Exploring Online Gaming Communities Through Documentary Filmmaking

Theory

Before we delve into documentaries, it is worthwhile to briefly revisit ethnography, which has been a cornerstone for exploring online virtual worlds and gaming communities for over two decades (9-26) concept of the “imponderabilia of actual life”—subtle, intangible details of everyday life that are critical for understanding a culture—underscores the value of direct observation (pp. 18–19). What Malinowski and other scholars like Clifford Geertz (1973) have emphasized is the importance of the “minor,” often overlooked, details of everyday experience: the gestures people make when they salute each other, the way they eat or display affection, are as important as the formal systems of interactions. These encounters allow ethnographers to access elements that cannot be easily quantified or measured, providing deeper insights into human complexity. Ethnography enables the observation of phenomena in their natural settings, integrating participants’ perspectives and insights into its accounts (Berg, 2001, p. 134).

With the introduction of new technologies, ethnography deviated from solely textual documentation to recording, filming, visual data collection, and informal interviews (Van Maanen, 1982, p. 103). The advent of visual sociology and anthropology tools, particularly digital technologies and videography, retained the core principles of ethnography and expanded its potential through the use of digital cameras in multiple ways (Pink, 2021):

- Simultaneous collection of diverse types of data

By utilizing video recordings to capture human interactions, this approach provides visual data that convey a powerful sense of direct experience. In doing so, it captures the subtle, everyday details that are crucial for understanding, representing, and interpreting lived experiences (Heath et al., 2010; Pink, 2021, Chapter 5).

Video ethnography has also proven effective in studying online gaming communities, offering a medium for both producing and representing ethnographic knowledge. For instance, Chia-Yuan Hung (2007) employed video recordings to document the practices of Asian adolescent gamers, emphasizing the culturally constructed meanings embodied during game sessions. This approach included audio recordings of conversations occurring before and during gameplay, alongside video recordings of in-game actions, to analyze how gaming practices manifest in physical spaces. Another example of video ethnography in game studies is game elicitation (Roinioti, 2018), a methodology influenced by the psychological tradition of stimulated recall (Dempsey, 2010) and video elicitation. This qualitative approach uses video prompts to facilitate interviews. In game elicitation, synchronized in-room and in-game recordings produced by the gamer serve as the basis for interviews. Through active engagement with these recordings, gamers can reflect on their self-image as players, their in-game performativity, and the spatial and proxemic dimensions of gaming in physical space (Roinioti, 2018).

It is evident, however, that the very presence of an unfamiliar person or a camera in everyday life of gamers alters the routine. Researchers working with cameras have emphasized that the camera is never a neutral or unbiased object. On the contrary, it is a mediated tool that offers different affordances depending on the relationship established between the filmmaker/ethnographer and the research subject (Hänsch, 2021). Whether the camera functions as a colonial instrument of observation (Gregory, 2020) or encourages participants to adopt a performative role for the scientific gaze (Hänsch, 2021) depends on the research protocol and the nature of that relationship. Enter documentary filmmaking. Documentary filmmaking enables researchers to explore individual stories, emotions, and cultural meanings in gaming practices creatively, while also serving as practice-based research that produces knowledge through a creative output, as an arts-informed research framework (Cole & Knowles, 2008, p. 60; Petrarca & Hughes, 2014, pp. 562–563). In this approach, arts such as film, animation, and digital visual media are used to explore emergent micro and macro stories, while also serving as a reflective framework for both the researcher and, when possible, the research subject, following traditions such as video elicitation. Bearing close similarities to the ethnographic film genre (Nichols, 2017), while also incorporating creative aspirations (2-20, p. 8) definition of a documentary film. In a society dominated by visual media, it seems intuitive that documentaries would serve as effective tools for knowledge generation (Nichols, 2016).

