Still from The Hobby: Tales from the TabletopRoute504/Supplied
The Hobby: Tales From The Tabletop
Directed by Simon Ennis
Starring Dan Corbett, Tom Vasel
Classification N/A; 92 minutes
Opens in theatres June 20
There is a cute scene in The Hobby: Tales From The Tabletop, a quirky documentary about board games and the people who obsessively play them and others who design them. One of the featured hobbyists is about to roll the dice on a journey that takes him from Toronto to Las Vegas to compete in the World Series of Board Gaming.
He is Dan Corbett, a bearded, obsessive, middle-aged man-child. He once injured himself taking a victory lap singing Europe’s The Final Countdown while celebrating a Trivial Pursuit victory over his mother-in-law at the cottage.
Do we loathe this guy, or do we love this guy? (I love this guy.)
About his competitors in Vegas, his daughter tells him, “You can beat those nerds.” It’s adorable − she has no idea her dad is the biggest nerd of them all.
Canadian documentary filmmaker Simon Ennis does know. Corbett is a close friend. With The Hobby, Ennis attempts to find out what makes people like his pal tick, and why they play and create complex games such as Catan and Blood Rage that blow simple endeavours like Battleship out of the water.
We meet Elizabeth Hargrave, an American policy analyst who invented the ornithologically concerned, card-driven Wingspan, which flew off the shelves upon its introduction in 2019. As the New York Times said in a feature article about Hargrave, it is a hit board game with “scientific integrity.”
But Irving Finkel thinks Wingspan, with its thick rule book, is for the birds. “The idea that it could have anything to do with pleasure seemed to me like a fantasy,” says the feisty, white-haired curator at the British Museum in London.
Finkel is old school − not Boggle or Sorry old school, but ancient Mesopotamia vintage. He raves about the Royal Game of Ur, a backgammon-like Bronze Age pastime that is “full of magic, full of promise, full of questions.”
One could say the same about The Hobby, a film of unnullified promise that frustrates as much as it charms. Like an annoying Monopoly player, director Ennis refuses to play by the rules.
Often the personalities put in front of the camera are not identified. Locations are sometimes mysteries as well. “Where are we, Daryl?” Ennis asks a game designer. “At my house,” Daryl Andrews answers. Are we supposed to deduce from the Blue Jays cap Andrews conspicuously wears that he is from Toronto?
At times it feels as if Ennis is, excuse the expression, playing games with the viewer. Moreover, the storytelling is flawed: Ennis’s choice of his friend as the film’s focus does not pay off narratively.
A rock-climbing associate professor of philosophy − from which school? − adds intellectual heft. Only by squinting very hard at his book he’s holding will anyone know he is C. Thi Nguyen. “Games can engineer a space where what you do fits what your abilities are perfectly,” he says. “We’re supplied with exactly the tools that we need just to be able to barely do it.”
I’m not sure that explains gaming, but it is an excellent theory on life and career choices in general.
The theories from the associate professor from the unnamed university aside, Ennis seems more interested in exploring the peculiarities of his characters than he is in providing historical context or meaning to the subculture at hand.
Game reviewer Tom Vasel of The Dice Tower website makes the point that ultimately board games do not matter. “People do,” he says.
For better or worse, the film’s director took that assertion to heart.
