Two films about old-school arcade games premiered within a few days of each other in Park City in 2007. One was at Sundance, the other was at Slamdance. Guess which one you’ve never heard of? Ironically, it’s the one from Sundance. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters was the success story when these two films unintentionally butted heads, and the sad thing is that the other movie, Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade, is a much better film. But chances are you’ll never get to see it.

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One of my favorite things about film festivals is the chance you’ll have at seeing something that you’d probably never come across otherwise when you visit the multiplex or browse your rental queue. When the Toronto International Film Festival schedule was released last month and I saw Keven McMcAlester’s documentary about Dungeons & Dragons gamemasters, The Dungeon Masters, listed, I knew I had to see it. It wasn’t that I’d seen Keven’s earlier documentary about Roky Erickson, You’re Gonna Miss Me, and wanted to see this, nor did I want to see what fine cinematography Lee Daniel had crafted for the movie. No, I wanted to see this one for the geek in me. Heck, it even made Karina’s list of Films We’re Betting On for TIFF, and she doesn’t dole out the nerd love lightly.

Although Dungeons & Dragons came out in 1974, the game is still played across the world, and has directly contributed to the creation and success of online sword and sorcery games like World of Warcraft and EverQuest. Almost everyone you as about the game knows that there’s a certain nerdy/geeky vibe associated with it, although most people probably couldn’t tell you anything else about it. The Dungeons Masters attempts to show you the personalities behind the dice-rolling by taking intimate looks inside the lives of three different dungeon masters who, in effect, become the game themselves.

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There are few board games that have endured the test of time to still get played today even during the video game craze. Games like Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, and Clue are still available at your neighborhood store, decades after they came out. In fact, they’ve all seen multiple releases over the years. There’s a billion different versions of Monopoly out there, and you can even Make-Your-Own-Opoly. Scrabble is still as popular as ever, especially given the Scrabulous flap over at Facebook, and Risk just came out with a revised edition that has new rules and pieces. That just leaves us with Clue.

Clue, or Cluedo as it is called in the United Kingdom, where it was invented by Anthony Pratt, was created out of a love for murder mysteries. It was first published in 1949 and still endures to this day in multiple versions. To name a few, there’s The Simpson’s Clue, a Clue DVD Game, and even Clue Express for people with limited time on their hands. Clue also came out with a new edition just a few weeks okay, completely updated with biographies for the characters, new weapons, and a second deck of cards. I’m not sure how I feel about Professor Plum being changed to Victor Plum, a dot com billionaire. That’s like replacing Gumdrop Pass in Candyland with “Bean Sprout Way” to encourage kids to eat healthy. Don’t mess with nostalgia, man.

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When your film is without official distribution, yet you continue to have screenings, it’s worth your while to make distinctly new trailers that advertise specific shows. This is apparently what the makers of Nerdcore Rising have done. The above promo was posted to YouTube this week in order to announce the music doc’s west coast premiere, happening this Saturday, August 30th, at the 2008 Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle.

Nerdcore Rising is one of the most entertaining films I saw at SXSW this year; in my review, I particularly applauded the attention paid to the hilarious fanbase of nerdcore hip-hop. Both the music genre and the documentary are as much about the fans as they are about the artists, which include nerdcore “godfather” MC Frontalot (seen in the promo with Nerdcore director Negin Farsad).

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Kevin Kelly, a contributor to Joystiq, i09 and countless other weblogs, will be weighing in on the intersection between film and video games every Thursday here on SpoutBlog. This is his introductory column; please welcome Kevin, ask him personal questions, shower him with flattery and/or rip apart his argument in the comments.

If you’d been holding onto a game controller or sitting deep in a multiplex somewhere a few weeks ago, you might have felt the shuddering groan of millions of video game and movie fans everywhere when the press release dropped the news: Brett Ratner is going to start making movies based on Activision’s cadre of video games. Maybe the Uwe Boll career path of making extremely bad movie adaptations of video games still appeals to him. It’s not clear what project will be first up, but given the fact that Ratner’s films have somehow made millions of dollars, it’ll probably be something fairly popular. Don’t rule out Brett Ratner Presents: Brett Ratner’s Guitar Hero: The Movie just yet.

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Second Skin, a documentary to be featured later this week in the Spotlight Premieres section at SXSW, follows a handful of gamers who are deeply devoted to Massively Multiplayer Online games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft. The film premieres on Friday at 9pm at the Austin Convention Center. Check out the trailer above, and answers to the 4 Questions We’re Asking Everybody, from director Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza, and producers Victor Pineiro and Peter Schieffelin Brauer below. Victor Piniero and I are also speaking on the same SXSW panel, Blogs, Buzz and Buddy Lists, which goes down on Sunday, March 9.

Tell us about your movie. Who did you work with, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.

Juan Carlos: This flick is like An Inconvenient Truth meets Errol Morris. Except that the movie we’ve been making for two years doesn’t involve an environmental crisis. I kept on coming back to An Inconvenient Truth, because online games (MMO’s) have the power to change the landscape of our society. Games like World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, and Second Life have and will continue to make our global community closer in ways that I think are just becoming clear now. I’m not trying to imply that it is going to cause problems on the scale of global flooding, but I think it is a societal evolution that we are running to catch up with. Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control on the other hand takes a really intimate look into people’s obsessions. Which is to say that our movie is about people who tend to play a lot of MMO’s. In our film I try to balance between that gigantic cultural phenomenon, and the personal lives of people who are ‘just gamers’. Finding a way to say this movie is about a burgeoning sub-culture AND seven people - is a delicate balance. Suffice to say I think you’ll be pretty surprised where everything ends up.

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