What may remain debatable, however, is their role as a form of academic inquiry. While documentary filmmaking is widely accepted for entertainment and education, its place in academic research continues to evolve (Morgan et al., 2019). This debate often centers around 6, p. 139) notes, “to be reflexive is to have an ongoing conversation with one's self.” The goal is reflexive knowledge: insights that reveal not only the workings of the (virtual) world but also the epistemological conditions under which such knowledge is produced.

In a practice-based approach, the creative process—in this case, a video game documentary—refers not only to the artifact and the creative outcome, but even more to the techniques and processes that frame the result, while simultaneously reframing the knowledge it produces. In other words, knowledge emerges through in-the-field experimentation and creative production. This approach is not intended to be perfect but can (or ought to) become novel (Candy & Edmonds, 2018).

Documentaries, like ethnography, require reflective concern from the filmmaker, and the process of corroboration or verification parallels ethnographic reflexivity (Nichols, 2017). Stella Bruzzi positioned documentary filmmaking as a negotiation between the pursuit of the most authentic factual representation and the impossibility of fully achieving this aim. As a result, its identity is not fixed but emerges from a productive, dialectical relationship among all those involved in the production (Bruzzi, 2006, p. 7). In the case of video game documentaries, this entails the researcher-director who, through the filmmaking process, engages in reflective practices akin to ethnography; participants (the gamers), who either serve as co-creators (shaping the narrative through their lived experiences and interactions) or as protagonists within a structure shaped by planned themes; and audiences, who encounter ethnographic data through the film and critically assess both the material and the perspective of the researcher-director. These groups interact with one another through the film and the reality it represents. While all acknowledge the representational challenges inherent to nonfiction, this recognition does not invalidate the video game documentary or its ethnographic potential.

Methodology

What are the actual benefits and limitations of documentary filmmaking for game studies scholars, and what new opportunities may arise from this engagement? In order to critically approach this question, we will examine four films that highlight European voices:

- The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (Ree, 2024) tells the story of Mats Steen, a Norwegian gamer who died at 25 from a degenerative muscular disease. Initially thought to have led an isolated life, his parents were moved by the outpouring of messages from his online friends in the World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004).

The films selected are all from recent years and reflect the growing diversity and depth of documentary work in the field. They differ significantly in style, methodological approach, and the production resources available to them. Rather than choosing films with a shared framework, we deliberately selected four fundamentally different works in order to capture a wide range of documentary strategies. Our methodology emerged through close analysis of these differences, allowing us to extract key principles from contrasting approaches to the subject matter.

Of the four films chosen, only the last was based on academic ethnographic research. The others conducted research primarily to support the filmmaking process. Nonetheless, these documentaries provide rich content for exploring the filmmaker's approach to data collection, subject exploration, and camera use.

We then developed a framework that would serve as a template for analysis. The starting point of our inquiry was the typology established in film studies. According to Nichols (2017), documentary films can be categorized into poetic, expository, observational, participatory, performative, and reflexive modes, each defined by distinct production techniques and narrative strategies. These modes range from the emotionally driven and visually expressive (poetic) to the factual and authoritative (expository), the realistic (observational), the subjectively engaged (participatory), and the self-aware (performative) or meta-narrative (reflexive). From this typology, a conceptual coordinate grid was developed to help us compare different game documentaries more easily (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Illustrating the Tensions between Subjectivity, Authority, Mythology, and Archiving.

The X-axis represents the degree of the researcher-director's involvement, that is, to what extent the documentary emphasizes the filmmakers’ perspective (authority) versus allowing interviewees the freedom to express themselves openly (subjectivity) in a more ethnographically oriented approach. The distinction between authority and subjectivity is valuable, as it indicates the degree of intervention in the primary data and helps us evaluate whether a documentary reconstructs reality or serves other purposes, such as reflection or political reasoning. In a nutshell, the horizontal axis addresses authorship: on one end, strong authorial control, where the director and experts shape the argument and drive the plot; on the other, subjectivity, where the plot and content are guided primarily by the protagonists’ perspectives from a subjective point of view. In the case of Nichols's typology (2017), we would place the expository documentaries at one extreme and participatory documentaries at the other.

