The world of role-playing games is a fascinating one. Unfortunately, you wouldn't know that from Life with the Dice Bag.

The documentary starts out with an odd hand-animated introduction to the basic concepts of role-playing, such as the fact that you control a character who may or may not be anything like you, and that you guide this character through adventures in a setting designed and controlled by the game master. It's a bit crudely done but the general idea is sound, since viewers may or may not really know what a role-playing game is all about.

After this introduction, though, Life with the Dice Bag shifts into its ordinary documentary mode, and it's pretty much downhill from there. There's no real structure to the film; instead, we just get interviews upon interviews with random gamers, at first in their homes, and then later on the grounds of a couple of gaming conventions.

Life with the Dice Bag showcases the challenge faced by a documentary filmmaker when making a film composed primarily of interview footage: the difficulty of finding interviewees who are both articulate and interesting. That's a combination that's sadly lacking here. Many of the interviewees give unnecessarily rambling answers; some go off on unrelated tangents; others might have something more worthwhile to say, but range from being poor speakers to being almost inarticulate. (The editing doesn't help; instead of mercifully cutting to the next scene, in many occasions the camera stays fixed on the interviewee as he fumbles for words, or as silences lengthen painfully.)

There's also the question of "why should we be interested in these people?" No particular reason; most of the people we meet seem to be just random gamers, either friends of the filmmaker or miscellaneous people he met at a gaming convention. The DVD description on the back of the case makes much of the "candid interviews with industry big names," and yes, we do get to see D&D creator Gary Gygax, Gen Con owner Peter Adkinson, fantasy artist Brom, and others... but these interviews are very short (in one case, only about five seconds) and clearly ad-hoc, captured in the middle of the dealer room at the convention, for instance.

Another problem with the film is its persistent negative tone. Here's a tip: if you want to dispel negative stereotypes about gamers, spending a long time elaborating on those stereotypes and then concluding with a weak "but we're not like that, really" conclusion is just not the optimal way to do it. Quite the opposite, in fact. After hearing various interviewees describing in great detail (and some enthusiasm, oddly) how others think they're geeks, nerds, anti-social, freaks, etc., one starts to think that maybe those labels aren't so far off target. (As a gamer myself, all I can do is roll my eyes and say "Gee, thanks.") In the Gen Con section of the film, there's another negative streak, as the filmmaker seems determined to find an anti-gamer conspiracy behind the convention's upcoming move from Milwaukee to Indiana (misspelled as "Indianna" in one caption, I might add.) There are some humorous moments in the film, though I'm not clear how intentional they were, like the male gamer who describes female gamers as a scarce commodity (yes, he used the word "commodity"; I'm thinking there are more reasons than just scarcity-of-females why he can't get a date...), but the overall tone remains oddly negative.

What it really comes down to, though, is that Life with the Dice Bag is just not interesting. It's 90 minutes of "man on the street" interviews about role-playing, and it gets old very quickly. Almost nothing of substance is presented here. For instance, while the film claims to cover role-playing in general, and not just Dungeons and Dragons, it never really explains the existence of different games or describes the other popular role-playing games. Some of the interviewees actually get their facts wrong, such as the fellow who claimed that D&D started out as a board game, while at other points, the material is simply presented in a muddled and confusing way.

The DVD

Video

I suspect that the poor quality of the image in Life with the Dice Bag comes mainly from the source material, which looks like a fairly poor-quality VHS tape. Unfortunately, it doesn't help to know that: no matter how you slice it, the film just looks awful. The image is washed-out, with the color palette appearing mainly as tan and gray; contrast is usually too light, so the image often looks washed-out. The picture is very soft and fuzzy, and there are wavering image flaws at the bottom of the screen. Worst of all, though, is the fact that whenever there's any movement in the picture (either from an interviewee moving or from the camera panning), we get extreme distortion of the image.

Life with the Dice Bag is presented in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio.

Audio

Although the soundtrack is better than the image in terms of quality, that's not saying much. Some of the interviews are reasonably clean and clear-sounding, others sound muffled, and in others there's a substantial amount of distortion in the sound, resulting in a harsh, tinny quality to the interviewee's voice.

Extras

Three trailers for the film are included. The menus are reasonably straightforward, but they're very sluggish to navigate.

Final thoughts

The best word to describe Life with the Dice Bag is "amateurish." It may be a worthwhile accomplishment as a student film, but it's in no way ready to make its way out into the larger DVD market: it's poorly structured, overly long, uninformative, and just plain uninteresting. If you're looking for an interesting documentary on role-playing games, pass over this one and check out the excellent The Dungeons & Dragons Experience instead.