A group of creatives want to stage Hamlet. They go through the usual process of casting calls, costuming, set making, and such before putting on the show. What distinguishes this particular production is that all this is happening within Grand Theft Auto Online (GTA). Auditions are held in virtual nightclubs and offices, featuring one performer who recites from the Quran while using a frogman avatar. Costuming means selecting each user’s outfit from an in-game shop menu to find the most appropriate look for the Shakespeare character they play. The sets are found in spaces in Los Santos, the game’s vast re-creation of Los Angeles, such as an amphitheater modeled after the Hollywood Bowl or the top of a blimp. All this is happening when, at any time, hostile players and nonplayer characters (NPCs) might swoop in and kill the troupe.
Such are the travails captured in Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane’s Grand Theft Hamlet (2024), shot entirely inside GTA. The directors are also participants in the play, with Crane the director and star and Grylls a producer. They and the other actors speak over voice chat, and the film continually switches between the points of view of their various screen recordings. The film, which had UK, Ireland, and U.S. theatrical runs in January and releases on VOD on February 20, is the latest in a wave of documentaries that take such an aesthetic approach. Because video games have risen to cultural ubiquity alongside technological developments like live-streaming video and social media, these media are all tightly enmeshed. Playing a game is often no longer a solitary exercise but a social one, and we can understand games not as experiences separate from the “real” world but as an extension of it. Within that new paradigm, it makes sense that we’re seeing more documentaries explore game spaces as if they are physical ones.
Professional filmmakers and computer engineers alike recognized games’ potential as playgrounds for formal experimentation years before this trend. Chris Marker was famously a fan of Second Life, created the island Ouvroir within that metaverse, hosted tours of it through his own cat avatar, and documented such a tour in his 2010 short, Ouvroir, the Movie. The infamous “Leeroy Jenkins” meme, about a meticulously planned World of Warcraft raid gone disastrously wrong, is an early use of a game as a stage for a fictional comedy sketch (though for years, many believed the incident was real, and the video’s creators were playfully evasive about the subject).
One of the most fruitful uses of video games comes from machinima, a category of animation using game engines and assets as the clay with which to sculpt shorts, series, and more. Though the phenomenon has mostly been confined to the web, crossover hits have included the Halo-based comedy series Red vs. Blue (2003–2020), which was popular enough to get DVD releases and to be carried for a time by Netflix, and the 2006 “Make Love, Not Warcraft” episode of South Park, which seamlessly imagined the MMORPG as an organic part of the (animated) world of the characters—one in which they were engaged in a petty struggle with another player. Milan Machinima Festival, whose eighth edition is approaching, is entirely dedicated to these kinds of performances and films.
Over time, projects that use games as stages have grown in ambition. Though Grand Theft Hamlet emphasizes how the production of Hamlet it chronicles is the first ever in Grand Theft Auto, it is far from the first theatrical piece performed within a game. Celine Song staged Chekov’s The Seagull in The Sims 4 for the New York Theatre Workshop as part of its pandemic-restricted 2020 season. Years before the bestselling Chinese sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem got a glossy big-budget Netflix adaptation, in 2014 it was re-created in full by one user in Minecraft, doled out in installments on the Chinese video-sharing site Bilibili.
Theater is but a narrow slice of the broad world of live performance. From there, it isn’t a big conceptual leap to larger-scale happenings like concerts (though they pose their own logistical challenges). Increasingly, developers—especially those behind online multiplayer games—comprehend the potential of such events and are putting them on themselves. Most prominently, Epic Games has drawn millions to concerts hosted in Fortnite. Initially one of many pandemic-era measures to attract people starved for in-person entertainment, it persisted due to its success. (Other, more education-focused initiatives within the shooting-based game have proved more problematic.)
Films made in video games have often been restricted by the tools available within these respective games. Because of this, they have a good deal of formal overlap with the conventions of video game cutscenes. Game cameras are generally built to provide the best continual view of the action, and when employed to mimic cinematic conventions, they have often been a bit haphazard. Primarily built for swooping and panning, these cameras generally stick to wide shots. Close-ups can be awkward, especially considering the limitations that nonrealistic graphics have imposed on game characters’ ability to emote. Over time, games have sought to more faithfully imitate the look of “real” movies, though they are not always directed so thoughtfully.
When it comes to live performances within these games, control of point of view is left entirely to individual audience members, who use the same schemes of interaction that the game in question gives a player. It is here that a game can more successfully mirror the experience of attending a physical performance, letting an audience choose what details they notice and what they do and don’t pay attention to; this also rewards creators who construct these spaces with a thoughtful eye toward immersion.
Many independent creators, particularly video essayists, have taken advantage of such tools when crafting content for sites like YouTube and Vimeo. Their process of discovery here helped pave the way for the newer crop of feature-length documentaries. The millions of casual gamers who posted videos of themselves getting up to mischief on video-sharing sites have gradually built a vocabulary for a game-based cinematic language. There is a whole “cinema of fucking around,” exemplified by things like the Polygon YouTube series Car Boys and Monster Factory, which test the boundaries of vehicle simulators and character creators for comedic purposes.
