Reflection 1: Ethnography & Our Documentary

In the King of the Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, the filmmakers did a variety of things that portrayed Steve Weibe and Billy Mitchell in a somewhat negative manner. Throughout the documentary, Billy Mitchell was consistently portrayed as the bad guy, in part because of how he acted in general, but also because of what footage of Billy the filmmakers decided to utilize. On the other hand, Steve Weibe is portrayed as a relatively hopeless grown adult that fails not matter what he tries, which is not entirely true. Steve is portrayed as hopeless when he loses Donkey Kong to Billy Mitchell, which makes it seems as though he has never amounted to any success throughout his entire life. Furthermore, once Steve begins training to compete in Donkey Kong, he is continuously shown ignoring his children and his family to play the game. He is shown playing Donkey Kong without pause as he young son begs for him to help him in the bathroom. This makes Steve appear as though he values a video game more than he does his own children, which is not a good way to depict the subject of the documentary.

When filming and editing our documentary, it will be of the utmost importance that we do not portray any of our interview subjects in a negative manner, be intentionally or unintentionally. Since we are studying the League of Legends gaming club, certain audiences with preconceived notions of “gamers” might not be particularly receptive to a documentary about a video game. Therefore, when introducing each interview subject, we should provide contextual information about other activities that the LoL players participate in, so as to engage and include the largest number of audience members possible.

Reflective: League of Legends Community, does anyone can become a member of this?

     A community is a social unit that shares the same interest and common. League of Legends is also a community. But is it possible that people do not play this game can also become a member of the group.
     According to the data from Riot Games, there are 32 million active players (which are those accounts have been played at least once a month). LOL is the most popular video game in the world. Still, there are lots of people who does not play this game. Can they also become a part of this community? I believe this is also one of the purpose of our blog-- to fit people into this community who has never played this game before but still understand the terms or dialog that will show later in our blogs and videos.
     Most people who become a part of this community is by playing the game because as a player, you are a part of this game. Every player shared the same common--which is to defend their base and destroy the other team's base, and the most important of all is to have a good time. By having this common, people keep start matches over and over again. However, not all the people I have meet before enjoy this game, or get board after a certain amount of time that has already put into this game. It is hard to classify these people a part of the LOL community but still they understand the consept of the game. I believe with our hard work anyone can understand this game and also by not become a part of the community but still enjoy what this game is about.

Process: Week 1

In our first week of filming, we successfully developed a detailed plan for shooting all the necessary footage for our documentary. We have all of the camera equipment that we need to film but we had to rent a tripod from the iTap desk in the library, to stabilize the camera during interviews. First we are planning to individually interview two people who have never before played League of Legends about what they think of the game and people who play it. During the League of Legends club meeting next Sunday, we are going to capture the remaining interviews as well as the majority of our footage. There we will interview both the President and Vice President of the club, in order to understand how exactly the group functions as a discourse community. We will also record wide angle shots of the room where the meetings are held, as well as individual game play footage of different players. We also hope to interview two members in a non-officer position to attain a viewpoint of the community different than those of the club's leaders.

We plan to use exciting and informative League of Legends game play footage to transition between interviews throughout the documentary. As a result, we are trying to determine how to best screen capture a large amount of game play footage, without sacrificing video quality. Thus far, we have been unsuccessful converting already recorded footage files to file that can be read by iMovie.

Process: Week 1

This week is the first week of our documentary. We had a good plan for gaining gameplay footage from League of Legends as well as getting footage of people playing the game and outside opinions from people who both know about the game and do not play, and from people who do not know about the game. Our plans did not work out too well due to our organizer losing his cell phone before we set our meeting times up. Despite this setback we should be able to get footage during the week and submit our two hours of raw footage before Friday without too much trouble. We will then film the League of Legends club meeting the following Sunday, with all of this footage obtained we should have just about everything we need as far as raw footage for this project.

Aside from our setbacks I feel that our plans for our process are solid. We should have well over three hours of footage following the meeting we attend. At that point one of the hardest parts of the process will be simply refining three hours of raw footage into a three to five minute documentary. Considering that transitions and interviews are going to be incorporated, it feels that there will hardly be any time for substance in the documentary, and I believe that making it interesting and informative will be one of the major challenges of this project.

Reflective: League of Legendends players, is 32 million just a number?

     There is a question in my mind after we created this blog for the League of Legends Case Study. Why is this game so popular? As you know, this blog is for the "case study" for LOL (League of Legends in short) and the community this game creates. Which we are talking about 12 million people worldwide play the game everyday and about 3 million people probably playing at this minute according to NBC news.com. Which makes this game the most played video game in the world.

Check out League of Legends website for more information of how popular this game is.

      A lot of people may not understand how this game has such attractive. But being a player like myself for more than two years have slice more understanding than the people who never played the game before. I believe as a multilayer online battle arena, LOL is the best and funnest game that has been created in this genre. Why Riot Games become so success in this game? You have to ask them yourself. But there is one point that can not be doubt, the impressive number of people who is playing this game right now.

Reflective 1: Ethnographic

Ethnographic writing is a writing style that focuses on groups of people. This type of writing can be very influential to the people who are studied. The author may want to convey certain points so that the situation is altered. In other words the author can directly affect the people in the study. If the author gives a contorted view on a person, the person may read this and is persuaded to think another way.

