Exploring Online Gaming Communities Through Documentary Filmmaking

This paper explores video game documentaries as a method for researching online gaming communities. We begin by framing documentary filmmaking as a practice-based approach, a creative form of video ethnography, with the film serving as the focal output. Our analysis draws on a close reading of four recent video game documentaries that highlight European voices, alongside insights from our own fieldwork. We focus on the affordances of this approach in capturing embodied, affective, and performative aspects of play that text-based ethnography may struggle to convey. The selected films also offer different stances on the agency of both participant-protagonists and researcher-director. In light of these observations, we propose a multimodal research output in which the documentary film takes center stage.