Felicia Day

Worth Watching: ’The Guild’ mixes dorkdom with humor and cute chicks

A rare jewel in the Web TV world is "The Guild," written and produced by Felicia Day, a graduate of the Joss Whedon School for Gorgeous Nerd Actresses.

This show is an absolute, no-holds-barred dorkfest — a soap opera about a group of social isolates who, having met and played together in the World of Warcraft (WoW for short — that’s the hugely successful fantasy MMORPG world with 10 million players), decide to see what it’s like to . . . gulp . . . meet in real life.

Day plays CodEx, the group’s "Healer" — a type of video game character who is too weak to fight monsters, and so is forced to weenily stand in the background and use her healing magic to help the stronger players. It’s a video game nurse, basically. CodEx’s in-game diffidence bleeds into her real life, where she’s unable to rid herself of Zaboo (Sandeep Parikh), a hyper-geek from WoW world who shows up at her doorstep after she gives him too many in-game "winkies" — (; (;.

Another great character is Clara, the hefty mommy with a baby and two toddlers who is so obsessed with the game that she sometimes forgets to feed her kids.

The show makes heavy use of WoW jargon — gold farming, rezzing, wizard staffs, manna pools, loot — the show is funnier if you’ve ever actually --- er . . . journalistically investigated the game. But non-players should be able to enjoy it too.

"The Guild" is one of several geek-oriented Web TV shows — MyDamnChannel’s You Suck at Photoshop being another — that are capturing wide audiences and further hastening the demise of the geek stigma (a process always aided by the presence of good-looking women).