Kevin shares his thoughts on the direction and intention of The Raid documentary film

Hey all!

Having seen a lot of responses to the film by now, I thought I’d put out a few brief comments to address some of the questions I have seeing around the web:

So why allow the use of coarse, “-ist” language in this documentary when I’m trying to represent the experience of online gaming to people who don’t appreciate it? Doesn’t that make us look like awful human beings?

Let me just say up front: I love gamers. I think there is so much happening in the online gaming space that is under appreciated and devalued. However, I didn’t take up this project to create illusions of the truth. This film is quite literally a documentary. I filmed three months of MB’s raid progression, took that content and filtered it for important issues to highlight and discuss. The issue of language was a huge part of that. I dedicate a whole section of the film to try and unpack the reasons why individuals, in a virtual space, can feel strangely empowered to speak in a way they never would in public. If you don’t see it (and hear it), how can you believe it?

I realize that there are communities who don’t participate in this kind of coarse behavior online, but that is not true of MB and, quite honestly, it is not true of most online communities I have been a part of. Instead of filtering this issue and misrepresenting the experience, I attempted to unpack it and raise questions about why this kind of interaction takes place.

This whole thing looks acted. I thought this was supposed to be a documentary?

It’s not acted. What you hear and see of the guild’s progression (outside of the in-game cinematics) is 10-man, Heroic progression when it was happening during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. That was the entire point of the film. I wanted to capture the experience of “downing bosses” for the first time in a challenging environment. Every boss kill you see in the film was the very first Heroic kill the team experienced. The film would be entirely soulless otherwise.

The reason we had to capture the cinematics outside of progression was because there was no way we could possibly do it in real time. The guild had to play a man down so that I could be in the raid to film. It is impossible to play a man down while attempting to progress through Heroic raids when they are relevant. Even getting FRAPs footage during this time was challenging because people were recording webcams at the same time they were playing the WoW client. Adding FRAPs on top of that is something most normal computers is far from capable of. However, all the UI footage you see is taken during the actual progression. Again, I would have it no other way.

I will keep adding to this post as I find more questions that feel appropriate to answer, or feel free to post them in the comments below. Thanks for your consideration of the film!

Warmest regards,

Kevin M. Johnson