The Y-axis represents the narrative style of the documentary, indicating the degree of realism the creator aims to achieve or the level of analytical intent. In this frame, a poetic documentary that is frequently characterized by a loose narrative structure and lyrical cues (mythology) would be in the opposite direction from observational documentaries, also known as cinéma verité (archiving). Narration and storytelling in video game documentaries can take multiple forms, from stylized animated techniques and machinima to raw archival in-game footage. The importance here lies in whether the director's intention is to construct a narrative that resembles a fictional film (utilizing cinematic techniques and narrative tropes that can evoke the emotion) or to rely on recording events with minimum intervention, where participants become unaware of the camera's presence—a fly on the wall. Under mythology, we include re-staging and re-enactment—techniques used to represent events that were not or could not be captured in real time. These involve the recreation of specific scenes or events by participants or the dramatized depiction of past events, often using actors, elaborate setups, and other tools. Nonetheless, both approaches—archiving and mythology—maintain a commitment to fact-based and historically accurate data presentation (see Part 3: Creativity).

This conceptual coordinate grid allows us to categorize game documentaries based on the creator's level of intervention (X-axis) and narrative techniques (Y-axis) and manage data (positioning data within the grid) through an open system of interpretation. At the same time, it offers a more flexible form of analysis, emphasizing a spectrum of possibilities rather than rigid categories. To analyze these films, we employed grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), a systematic methodology that develops theory directly from the data by identifying patterns and recurring themes. From this process, a set of categories emerged, relating, among other things, to the use of open-ended questions in interviews, the presence of commentary, the existence of a grand narrative, and specific dramaturgical elements such as character focus, camera movement, conflict, and creative montage. Each documentary's affordances and limitations were assessed through two ethnographic criteria: the filmmakers’ intervention in the field and their approach to storytelling for broader audiences. The visualization derived from the grid diagram further supported our analysis by allowing us—and the reader—to better understand the variety of documentary approaches and their implications for representations of online gaming communities.

The Setting

One distinguishing aspect of documentary filmmaking as a research method is its inherent focus on place. By capturing the real world on camera, documentary filmmaking can put a spotlight on the local dimensions of online gaming communities as they unfold in specific contexts. Consider, for example, a scene from The Gamer (Figure 3(a)–(b)). The camera follows a group of White male gamers, including the protagonist Bona and his teammates, who are portrayed in their own insular space. In tandem, the aesthetics and urban setting clearly reflect a northeastern European environment, with the clothing, hairstyles, and surroundings contributing to a strong sense of place. Every detail in the frame—from the characters’ attire to the architectural backdrop—anchors this moment in a specific environment, encouraging viewers to associate the experience with the place where the scene was filmed.

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Figure 3.

(a)–(b) Scene Sequence from The Gamer by Jokinen and Luukkainen (2023).

This connection not only makes documentaries compelling narratives but also positions them as powerful methodological tools for capturing the regional dimensions of game studies (Liboriussen & Martin, 2016). Here, regional game studies, as a framework, can be found useful to support documentary filmmaking as a research method. The goal, however, is not merely to “capture” the local in camera but to engage with what Melanie Swalwell (2021a, p. 3) described as a critical reflection on locality—encouraging a more nuanced consideration of the local rather than celebrating it for its own sake.

Consider The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, for example, the family's private VHS footage of Mats’ childhood and the interviews with WoW players in their environments across borders add a crucial context to the unfolding story. Set in a different locale, and the film would convey a fundamentally different experience. This strong sense of “place” and “time” immerses viewers in diverse economic, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions shaping the story—dimensions that are integral to the film's narrative texture and interpretive depth, even if they do not constitute its primary argument.

