General Posted in Entertainment

Full disclosure: Chris Hussey, who runs the Table Tales website, asked us to take a look at his site and review his series Gamers Behaving Badly. We’re willing to write honest reviews of pretty much anything, but we can’t promise we’ll do so in an especially timely fashion.

One of the things really exciting things to come out of internet culture is that it’s given people (like us) a voice, people that probably wouldn’t have one otherwise. The popularization of podcasting has resurrected the radio shows of old. Except that, rather than being limited to local station and stars, we can receive broadcasts from everywhere in the world. Practically anyone can afford the basic equipment to put together a program, though (as we’re discovering) it’s a hell of a lot of work.

Enter Gamers Behaving Badly. The brainchild of Chris Hussey, the podcast series follows the antics of six gamers playing through a D&D ersatz fantasy roleplaying game. The players represent tabletop archetypes most of us have encountered: powergamers, ass-kickers, storytellers, method actors, and beer-and-pretzelers. Running about ten minutes apiece, each episode gives a window-view into the players’ antics–from low-level mortality to player sass about the DM’s bad naming conventions. By now, you probably know if you’re the target audience (you probably are).

On the surface, Gamers Behaving Badly appears similar to other geek-related projects like the Gamers or Zero Charisma, but it’s a much subtler (niche) kind of comedy. If you’ve played D&D, you’ll likely relate to Hussey’s characters (and chances are that you’ll even recognize some traits of your own). Although the characters all fit into stereotypes, the characters have backgrounds (available in the Gamers Behaving Badly section) that imply a deeper story, such as Jenny’s mysterious past with “The TPK.” Hussey has given himself lot of opportunities to develop his series.

There are two banes to any podcast, the first being inappropriate length. Some podcasts run over an hour, which is too long for our limited attention span. Gamers Behaving Badly sidesteps this issue with its short, episodic format. As mentioned earlier, each episode runs about ten minutes. It’s convenient to have the ability to start and finish an episode without devoting a large block of time to it (and it makes marathoning the series for a review much easier). As part of this, each episode has little filler, so you have to pay close attention. It’s a little difficult matching voices to characters at first, but you’ll pick it up by episode three or so. (Hey, it has less characters than Game of Thrones.)

The second podcast pitfall is the acting. As an independent production that relies solely on audio, this could make or break Hussey’s work. Fortunately, the actors do a solid job with their material, though there is one small complaint we have: it’s a wee bit overproduced and overwritten in some spots. Brevity is the soul of wit, and popular comedies like Archer or Modern Family rely on precise comedic timing. Back-and-forth banter, jibes, and one-liners are just as important as longer jokes, and they’re one of the most important elements to spicing up boring scenes. Some of Gamers Behaving Badly‘s lines contain a hair’s breadth of a pause at moments when real people would talk over one another. The intent is likely to ensure we’ve heard the line, but it slows the momentum of the conversation and deflates the humor. On the other side of the equation, other lines run just a bit longer that they should without interruption, which sounds unnatural. Luckily, these are easy to fix by condensing the dialogue and tightening the editing, two things that would add a bit of polish to the web series.

All said, we definitely think that Gamers Behaving Badly is worth a listen, and we recommend you hop on over to YouTube to start at Episode One: “One and Done.” Even if you’re not sure you’re the target audience, we think you should give it a few episodes before deciding one way or another. It’s always good to support your community.