All Work All Play
Whilst the phrase ‘all work, all play’ might sound like a picnic, it’s actually not such a paradise as it may seem to be. All Work All Play is a documentary about the evolution of eSports, where it began and where it currently stands now. The documentary aired last Tuesday, in more than 466 cinemas in 28 different countries all over the world. Nonetheless, things were slightly different than expected.
This live event started off with a small introduction of what to expect, followed by a 2 vs 2 StarCraft match immediately after. It was quite confusing why the event started off with the match, instead of the documentary, as the event was also directed at those who were not that familiar with the eSports scene. Nonetheless, the organizers did an effort to present us the unreleased Archon mode for the coming expansion, Legacy of the Void. This new mode will allow two players to control the same characters/buildings/race at the same time. Overall, this ensures more action throughout the match. After the short match, which lasted roughly around 20 minutes, the documentary finally kicked off.
All Work All Play starts off with the evolution of normal sports throughout the last 100 years, where new sports were idolized and women’s teams came to life. The fun montage was swiftly followed by scenes of reporters making a laughingstock out of ‘people watching other people playing games’. The latter is also the source of inspiration of the fairly lengthy documentary. The last few years the ‘eSports’ scene has been growing exponentially, at least in Europe and North America, as South Korea was already a country that has been embracing eSports for a long time now. Due to this, they often dominate many international tournaments, as eSports is nearly as common there as normal sports.
Whilst the buildup of the documentary was quite interesting, we felt it was also a bit of advertising for the ‘American’ teams, as for some reason, more than half of the documentary showed the careers of Cloud 9, a North American team. That being said, it was not truly bad, but their qualifying rounds were dragged out too much, especially seeing they lost, in the first round, of the actual world tournament.
The creator of the documentary stated he directed the documentary to those who have no experience with eSports, in order to show them that not everything is – all work, all play. Nonetheless, with the documentary being more than half of the amount of its length being about the qualifiers and tournament, it would have been great if some more basics were explained. The overall quality was great, especially when getting to know some of the ‘pro players’ a bit better. Whilst these ‘gamers’ have a high income, they also sacrifice a lot of their personal lives for their teammates. It’s not easy to get to the top, and it’s even harder to remain there.
After the documentary, the live feed continued with a few afterthoughts, extra information and a bit of Q&A. The questions were posed through Twitter but sadly only around three questions were actually handled, due to the very limited time.
Conclusion
Even though some aspects could have been handled a bit differently, the documentary was the highlight of the live event. It would have been a bit better if the StarCraft II match was shown after the documentary, but it was fun to see a live match on the big screen. Overall a fairly decent kickoff for the coming eSports events in the theatres. We’re curious to see how the Counter-Strike event will be handled the 23rd of August.
All Work All Play,
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[…] we viewed All Work All Play we saw that you had to sink in many hours into your game of choice to make it big. It was clear […]