The Hobby: Tales from the Tabletop

The Hobby: Tales from the Tabletop is a documentary about modern board gaming.  It is a brief, tiny view into one specific hodgepodge handful of people who are enthusiastic about board gaming.

As an enthusiast myself, I spent the entire viewing experience wondering:

• how did the filmmakers pick this subset of people?
• how did the filmmakers pick this particular event (The World Series of Board Gaming tournament in Las Vegas)?
• why did the filmmakers ignore any number of other, more interesting filmic facets of this hobby?
• who was this made for?

To non-board-gaming audiences, this "documentary" doesn't really explain anything about board gaming. To board gaming audiences, this "documentary" is myopic and overly generalized, without getting into anything fun. (Why show someone boringly assembling pieces of a prototype game, but NOT show them explaining the prototype? Why avoid talking about Essen, or PAX Unplugged, or live-action roleplaying? How can you NOT mention Warhammer when talking about wargames? Why do you only interview adults and grown-ups, not families with young kids? Why interview several board game creators extensively about their love for games in general, but NOT discuss game publishing or marketing for their games in particular? Why let the issue of racism and audience be raised, but refuse to investigate it?)

My general takeaways were a sense of dissatisfaction, and the observation that absolutely some filmmaker got paid a paycheck to make this, and I'm so glad that they did. Their choices made little sense to me: they did not assemble a coherent story to follow; they did not attempt to interview a broad and representative range of people; they did not explore the details of the games or why the games are so interesting; they also did not explore the personalities! of! the! interviewees! or why we, the audience, should be interested in them. They did follow people into a variety of different lighting settings and across several costume and location changes.

Ultimately, this was a fluff project which successfully got me to (1) spend social time at someone else's house, and (2) watch some Amazon Prime inserted ad content. I would not recommend this documentary, going to hang out at a friend's house is free and comes without ads.

This post's theme word is canescent (adj), "turning gray or white; becoming hoary." While writing this post, I rapidly aged, and ended up canescent and waving a cane to get these pesky neighborhood filmmakers off my lawn!