Like a video game screen that says “Continue?”, video game documentaries keep popping up with extra lives. Just last week I wrote about the documentary Chasing Ghosts and how it’s a better movie than The King of Kong, and the good news is that Chasing Ghosts is now coming out next month on a cable channel near you. The even better news is that there are a lot more in the pipeline, and a few others worth seeking out and watching. Besides these two retro gaming documentaries, here’s a roundup of new and recent video game films that’ll keep you pushing buttons. Check out the list after the break.
Second Skin
Juan Carlos and Victor Pineiro-Escoriaza put together a movie about the people who inhabit this side of the screen in the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing game phenomenon of games like World of Warcraft and Everquest. It’s a fairly intimate look inside the lives of many of these gamers, for better or for worse, and doesn’t take the easy route of just poking fun of these people. The film aims to make you understand what draws these people into the games, and what ends up keeping them there. It also shows you several people who left the game for various reasons, including addiction. Victor, who produced the film, recently told us to keep your eyes open, because you’ll be able to catch this movie outside of film festivals very soon.
Get Lamp
When I was a kid, one of my first gaming memories was playing the classic text-based adventure Zork on a friend’s Commodore 64. Even today, I’ll sometimes boot up a text game like A Mind Forever Voyaging or Trinity, which come much closer to the world of prose novels than they do of video games. They are beautifully created works of art, and one company was behind 99% of the successful text-based games in the 1980s / 1990s: Infocom. Get Lamp is a look at the people who created these games, and the rise and fall of the company. It’s a labor of love by director Jason Scott, who has spent as much time as possible on the other end of a blinking cursor. He completed principal photography earlier this year, leaving him with over 80 hours with of interviews the whittle down into a feature documentary, and we’re hoping there will be an update soon about the progress on his website. For now, you can catch the trailer for it here.
/afk
In the gaming world, /afk is how you’d signify that you’re “away from keyboard,” leaving your in-game character in a sort of limbo until you return. Like Second Skin, /afk seeks to show you the people behind the games, and what their lives are like both inside and outside, and it also asks if gaming should even be considered an addiction. The film had a clever marketing campaign that featured postcards that looked somewhat like baseball cards, with gamer’s stats listed on them. I haven’t heard much else about this film, other than briefly meeting director Greg Stuetze at the E3 gaming expo one year. Hopefully this film will see the light of day soon, because I’d like to see if it explores different ground than Second Skin does. I was at the launch event last night for World of Warcraft’s newest expansion, The Wrath of the Lich King, and I spoke with a lot of different people in line. They really are a fascinating bunch.
Gold Farmers
In the World of Warcraft and other online games, a lot of your time is spent killing low-level monsters, going on random quests, and trying to make a buck so you can buy new gear. This tedious and repetitive task is called “grinding” by players. Almost overnight, people and then companies sprang up that offered to do this for you for a price in real-world money. Now complete organizations (normally in China or other parts of Asia) hire groups of gamers, pay them extremely minimum wages and have them grind in-game so that they can sell gold, gear, and even complete characters to players. It’s not legal in the game (you’ll get banned for life if you’re caught on either side of the fence), but it’s also sometimes impossible to detect. UCSD doctoral student Ge Jin’s film Gold Farmers explores this real-world job for a virtual-world economy. Like /afk, the future of this doc is uncertain, but you can catch a trailer here.
TILT: The Battle to Save Pinball
Pinball machines have unfortunately been on the downward slide ever since coin-op video games overtook the flippers-and-balls gameplay. Then as in-home video games started becoming popular, and people stopped going into arcades for their gaming fixes, things got worse. In 1998, Williams Electronics, one of the pinball bigs, decided to try something new by meshing a video game and a pinball machine together in one unit called “Pinball 2000.” Although things seemed to be going very well and initial units were successful, Williams suddenly pulled the plug on the whole project. This documentary explores that entire project, and asks what happened. I still love pinball machines, but they are getting harder and harder to find. Check out the trailer and a scene from TILT right here.
Playing Columbine
Super Columbine Massacre RPG! was a video game created by Danny Ledonne after the school shootings in Colorado, and according to the movie he created it on a whim thinking no one would play it. It ended up setting off a huge controversy about video games, which reached a fever pitch when the game was submitted to the Slamdance Guerilla Gamemaker Competition in 2007, and then later yanked from consideration for vague reasons. This documentary, by game author Danny Ledonne, explores the controversy around his game, and around violence in video games in general. While it’s not a fair and balanced look, since it comes from the creator of the game, it does ask a lot of interesting questions, and has some really good insight into the cultural phenomenon of gaming and how it may or may not relate to real-world violence.
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