I’ve been playing games since I was a kid and struggled for many years with people who thought online games were dumb and action games made you chaotic. I saw this as an opportunity to present some insights into what gaming can really entail: passion, camaraderie, and experiences you can’t get in real life. ~ Ben Dressler
Let’s face facts, the gamer lifestyle is something not many people understand /AFK The Movie looks at the life of a gamer who is asked to give up the one thing he has ever enjoyed: World of Warcraft.
For people who don’t play video games, that’s called quitting. To hardcore gamers and MMORPG players around the world, that’s known as “euthanasia.”
The film examines what it’s like to step away from the computer keyboard, to cut out the one thing you love to do, simply because you realize it controls everything you do. But what is the small difference between loving video games and being addicted to them? Does it make a difference and should we care?
The /AFK The Movie theme covers World of Warcraft and online gaming as well. But you don’t need to know the difference between Horde and Alliance to connect with the movie. We’re all addicted to something, whether it’s cell phones, websites, video games, or candy (or even a dangerous combination of all 4). Step away from your cell phone for 1 day and see how you respond. Is a cell phone so different from a video game? Exactly why is one an addiction and the other just a habit?
I spoke with Ben Dressler, the filmmaker who brought /AFK to life.
What was the process of creating the film like, and from your point of view, what message did you want to convey to gamers and to those who tell so-called “addicts” to stop doing it?
JHS: What inspired you to do the script? Did you feel like writing something that could speak “for all WOW players?”
2 things. First of all, the feeling that nobody had done this in the past. I think it’s really unusual that you have a concept that is unique and doesn’t really exist. When I first saw Memento, I was so impressed that after a long time of filming someone could still come up with something so clever. And while we weren’t the first to combine actual live action and video game clips, I don’t know of any movie that has done it to the extent that we have.
Second, I wanted to have video game support. I’ve been playing games since I was a kid and struggled for many years with people who thought online games were dumb and action games made you violent. I saw this as an opportunity to show a sense of what games can really cover: passion, camaraderie, and experiences that you can’t get in real life.
JHS: In your own point of view, why do people want to leave the “gambling” lifestyle?
In fact, I think they just don’t taste much better. The main character of /AFK says at one point: “It’s not just me sitting in front of a colored window”. But that’s precisely what people see every time they see someone “play”. They don’t see what you think, feel or feel. even experiment while playing. I’ve had a lot of people watch me play WoW and think it was really boring. But when I let them play for an hour or more, they bought the game themselves. Fortunately, people who have gaming experience will grow in ranks. important as journalism or politics.
JHS: You mentioned that you basically had no budget because you couldn’t make any money from the movie. What kind of restrictions did he put on you as a filmmaker?
Since I knew there would be no budget from the start, I could focus on writing a script that dealt with few characters and places. We had five days of shooting for a 25-minute film with a very small crew. And since I didn’t want to rush the actors too much, there was little time left for the camera and lighting unit. We also couldn’t afford to buy a lot of accessories, so we needed to work with everything we had in our homes. The main character’s room is actually made of ten people’s geeky stuff put together.
It basically came down to pulling out a lot of favors and making the best use of what was already there. I think that if you choose to work with that restriction, it will easily lead to new and creative ways of telling your story. Although I recently read that German filmmakers particularly enter Hollywood mainly because they can make cheap movies that look like expensive movies. Well, that’s flattering, isn’t it?
JHS: What would you say to people who deal with people asking them to “quit video games”?
It’s really hard to give a general answer to that because it depends on the situations. Normally I would recommend trying to make those people really aware of what gaming means to you. Determine why they think games are stupid and show that you understand them too and take their concerns seriously. Don’t just plunge into retaliation mode. When I was in college, I used to talk to my parents about the games I looked forward to playing and what I found funny about them. He could usually get them to relate to it in some way.
JHS: Based on the insufficient success of some major movies, it seems very challenging to take the concept of a video game and turn it into a movie, with few movies making the effort to “get into” the life of BEING a gamer. . What was your experience in this regard?
I think there are two types of game movies… Adaptations and sci-fi movies. The adaptations are almost always horrible OR just solid action movies with the name of the game in the title… And yes, there are hardly any movies about real gamers; To be honest, I can’t name just one. And I’m kind of amazed by that!
But it’s hard, and I think people who do it need to know video games as thoroughly as movies… My point is that to truly learn from video games as a medium, filmmakers have to understand how a game tells its story, what can be translated and what things cannot.
JHS: What does WOW offer that hardly any other game on the face of the earth offers?
In all honesty, there are a couple of games on earth that I haven’t played yet! However, I think WoW did and does an amazing job of making intense gaming available to many people. Back in the days of EverQuest, MMORPGs were a very exclusive genre that even most gamers didn’t know about or care about. These days, you’ll attack with people who wouldn’t even see themselves as a true player. And yes, perhaps that is a pioneering work that no other game can repeat.
