All the World’s a Stage: Pop culture and its impact on roleplay

My original title for this post was going to be “You got your pop culture in my roleplay!” “No, you got your roleplay in my pop culture!” But that doesn’t fit, and it isn’t a very descriptive title. Still, this issue of “how many cultural reference is okay in game” is an argument I see come up in roleplay alot. WoW, tabletop, and LARP all seem equally plagued by it.

My example is, of course, the above video. It’s not a WoW roleplay thing, but it’s still a pretty good illustration of my point. The LARPer is taking the part of Baron Samedi, who is attempting to convert some snake-worshipping vampires to his own religion. I don’t know enough about the game dynamic to evaluate it on anything except the obvious; the video’s creator is performng a parody of the Old Spice commercials in a very in-character manner. (Thanks to OWbN for the example.) In my opinion, the creator did a pretty good imitation of the vocals, and mirrored the Old Spice commercials pretty well.

With the technical evaluation out of the way, we’re left to wonder if it makes sense that an ancient vampire god really spends that much time cruising YouTube. But on the other hand, the video’s kind of funny, and probably some people had fun with it. Isn’t that kind of the point of roleplay?

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Filed under: All the World’s a Stage (Roleplaying)