So far, we have seen how traditional cinematography techniques can effectively capture offline dimensions of gaming culture. However, game documentaries offer an additional advantage: their ability to seamlessly blend physical and digital environments. In text, such transitions typically require explicit explanation or risk disrupting narrative clarity. In contrast, film allows for a rapid cross-cutting between the two realms—immediately perceptible to the viewer—while the narrative continues on another level. The paraethnographic film Virtual Cultures in Pandemic Times harnesses this strength and flickers between screens, shots of players’ workstations, footage of Animal Crossing gameplay, and interviews via Zoom calls embedded within Second Life, creating a unified aesthetic. Although digital takes center stage, the brief cutaway shots of participants’ real faces during interviews serve as an implicit source of knowledge on the paralanguage and idiolect of these unique individuals.

A Coherent Story

Melanie Swalwell argued that the early phase of local game history aimed to correct the limitations of earlier accounts by decentering dominant narratives and documenting game histories beyond the former centers. To move regional game studies beyond that “chronicle stage,” she drew on microhistory (Swalwell, 2021b, pp. 231–232). Microhistory applies a micro-scale of analysis to virtually any subject, whether an individual, a village, a particular commodity, or even a single year. Given the wide applicability of this approach, it is surprising that Swalwell's call to apply microhistory to the study of games and players in context has received little attention so far. Hence, game studies scholars have not yet exploited the full potential that this methodology has to offer in terms of the captivating style of history-telling and with respect to both the micro and macro analyses (Gylfi Magnússon & Szijártó, 2013).

What documentary filmmaking shares with microhistory is the ability to examine large-scale processes through focused narratives. By placing individual stories at the forefront, documentary filmmaking—much like microhistory—encourages viewers to look beyond simple categories of nationality, ethnicity, age, or social class. In this way, it balances abstraction with detail. It shows the complexity of personal stories while being capable of addressing the “big questions.”

Not all documentaries require protagonists, just as not all microhistories necessarily center on a single person or a group of people. In Knit's Island, none of the participants emerges as a protagonist; instead, the journey of the filming crew and their efforts to survive nearly 1,000 h in a hostile virtual world become the narrative thread that binds together disparate scenes and players into a cohesive storyline. Through the narrative archetype of a journey, viewers are introduced to the film's central question: can a multiplayer online game substitute for nature and human interaction during lockdowns? This question gains particular poignancy in the film's closing moments, where a virtual rave party and a lingering gaze on the sea within the game world are juxtaposed with real-life footage captured by players during lockdown—a “view from my window” shot on phone cameras (Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

Knit's Island by Barbier et al. (2023). Homage to ‘View from My Window’ at the Film's Journey's end.

As a visual analog to microhistory, research through documentary can bring large-scale models and theories to life through real people and events, creating a mutually beneficial approach. On one hand, documentarians gain the opportunity to broaden their narratives beyond individual cases, adding translocal and global dimensions to complex stories. On the other hand, global narratives benefit from the rigorous, reflexive qualities of documentary storytelling, which can test and humanize macro-level analyses (see Ghobrial, 2019, p. 14). This fusion—akin to “global microhistories,” as proposed by Tonio Andrade (2010)—can be seen in The Gamer (2023), which centers on a struggling young player who wants to become an esport professional. Through Bona's personal dramas, situated almost entirely in a Finnish context, transnational and translocal dynamics surface as they and their networks navigate the global esports industry, platform policies, and English-language gaming content (Aslinger & Huntemann, 2013, p. 2).

Letting Go of Your Digital Sirens

Digital worlds can distract in many ways—through their mechanics, flashy visuals, unreal experiences, and flexible rules. It is easy to become mesmerized by a reality that almost seems to refuse any real-life conditions—ethical, social, or even personal. Killing might be the social norm, and flying might be the primary mode of interaction. As in classical anthropological research, familiarizing oneself with this new environment helps reduce the noise and creates space for micro stories to emerge. Yet within these strange environments, there are real-life people “living” by the rules of the digital world. That introduces another important factor to keep in mind—familiarization with the gameplay and the fictional world of the game.