Others investigate game spaces themselves, as well as the players. YouTuber Syrmor found success seeking human interest stories in VRChat, interviewing other players and posting videos of the conversations on YouTube. Watching a young person with a Kermit the Frog avatar confess their struggles with being bullied may at first be disorienting, but after a while, the interviews are deft enough to make adjusting to it rather easy. The channel Any Austin is more like a travel show, featuring in-depth explorations of aspects of different game worlds, like the rivers in The Legend of Zelda or the power lines in Grand Theft Auto. Seemingly a superficial, nitpicky concern, this is in fact a great ongoing project about how games emulate reality, and how the design shortcuts (rivers without sources, snow that exists as an animation layer rather than actual flakes falling down) are based on what we tend to pay attention to—or more often, don’t.
Artist Grayson Earle performed a similar investigation, also within Grand Theft Auto, but concerning character programming rather than environmental design. In his video essay Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other? (2021), Earle notices that police NPCs are never hostile to each other the way other character types are. He analogizes this to the real-world “blue wall of silence,” wherein law enforcement protects itself from outside accountability.
Critical investigations of game worlds are also the foundation of the collective Total Refusal, which stages guerrilla lectures in online games. For each piece, the collective members enter the games and expound on the topic at hand to both a live in-person audience and some in-game companions playing along online. The group has posted videos of many of these interventions on their website. Operation Jane Walk (2018) uses Tom Clancy’s The Division to discuss urban design through that game’s re-creation of New York City (the title refers to revered urban studies theorist and activist Jane Jacobs). How to Disappear (2020) discusses the history of military desertion within Battlefield V’s simulated World War II battleground. Not all their works are lecture pieces; Hardly Working (2022) is an essay that explicates labor relations by scrutinizing the programmed schedules of NPCs in Red Dead Redemption 2. Like in-game theatrical stagings, these lecture-performances subvert the ways these game worlds are constructed mainly as backdrops of violence, opening up new possibilities for interaction and critical engagement with the unspoken assumptions that undergird them.
These different tendencies have coalesced in the new decade, facilitating the recent wave of feature-length films within games. One breakthrough came with We Met in Virtual Reality (2022), in which director Joe Hunting used an in-game camera tool to navigate and film VRChat as if it were a physical space. Building on the work of creators like Syrmor, it fully incorporates the cinematic language of a reality-based documentary within a virtual setting, rather than being confined to screen recordings of whatever points of view a game offers during normal gameplay. This grounding element emphasizes the humanity of the characters, who talk about how they use VRChat as a haven to express their gender and sexuality in ways they can’t in their everyday lives, make connections more easily than they otherwise could, or simply imitate normalcy while quarantined amid the pandemic. Like the worldwide quarantine that spurred the project that became Grand Theft Hamlet, COVID-19’s continual presence in We Met in Virtual Reality suggests that the extended period in which millions were cut off from traditional human interaction was a major inflection point for this trend.
Infection is a theme in 2023’s Knit’s Island, set in the postapocalyptic online game DayZ. Filmmakers Ekiem Barbier, Quentin L’Helgouac’h, and Guilhem Causse travel to an island in the game where players don’t merely run and gun but purposefully try to immerse themselves in the tropes of zombie fiction like The Walking Dead, building communities and sometimes even embracing the personas of rapine scavengers or warlords. If their interviewees are discussing their real lives and emotions, then it’s only in a roundabout way; the film is a simulacrum of what a documentary in a postcivilizational wasteland could look like.
The physical and the virtual meld in The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (2024). Director Benjamin Ree tells the story of Mats Steen, who—because his muscular dystrophy severely limited his physical ability—spent much of the last 10 years of his short life playing World of Warcraft as the character Ibelin Redmoore. The film emphasizes the distinction between Steen’s physical and game experiences by maintaining a rigid formal approach in its interviews with his friends and family, which then opens up to a much more active camera during the machinima segments which re-create the experiences he had in World of Warcraft (adapted from his and other players’ chat logs). The strategy is particularly intriguing in how it marries the tropes of game-based cinema with older conventions of reenactment in documentary.
With so many shorts and features coming out, there’s still so much more artistic potential for these films to explore. Grand Theft Hamlet is terrific at conveying what it’s like simply to exist in an online game world, that surreal feeling of hanging out with friends in a mundane way within a fantastical setting. Against such a backdrop, the heightened logistical headaches they face (like falling off a blimp during a show) become all the funnier. The film is less convincing when it plays out seemingly staged arguments between Grylls and Crane over how the strained production is affecting their marriage. As more filmmakers test these waters and refine the techniques of capturing game-based experiences, they’ll surely find even more ways to capture human authenticity.
Livestreamed video games are already an everyday part of our culture; it seems only natural that documentaries made within games will become increasingly normalized in the years to come. Ibelin was shortlisted for this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, marking a new level of visibility for this burgeoning genre. With all these films releasing in the space of just a few years, building their own formal language as they go, it’s exciting to wonder what the game-based docs to come will bring us.
This piece was first published in the Spring 2025 print issue of Documentary, with the following subheading: Grand Theft Hamlet is the latest entry in the exciting development of films made in video games.
Dan Schindel is a freelance critic and full-time copy editor living in Brooklyn. He has previously worked as the associate editor for documentary at Hyperallergic.
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