The documentary that my group is making is studying the League of Legends club. Our documentary is going to be using ethnographic writing. We will be looking into the club and study how they operate. We will be doing interviews to try and get information. The way we use these interviews will create a certain distinction with the club. Creating the best description of the group is the hardest thing to do. We don't want our audience to get the wrong impression. If we did this the club is going to be distraught. Ethnographic writing has the ability to label groups as one thing when they actually may be another. If you don’t know exactly what you are talking about you may insult others. If we did this the club is going to be distraught. We will try and interview different types of people in the club so we can decipher what their true ideals are. We are going to try and not take any sides so that everyone is pleased. Ethnographic writing is very prevalent in documentaries and either creates a positive or negative response.

Reflective 1: Ethnography & Our Community

This week in class we read a writing from Kahn. He talks about ethnography, which is not something that I had explicitly heard about before. To an extent, ethnography is common sense; don't portray communities negatively when you do a work about them, do your best to not offend anyone. It is more complicated once you go beneath the surface, however. For example, our documentary is going to be going up on the internet, which makes it available for anyone to see. This means that we need to make sure our work is not offensive to the Purdue League of Legends club, as well as making sure to make it inoffensive to potential viewers.

There is also the concept of imperial and colonial critiques. The imperial critique is likely the one that is preferable for us to use for our project. This is where we actually interact with the community and try to get to know them a bit during the process, hopefully in this process we will somehow leave the community better than we found it, either directly or not. This could be accomplished by actual interaction, or by their viewing of the documentary. Colonial critiques are not as helpful for anyone, this would be if we went in and filmed the community without interacting with them at all. Colonial critique is like the silent observer, this does not help the community or you at all as you do not interact with the community so no one involved gains anything from the process.

This gives us a lot to consider as we need to make our documentary entertaining, informative, inoffensive, and hopefully while doing all of this we have learned something about the community and helped the community gain something.

Reflective: Notes on interacting with the community

Recently, we were assigned to read a paper by Seth Kahn, titled "Putting Ethnographic Writing in Context." His article has some very good points that our group should follow or put to use when dealing with the community we are filming.

First of all is to establish a good trusting relationship between us and the community we are studying. This not only makes the filming process go smoothly but also ensures that their answers and actions would be more natural as they will be comfortable with us around.

Secondly, we should be considerate and protect the identity of the people we interview at all times. The people we interview does have a right to choose which information about themselves they wish to disclose. This why it is very important to include them in the process of making the documentary to avoid accidentally exposing private information and also not misrepresent participants in the documentary.

Lastly, we should also avoid the colonial problem which is filming them for the sake of getting good grades then "leaving the cultures in the same conditions we found them". Participants should receive some reciprocity in return for helping us with our project which could be publicity. Hopefully once our documentary is open to the public, the club will be exposed to potential members who are also passionate about playing LOL and will join the club.

These points are all very basic but at the same time very important as well and must be followed at all times when filming them.  Can't wait for the day to meet them in person! :D

Process: Introduction

For those of you who have no idea what this blog is about, I suppose this post could serve as a form of introduction.

About the blog:

The purpose of this blog is to provide information on the filming process of a documentary about Purdue League of Legends (LOL) club's community and their characteristics that differentiate them from other clubs and societies. There will be a post by each member of the group weekly regarding the filming process so stay tuned!

As this blog is made for an educational purpose (English class assignment), there will also be a post by each member of the group weekly regarding previous academic materials studied and how it relates to the filming process or documentary itself.

About the documentary:

The LOL club meets on weekends to get together and play which is when we will be going to interview and film them. Footage will be taken using two separate cameras and will be edited using iMovie. There will also be some game play footage that can be recorded directly from the game through a separate client.

The documentary hopes to capture and highlight certain things that make the LOL club unique. One of the factors has already been provided by Elliot who states that the language they use is different in context than other communities. Other factors will be explored further as we progress through the filming process.

Lastly, for those who don't know what LOL is, LOL "is a multiplayer online battle arena video game developed and published by Riot Games for Microsoft word"  ─ taken from Wikipedia. 

Feel free to follow this blog to stay up to date with the filming process by simply clicking follow on the right hand side of the page! : )

Edit: This blog is made by students with no experience in blogging so please overlook any mistakes we make!

Process 1: Planning

We are still in the planning phase of the League of Legends Club documentary. We have found when the club meets and where. They meet on Saturdays and this is when we will go in and film them. We won’t be able to get any filming done this weekend, because the group does not meet for some reason. As of right now we plan on filming the first club meeting two Saturdays from now. We also won’t have to check out any cameras for the film. Two of our members already have sufficient cameras and are willing to let the group use them. The fact that we have two is awesome, now we can get multiple angles when we shoot. We have not interacted with the group yet so we really don’t know any of the unique things about it yet. Some things about the group are self-explanatory though. For example you join the club because you have a keen interest in the game League of Legends.  We can already tell that this group has a very unique language that it uses. Instead of saying League of Legends we just use the acronym LOL. If someone were to look at this they would probably think that we are saying laugh out loud instead we are talking about the League. So if you are reading through our blog and see LOL don’t think we are joking. Throughout this documentary I am going to try and define all the words that are unique to the group so you do not get confused.