Knit's Island presents a case where the directors never met the protagonists face-to-face, as the film was shot during the COVID-19 pandemic and adhered entirely to an aesthetic within the DayZ game engine. At the start of filming, the director's astonishment with the gameplay is apparent. He approaches the players within the game with certain misconceptions and simplistic views about their ability to separate reality from fiction in this post-apocalyptic virtual world. His questions often reveal his own biases, such as when he asks whether the game reflects real life or assuming a female leader might be a dominatrix. More than 30 min into the film (after over 300 h of gameplay), an encounter with an avatar named Reverend Stone seems to shift the director's perspective, prompting him to give the players more freedom to express themselves (Figure 5).

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Figure 5.

Knit's Island by Barbier et al. (2023). Encounter with Reverend Stone Frees the Director from his Digital Sirens.

As he spends more time with his in-game acquaintances, his preconceived assumptions begin to fade. The players’ personas become more open and authentic in front of the camera, and their interactions deepen in meaning. Eventually, through familiarity with the video game world and repeated interactions, a system of trust forms between the filming crew and the player-protagonists, allowing for a more genuine connection.

Creativity

While fully acknowledging the need to maintain academic integrity, documentary filmmaking remains a creative practice. The diagram in Figure 1 illustrates this tension: at one end is archiving, presenting data as faithfully as it was captured during the shootings; at the other is a creative approach aimed at engaging a wider audience by crafting mythology through special effects, scripted scenarios, music, re-staging by the subjects, and re-enactment by actors. Advocating for documentary filmmaking as a research method does not diminish its creative potential. On the contrary, we support responsible creativity in both selecting data to collect and deciding how to present the research findings.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin is an insightful example where, despite the undeniable creative aspects of the production process—such as animation, voice acting, and the soundtrack—the narrative directly stems from the protagonists’ actions and words, maintaining authenticity without imposing an external framework. At the outset of the inquiry, the film employs interviews with friends and family in the traditional “talking heads” format. Archival video footage from various stages of Mats’ life and original photos kept by his family and members of the WoW community provide an additional layer of data. Snippets from the protagonist's personal blog are voice acted throughout to convey to the viewer Mats’ self-reflections.

Following the director's request, the WoW online community used programs to transcribe their in-game dialogues with Mats, resulting in 42,000 pages of text. These transcripts were then transformed into a screenplay, which was recreated using in-game animation and voice acting. This is where creativity comes into play: first, in using this source data to shape the film's storyline—Mats’s coming of age in a digital world. Second, the director recreated moments from the protagonist's online life by incorporating mythology (animation, music, voice acting) to maintain narrative flow and convey a message based on his observations. To ensure that the mythicized reconstruction of events stayed true to the original, he consulted with other players about the mood in which things were said or written and how events unfolded. In this way, the highly creative approach taken allowed the narrative to remain relatively “clean” from external interpretation, enabling the players to express themselves and ensuring that what emerged came directly from them. This approach emphasized the agency of Mats and his WoW community as self-aware individuals making their own choices, rather than being influenced by unseen forces (Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

The Remarkable Life of Ibelin by Ree (2024) Applies Mythology While Maintaining Authenticity.

Petri Luukkainen and Jesse Jokinen, directors of The Gamer, adopted an approach closer to video ethnography—or what we term archiving. They film the protagonist and his environment, allowing him to determine the pace and unfolding of events. They exercise creative agency through rapid shifts between mid-shots and extreme close-ups—synchronized with the First-Person Shooter's pace—to convey the protagonist's internal anxiety and self-destructive drive (Figure 7(a)–(b)). Boellstorff's so-called paraethnographic film is arguably the most “religious” in its archival approach, constructing a narrative from the voices of researchers and participants. The director positions himself as lead researcher and makes limited use of the genre's creative affordances—what we term mythology. His artistic contribution is largely confined to a collage-like layering of real and virtual footage, assembled in ways that reflect the film's thematic concerns (Figure 2(a)).

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Figure 7.

(a)–(b) Rapid Montage of Extreme Close-ups in The Gamer (Jokinen & Luukkainen, 2023) Conveys Psychological Strain and Inner Drive.