In Dead Pixels,Hannah Harper Archiveswe follow a group of friends who pass the majority of their time together on the green pastures of the online game Kingdom Scroll --a fictional RPG that just happens to look a whole lot like World of Warcraft.
Since the four gamer friends don't seem to have that much to do with each other beyond Kingdom Scroll, it's easy to see the show as a commentary on how young people are spending their lives in fantasy universes while losing touch with the outside world and the people in it.
SEE ALSO: Is 'Fortnite' addiction among young children actually a real problem?But according to Alexa Davies, star of the new Channel 4 comedy, that's not the case.Dead Pixels, Davies explains,is not a commentary on the stereotypical view of gaming culture as a virtual world populated by those who feel safer online.
On the contrary -- the show is a loving portrayal of people who use online gaming as a way to connect with others and unwind. The three main characters, Russell, Meg and Nicky, have banter for hours online, and the show follows their day-to-day lives online and off (mostly on) and how the two occasionally intertwine.
"I can see how it seems really dysfunctional!" Davies, who starred in Mamma Mia 2,tells Mashable. But the show is pro-gaming at its core, she says. "The show was written and made by gamers. Everything in the show, even the stuff that’s poking fun at gaming, is coming from a very knowledgable place.
"When we joke about gamers and stereotypes, it's coming from a place of understanding."
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable Davies plays Meg, a young woman who spends most of her time, both at work and at home, talking to her two male co-gamers via headset, making filthy allusions to her genitals while butchering animals in the game.
According to Davies, the show's characters are not just using the fictional world of the game to escape the "IRL world." Instead, the show rather uses the game as a tool to show the different characters' personalities as they engage with each other online.
"The show is about the characters, not the game."
"If you didn't get to know these characters well, you'd say 'yes, they spend their time on their own without talking to people IRL that much,'" Davies says. "But when you see them talking to each other, they are actually all big, bold characters. The show is about the characters, not the game."
Per Davies, the show does acknowledge that when you split your time between online and offline worlds, you can sometimes become "two completely different people."
"You can be online and tell whatever story you want, but in real life you could be a very different person," Davies says. Dead Pixels explores that particular issue by going behind the facade of one of the characters, who is a famous live streamer on the show. And by showing that even the most confident players are sometimes a lot less confident in the real world.
"In a lot of the scenes we were just in a room looking at a computer," Davies says. "When we would leave that and go into other rooms, it was like playing two different characters."
This is definitely the case with Davies' character Meg, who seems very comfortable talking bluntly about sex with her gamer mates, but gets very awkward when a guy starts flirting with her IRL. Meg handles this by inviting him to play the game, only to kill his avatar soon after he logs on.
Davies says that this duality of personality, these two separate sets of rules and logic, is what makes the characters on Dead Pixels interesting.
"In every episode, you have one image of [the characters]," Davies says. "But then they go outside, and the assumptions you have about them are proved wrong."
Dead Pixels premieres 28th March at 9.30pm on E4
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