Blog Post #4: 3/17

I recently read an article about documentaries in 2020, specifically about gaming. They talk about several different ones, and how important these are to video game culture. Reading this both helped me understand what aspects of the documentary are important and helped me feel good about the theme of the film. It was encouraging to read about successful and "feel-good" documentaries and imagining that ours can be in that group of being beneficial to video game culture.

One of the things that stuck out to me in this article was the discussion about timing. This is timing not in the sense of documentary length, but timing in the real world. A lot of projects don't get off the ground because they're about things audiences wouldn't care about decades later, which means the relevance of a subject is important. This made me feel a lot better about ours, because it's not only about a specific game that's still relevant, but also gaming culture in general, which will always be important. In this sense, we are already succeeding.

Another topic of discussion was a concern about drama in documentaries about subjects such as this. There aren't a lot of conflicts in documentaries about an online gaming community, but this article made me realize that was okay. It referenced a couple specific films that "resisted the urge" to focus plot more on some sort of drama or conflict to make it more interesting, and about how they turned out well. For our documentary specifically, I'm not super worried about pacing. Being as short as it is about such a unique topic, I'm not worried about people losing interest. 

You can read this article here.