henke on 21/3/2014 at 17:17
Who knew Valve had the chops to make a documentary, and a good one at that? :D I've never played Dota2, and I couldn't care less about it, but that's no impediment to enjoying this doc. Valve does a wonderful job of getting you involved in the personal stories of these gamers. What their backstories are. What they have to prove. What makes them tick. Once you know what each one has riding on this tournament it makes the competition that much more captivating, and leads to some very emotional moments towards the end. A special mention also needs to go to the beautiful Source Filmmaker-created dramatisations of some of the more pivotal moments of the tournament.
Anyway, watch it! It's good, it's free, and you can watch the whole thing without even leaving this thread because I'm embedding it below!
[video=youtube;UjZYMI1zB9s]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjZYMI1zB9s[/video]
ToolHead on 23/3/2014 at 11:51
I have very little knowledge of and zero interest in DOTA, yet found this quite interesting. It's a shame though they didn't attempt to go behind the scenes at EHOME instead of lazily portraying them as this inhuman gaming collective with an obnoxious manager.
henke on 23/3/2014 at 13:57
Hah yeah, it feels like EHOME is set up as the Cobra Kai of this story. But there's also something admirable in how ruthlessly efficient and uncompromising they are. They're not there to play games or fuck around. At one point I believe the manager said that if they get the silver medal they're trashing it at the airport. It's gold or nothing for those guys.
ToolHead on 24/3/2014 at 08:45
True. Still, it would be interesting to get a glimpse of the real, human hopes and aspirations behind the RRRAAAARRRWEWILLKILLYOUALLWEAREINVINCINBLEALLYOURBASEAREBELONGTOUS facade. They probably aren't ALL evil through and through. ;-)
demagogue on 24/3/2014 at 09:36
Maybe there's a marketing angle behind it. The idea would be they're targeting specific demographics -- Americans, Europeans, and the Non-big-3 Asians that know English -- so they'd want it in English & following the persons they did. They don't have to sell it to Chinese & maybe translating is costly and counterproductive(?). The main punchline I got from it generally (which would speak to the target countries) is don't worry what your parents say, here's a good case for spending all day gaming, and don't worry that you don't have a support group in your country yet; It's coming.
But it could also be as simple as they Chinese team didn't give them permission so they could keep their secrets & not crack the unbreakable-juggernaut reputation they're going for with sob stories, whereas the persons they did follow looked like they wanted to give confessionals as much as the doc wanted to hear them.
In any event, whatever the purpose, which I don't doubt is part commercial, the human interest stories behind it were still very real and I'm happy they decided to focus on that and, except for the blurb towards the end, not make it only a glorified commercial. Actually reminds me of those Olympic retrospectives they do.
I think a lot of if not most people that are very self-driven to excel at any sport or game have serious demons driving them that make for irresistible human interest stories.
