Knit's Island

The premise is simple: a group of filmmakers act as digital ethnographers conducting participant observation inside the survivalist video game DayZ, a modification of the first person shooter Arma 2, interviewing players and probing their relationships with both the game and the real world. The melancholic result is a kind of slow machinima that reflects the fragile boundary between “real life” and the virtual world.

Such an approach is only possible within the context of games as spaces of social gathering (or perhaps social exclusion?) on Web 2.0 platforms, where the tightly plotted storylines and enclosed worlds of single-player games are replaced by expansive multiplayer sandboxes with wide-ranging cartographies. In one segment of Knit’s Island, the filmmakers invite DayZ players they encounter to explore the possibility of “seeing” what lies beyond the boundaries of Chernarus (the game’s fictional country, modelled on the northern Bohemia region of the Czech Republic). Like a kind of digital pilgrimage, they almost never reach the “edge” of the game’s map—just as others in different games pursue similar quests: searching for the Far Lands glitch in Minecraft, or traversing the absolute end of the map in Grand Theft Auto V. What the filmmakers find instead are conversations with and between players about their existence inside and outside the game, and attempts to question the ontology of “real life”, which they have been reflecting on after hundreds of hours of playing and surviving in DayZ.

Mirroring a form of emergent gameplay that constantly shifts, depending on the relationship between player and world, Knit’s Island attempts to represent a durational performance in which the filmmakers strive to build relationships in a virtual environment—evident in how these relationships move from suspicion towards familiarity after more than 600 hours of play. Not as rigorous, nor seeking to be, as works of digital anthropology or game ethnography found in works such as Bonnie Nardi’s study of World of Warcraft in My Life as a Night Elf Priest (2010) or anthropologist Tom Boellstorff’s ethnography of Second Life in Coming of Age in Second Life (2015), the filmmakers instead here function as the driving force of the film’s narrative. The kind of documentary that uses its own methods to construct a fiction, the tone that emerges in Knit’s Island feels very much like a form of digital, survivalist, ethnofiction and “shared anthropology”, executed by a sort of “cyber Jean Rouch”.

In parallel with its contemporary machinima documentary, Grand Theft Hamlet (2024), Knit’s Island was also a work born during the pandemic. In the context of Knit’s Island, COVID-19 isolation leads to a contemplative bridge between game and real life, as within the game, as perhaps outside, the players themselves are in post-apocalyptic survival mode. Here, game space and game mechanics become crucial, especially in relation to spatial experience. In Grand Theft Auto, the map and spatial architecture are highly maximalist; auditory interaction between one player and another occurs in a general way, without a specific point of audition. This stands in stark contrast to DayZ, where players can speak directly from avatar to avatar with directional, spatialised sound. This has the effect of making the world feel far more immersive, as if one were entering a spatial environment inside the screen. It is the spatiality of this on-screen world that makes Knit’s Island feel, to me, like watching a nature documentary.