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Earlier this year I wrote about a Gran Turismo film produced by Sony, and now we have a movie about the competitive gaming phenomenon Dota 2 made and distributed by its creator, Valve. This is typical of the self-sufficient Seattle outfit, which always prefers to do things its own way; this is the studio that built its own digital distribution network rather than trust anyone else to do it, after all. But it's also part of a wider trend. There's quite a lot of documentary film being made about gaming at the moment, but a troubling amount of it is commissioned and bankrolled by games companies themselves, or by the gaming community on Kickstarter. Most of the projects are well-meaning and made with love, but they can't help but carry an agenda. They come not to examine gaming, but to praise it. As entertaining as these films can be, by default, they aren't real journalism.In the case of Free to Play, Valve's agenda does at least extend beyond making its game look good (although animated scenes and specially reconstructed game footage make the matches far more attractive and exciting to watch than Dota 2 ever could be, to an uninitiate at least). The film profiles three top Dota players - the Ukrainian Danil "Dendi" Ishutin, the American Clinton "Fear" Loomis and Benedict "hyhy" Lim from Singapore - and follows them through the International tournament Valve hosted in Cologne in 2011. In doing so, it seeks to humanise the players and legitimise the world of eSports, which despite its massive popularity remains an insular and impenetrable demi-monde outside its east Asian heartlands - and which is still dogged by stories of corruption and exploitation.
As far as turning the players into human heroes goes, Free to Play is a big success. The three young men are awkward, charming and vulnerable, and the film fleshes them out with clear-eyed empathy and just the right amount of sentiment. It turns the image of the professional gamer from that of a taciturn, spotty, sporadically aggressive teen into something a lot less alienating to those outside the scene. For Ishutin, gaming is a refuge after a personal tragedy, a private place to rebuild something he's lost. Lim pines for an estranged ex-girlfriend, another Dota player, whom he hopes to win back with success in the tournament, as well as lifting the burden of his family's disappointment in him. Loomis is a classic underdog - "the Rocky Balboa of Dota", according to a friend - playing far from his European team-mates in rural Oregon, his old CRT monitor propped up on books on a desk he salvaged from scrap.
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