This is the poster for Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 movie The Girlfriend Experience, starring Sasha Grey, who works in the porn industry.
At this link she can be seen playing D&D with a bunch of other people from the porn industry. (All links are totally safe for work, btw.)
The blog Playing D&D With Porn Stars, and the D&D game described therein, are run by Zak Smith, who also illustrated every page of Gravity’s Rainbow. The D&D w/ Porn Stars blog is an excellently thoughtful and creative blog that is closely tied to the Old School Renaissance that has hit D&D since Gygax passed away, with James Maliszewski’s blog Grognardia as its totemic centrepiece. (Grognardia is here described briefly on the blog of Seattle’s alternative paper The Stranger).
Zak Smith and some of his players recently got into an honest-to-blog feud with a gaming podcast, said podcast being more attuned to the Story Games RPG community, which is kinda the hipster end of gaming but without the irony. Substance of feud: story games people didn’t give due respect to the breadth of Zak’s gaming knowledge and understanding.*
Point being: culture is fragmenting as the potential for internet communication to create asynchronous non-geographical communities beds deeper.
Or, more succinctly: porn stars just battled elite role-playing game nerds over geek status. You’re not living in your father’s culture any more. Heck, you’re not living in your older brother’s culture any more. The world is getting weirder and wilder all the time.
That’s a feature, not a bug, by the way.
* Feud since resolved.
4 thoughts on “Unexpected world”
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And coming soon: D&D with Pornstars, the webseries, at the Escapist.
Your summary: porn stars vs. elite rpg nerds for geek status is excellent.
I’ve grown a little dissatisfied with Story Games in the last year or so. It seems to have become more and more insular.
Shame, really.
I’m somewhat out of touch, but I do feel… *touched* that my preferred way of playing a D&D style game is being played by porn stars. Teh awesome.
It really is a very thoughtful and thought-provoking blog. I particularly like the point that old-school gaming allows new gamers who are feeling overwhelmed to just sit back and hit things with their axe for a bit until they find their feet again in a way that Story Games don’t because they insist that the player must be constantly engaged and creative, which is not necessarily fun for people who don’t think of recreational problem solving as a hobby.
It actually really makes me want to run an old-school game. Hmm…