To make Knit’s Island, Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse, and Quentin l’Helgoualc’h spent almost 1,000 hours traipsing through the post-apocalyptic world of DayZ.
Originally released in 2013, DayZ is an online-only multiplayer computer game in which users must scavenge everything they need to survive in a place populated only by other players and hordes of zombies. The film is composed almost entirely of footage captured within the game environment from the first-person perspective of the avatar ‘cameraman,’ making the film like a direct cinema entry into the machinima genre. The filmmakers’ digital renderings navigate the terrain to interact with, interview, and document the antics of those who have crafted lives for themselves within this virtual realm.
In essence, it is a fascinating microcosmic cross-section of internet cultures, gaming communities, and broader social shifts in the increasingly online age. Some people they come across are just there to see the world burn; they come to the game to unwind by going around and killing other players. At one stage the cameraman asks a stranger not to shoot him, saying he’s just a documentarist and pacifist, but he is gunned down anyway. Just prior to that, a member of one particularly violent faction had questioned whether an in-game day is really a day if nobody has been murdered. Others are somewhat more philosophical and reflective on the role this virtual life plays in their real lives and why people are drawn to it.
One such character is ‘Reverend Stone’, one of the leaders of what is effectively a Stetson-toting religious cult in the game world called The Church of Dagoth. He is one of the first people the filmmakers ask explicitly about the boundaries between the game and real life, and while he and his followers are unequivocal in their assertion that the game is just that, he also describes the sensation of adventures they undertake together taking on the form of real memories, “as if it really happened.” As they head off together again, like a posse across the plains, Reverend Stone warbles the opening lines of Waylon Jennings’ You Ask Me To and wonders aloud whether, were there to be a genuine societal collapse like the one depicted in DayZ, this crew would come together in the real world to get through it. They may all be playing, but the connections they are creating feel somewhat more than incidental.
Another couple that they speak to – who are, in the real world, sat together at home with their children asleep upstairs – travel around the game together. While they are equally insistent about the separation of game and real life, they also make interesting points about the blurring lines between the two. The woman, who calls herself ‘Slugmite’, recalls growing up in rural Australia and likens the game to allowing her access to the outdoorsy way of life no longer has access to living in Berlin. Her partner, ‘Macro’ on the other hand speculates about the improvements in the graphic qualities of games and shares the concerns he harbours about his children’s view of “what is interesting in the world being usurped by virtual reality.”
One thing that all the characters they meet agree on is the game’s role as a form – in very different ways – of escapism. One player, who is logged on from the slopes of Table Mountain in South Africa, enjoys the way that DayZ, in particular amongst other similar games, is a social experiment and a place within which people can discover their true – darker – selves by doing things that wouldn’t be acceptable in the real world without the horrifying consequences. In other instances, people probe at the game’s limits, like Slugmite and Macro going in search of what they call “the underworld,” a glitch in the game that allows them to peer beneath the constructed landscape into the void. Another group treks for hours into the desert-like wilderness at the map’s edge where strange anomalies abound.
You can’t escape your life, though, observes Reverend Stone – who in the final moments of Knit’s Island reveals his real name as Frank. A closing montage of live-action images, the views from the windows of various players, reinforces that point without undermining the outlet that our online avatars give us to exist beyond the confines of our everyday selves.
Directors, screenplay, cinematography: Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse, Quentin l’Helgoualc’h
Producer: Boris Garavini
Editing: Nicolas Bancilhon
Sound: Mathieu Farnarier, Marc Siffert
Distribution: Square Eyes
Venue: DOK Leipzig (International Competition Animated Film)
In French, English
95 minutes
