I need to watch as many as I can as soon as possible, as research for a final paper. I need to see if different documentary subgenres lend themselves better to the subject matter.
I know there are several out there, and many are available on the internet, so what else should I watch? Any type of documentary is okay and it can be broad and try to cover the whole history of gaming or gaming culture or whatever, or it can be very specific, like that new doc about gold farming in WoW. Has anybody seen Chasing Ghosts? I hear that one's good, but don't know much about it.
Right now all I have on me is The King of Kong and a History Channel DVD called Video Games: Beyond the Fun, but it's just a 50 minute episode of Modern Marvels.
I just watched the History Channel DVD, and here is my short review:
It was pretty informative from Space War up through the Magnavox and Pong, but then when it needed to cover all the innovations from Japan it crammed Nintendo from Donkey Kong all the way to the Nintendo 64 in about 1 minute, then mentioned Sega for about 2 minutes, and barely mentioned Sony at all. Then it said Sega and Sony were really innovating, left Nintendo out, and went back to American games, and went on and on and on about Lord British and how he introduced moral choices to video games (which is wrong). It focused primarily on technological innovations, but didn't mention a single one to come out of Japan, and just gave Nintendo credit for turning gaming into a global phenomenon that makes more money than Hollywood (Nintendo did that alone in 1992 apparently). And it even claimed that THE goal (as if there can only be one) of video games is to tell stories. And it didn't even mention Tetris! It gave me a lot of material to write about since it's such a different documentary subgenre than King of Kong, but information-wise it was failure city. But it did introduce me to the fun fact that war games are over 50% of the games published in America, or at least they were when these interviews took place.
What are your favorites? Are they online?
They don't need to have had a theatrical release, as long as they're non-fictional pieces trying to document some sort of truth, or attack an idea of truth, or play with an idea of truth.
