If you haven’t seen it, go watch the “Kanye the Giant” sketch from Key & Peele. It has its problems — it plays into some of the sexist stereotypes in gaming culture, certainly. It gets a few small details wrong (do people say “dungeon master” rather than “DM” in real play?), but those could easily be dramatic license more than misunderstanding.

On the positive side, though, it hits a bunch of deep and funny issues in gaming: players who refuse to respect the GMs’ worldbuilding; GMs who refuse to let their worldbuilding bend to the desires of the players; how the social contract evolves through actual play; how whole sessions can be composed of what happens “in town”. And the use of terminology is mostly dead-on, a sign that either someone has done their homework, or didn’t need to because they already knew it. It’s pretty clear this sketch was created by someone who gets gaming culture quite well.

There are a bunch of other sketches from Key & Peele that show a pretty deep understanding of fannish culture, too. (“Pizza Order” seems to do for comic fandom what Kanye the Giant does for gaming.) A lot of their other sketches contain nods to SF&F fandom, action movies and other nerdy hobbies. So I wonder, is either Keegan-Michael Key or Jordan Peele a gamer? It’s certainly possible that one of their writers is a geek, rather than Key or Peele themselves, but, well, I can hope. And if one of them is, then for no reason I can pin down, my instinct is that it’s Jordan Peele.