokes, and there are some inside tidbits for those in the know. Watching this movie made me want to break out the dice bag and roll up a new character…they really did a great job of making you feel like a part of the group. The scenes that show the gamers sitting around the table are so authentic, I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually went through the module this movie is based on, filmed the whole thing, and chose where they were going to cut in LARP footage. It is obvious that most of the actors in this movie have had these arguments in real life…it’s one thing to read a script and act well, but there is a certain kind of nerd rage that cannot be duplicated unless you have experienced it yourself before.
The Gamers: Dorkness Rising is an unbelievably hilarious movie that belongs in your collection. It would be funny for most anyone, but if you are big into tabletop gaming and RPGs, this may be one of the funniest movies you will ever watch.
