Call it research if you like but Jon Brown - veteran TV writer-for-hire and now creator of Dead Pixels, a sitcom centred around compulsive online gamers - has sunk a fair few hours into near-future looter-shooter The Division. After so much time clearing out the gang-ridden grids of Ubisoft's detailed simulacrum of a trashed New York, you might expect him to already feel at home in the Big Apple. But speaking down the line from a noisy Manhattan sidewalk during a break from location filming, Brown cannot quite get his bearings. "I don't really know where I am," he says cheerfully. "Somewhere near 47th Street? To be honest I just get in a van every day and they take me somewhere."
The 40-year-old has spent most of 2019 working on the second season of HBO's Succession, the heroically profane boardroom dramedy starring Brian Cox as an unravelling media baron. But shuttling between the UK and the US means Brown has not been able to closely track the response to his gaming baby Dead Pixels, which debuted on E4 last month. "I was at home when it first came out but I'm not the sort of person who would go on Twitter or Google to see what the reaction was," he says. "I knew I was writing for a demographic who are very discerning and have a keen eye so I was aware that it might be polarising. But gaming is something I've always wanted to write about because it was something that I'd never really seen portrayed on-screen in a way that felt real to me."
Anyone who has blearily looked in the mirror after an all-night Warcraft session and tried to brush out the incriminating indent of a gaming headset in their hair will likely feel a jolt of recognition watching Dead Pixels. It is a rousing, ribald tale split between two distinct realms: the verdant animated world of fictional MMORPG Kingdom Scrolls, where chunky fantasy avatars battle to free the Ninth Kingdom from insectile tyranny, and the rather more grubby Northampton flat where single-minded (and relentlessly single) gamers Meg (Alexa Davies) and Nicky (Will Merrick) spend long hours neurotically needling each over castle management and raid strategy while avoiding aggro clans like the Flaming Shitheads.
from Eurogamer.net http://bit.ly/2Vucipk
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