"Pwned" by Matt Vancil
Aug. 11th, 2015 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroA story taking place in the Gamers universe (with Lodge, Cass and Leo guest-starring) about a man who loses his girlfriend to WoW addiction, and goes into the game to get her back. Basically, if The Gamers was about MMOs.
This is a case where it makes sense for this to be a novel, and there aren't that many gags that would be improved by the visuals and it would be incredibly expensive to produce as a movie. It also makes montages and blurring together real and typed-online interaction work better. And allows for in-game underwear dance parties. And we get enough of Reid's inner monolog that it actually builds him into more of a real character than most of the movie characters get. (Also, it’s easy to miss, but our protagonist this time around isn't white--discussion of his family tree reveals him to be at least 1/4 Asian and raised with heavy exposure to grandma's culture.)
The sensibilities and a number of the plot beats are very similar to The Hands of Fate: Newbie gets into the game to chase a girl, gets mentored and ends up doing well from sheer luck, encounters opposition and really gets into it and eventually makes the critical decision based on the game rather than the girl. Oh, and doesn't win the girl in the end because that's a stupid thing to try and he eventually learns that lesson, but there is some romance potential nonetheless.
It's a fast read, which is good, because that meant the jokes didn't overstay their welcome. The humor - to-poignancy ratio was pretty good.
Overall: Like many things, it could have used a slightly firmer editor's hand. But I'd call it a worthy addition to the Gamers canon, and that's as someone who only knows MMO culture secondhand. I suspect that if you actually play WoW, you'll do a lot of "Yep, yeah, that totally would happen."
This is a case where it makes sense for this to be a novel, and there aren't that many gags that would be improved by the visuals and it would be incredibly expensive to produce as a movie. It also makes montages and blurring together real and typed-online interaction work better. And allows for in-game underwear dance parties. And we get enough of Reid's inner monolog that it actually builds him into more of a real character than most of the movie characters get. (Also, it’s easy to miss, but our protagonist this time around isn't white--discussion of his family tree reveals him to be at least 1/4 Asian and raised with heavy exposure to grandma's culture.)
The sensibilities and a number of the plot beats are very similar to The Hands of Fate: Newbie gets into the game to chase a girl, gets mentored and ends up doing well from sheer luck, encounters opposition and really gets into it and eventually makes the critical decision based on the game rather than the girl. Oh, and doesn't win the girl in the end because that's a stupid thing to try and he eventually learns that lesson, but there is some romance potential nonetheless.
It's a fast read, which is good, because that meant the jokes didn't overstay their welcome. The humor - to-poignancy ratio was pretty good.
Overall: Like many things, it could have used a slightly firmer editor's hand. But I'd call it a worthy addition to the Gamers canon, and that's as someone who only knows MMO culture secondhand. I suspect that if you actually play WoW, you'll do a lot of "Yep, yeah, that totally would happen."
