Spaced is one of the few perfect examples of how it should be done. It not only went down in TV history, but it was because of a single episode that the series earned most of its loyal following. Back in 1999, the show was on its third episode. In it, a little-known actor named Simon Pegg played Resident Evil 2 for so long he began to confuse real life with the game itself. Genuine Resident Evil 2 screens explain where the jokes are coming from; controllers are used properly; and lines from the game are spoofed. They're jokes for gamers, rather than about gamers. Even game music is used to cut from one place to the next. Spaced and, in many ways, The Big Bang Theory were probably never intended for anyone beyond those who'd appreciate this type of humor. But why not apply their onscreen approach to gaming to mainstream entertainment like Scrubs?
I've been acting, writing and directing for film and theater for five years now, and I've been gaming all my life. The most recent overlap of the two was my brief stint as a guest writer and actor in the Resident Evil episode of The Escapist's de-rez series. Another occurred last summer during the shooting of the upcoming Irish feature film Suckers in which I play an all-out PC nerd/gamer Chris Rice. Suckers starts out as an Irish Breakfast Club, but 10 minutes in, a heap of vampires show up. Chris was originally written as your stereotypical onscreen nerd. He was there simply to confuse other characters and the viewers with his various nerdy comments on whatever scenario they happened to be in. One the of the film's directors, de-rez's Chris Slack, and I set out to fix this problem and decided to use the method that Spaced perfected. We simply changed all of Rice's "nerdy" comments into what you might read in gaming chat rooms. Essentially, Rice was now a real PC gamer: "rofling" instead of laughing, calling people "noobs" instead of benders and screaming "Pwnd!" while killing vampires instead of ... well, just screaming.
We didn't rewrite Chris using lame pop culture references; we rewrote him to say exactly the kind of stuff most online gamers say on a day-to-day basis. Suddenly, he was funny to all types of audiences for two reasons: Anybody who didn't grasp our gaming jokes still found him curious and bizarre, but to gamers, he was now one of them. When it came time for the first screening of the film, only 40 out of the 200 present were gamers. But Chris' lines got laughs from the entire audience, gamer and non-gamer alike. Slowly but surely, gaming culture is becoming part of the mainstream; but there are still plenty of people too caught up in the stereotypes to notice.
My plea to filmmakers is this: For love of the film industry, the gaming industry, yourselves and most importantly your audience, please stop mashing buttons and start playing.
Stephen Colfer has never written a byline before, and when he isn't contemplating what to put in it, he's usually acting in a theater house, writing/shooting a talkie or being harassed by Leon Kennedy.
