Social aspects of gamingFollow

Have the lines blurred between your real social life and your online gaming life? Has playing Lineage 2 and other online games gained you a partner, friends, a community of friends? Has it lost you a job or a partner?

I’m developing a documentary about the social effects--positive and negative--of online games, and I'm looking for gamers who’ve invested as much time and energy online as they have in the "real" world. Please contact me to share your story. 510-847-7481 or email Jason at gaminglifefilm@yahoo.com.

How originial.

I propose you do a documentary about how smoking crack negatively impacts poor people next. That subject hasn't been covered enough.

Or, perhaps, a documentary about how school shootings are bad.

The subject you're looking into has been covered about 95,000 times.

Let save you some time.

MMPORGs are psychologically addictive. Most people's lives aren't severly impacted by them in any way, just as most people can drink alchohol and not have their lives adversely effectd.

There is a small subset of extreme cases, as there is with any group where people's lives are destroyed because they focus so much on MMPORGs that they drop out of school/get divorced/loose jobs/ kill themselves.

This will, of course, be the group you'll want to focus your documentary on, because we all know well adjusted people are boring.

A good idea to get subjects for your documentary would be to attend "fan faires" and find the most screwed up seeming people dressed up in coustume as their characters. Interview them and ask a few probing questions and pick the most obviously screwed up ones.

Film them playing the game and getting angry or crying. Be sure to get the camera in real close when they get emotional so you don't miss any exciting reaction shots.

Film them getting very excited playing the game, as well, for ballance.

Be sure to include couples who met through the game and refer to one another by their in game names. If you're lucky they will have children who they neglect so they can fit in more game time.

After one of the crying shots, when you've established just how unstable and nutty the MMPORG people are, cut to some stock footage of the Shawn Wooley suicide.

http://www.jsonline.com/news/State/mar02/31536.asp

It'll make a nice montage from the overly involved documentary subject to the story of someone who killed himself over a game.

If you're REALLY lucky, one of the nutbags you film will go on to kill himself during post production, and you can have a great pre-amble to the film, dedicating it to him and his family and some more stock footage at the end with a simple white-text coda along the lines of:

After the completion of this film, Joe Nutbag (GnollSlaya) was found by his wife (FairyGrrl) having shot himself in the head with replica Dark Elf mini Crossbow. He was playing the game at the time.

Over 1,000,000 people are playing the game, right now. Many of them Children.

Then you can cut to credits and play some cautionary Karen Carpenter song about not loving too much.

Cruel it seems what has previously been said, but true in some aspects. I see this as having potential with a little thinking outside the box contrary to what many believe. But being so harsh to someone who wishes to chronicle something in film is of no harm to any of us. Badgering him for attempting to do so is a bit unfair, people outside of the gaming circuit do not generally understand our way of thinking. If I were on the production side of this, I would go in depth on the similarities between gaming addiction and other addictions in ways many have not seen. I dunno, if really thought through, I see prospect.

Yeah. But the problem is that he's not really going to try to get people outside of the "gaming circuit" to understand "our way of thinking". I've yet to see *any* kind of documentary that does that. It's always about presenting the sad stories and providing some sort of cautionary undertone to the whole thing.

Don't get me wrong. They don't always start out that way, and I'm sure that this guy honestly believes he's doing this to provide accurate real data about the gaming industry and those who play games. But along the way, he'll have to make choices about what gets cut and what gets put into the final product. And the "art" part of a documentarian steps in. Drama is "good theatre". Real life and real people are boring unless you spice them up somehow. Inevitably, despite even the best intentions, his documentary will come out pretty much like Smash describes. It's pretty much unavoidable, doubly so when he starts out his questions asking about people who've had negative experiences with the game. Yeah. He says "and positive", but we all know what's going to interest an audience.


If you want to learn about games, start playing for yourself, or meet people who do yourself. A documentary is about the worst place to learn about anything, despite the name.