Outfest 2023: Break the Game
Outfest 2023For many, the online world has provided a new outlet for communication and connection. Typically found by those who face social anxiety and have trouble connecting to individuals in real life, this has been documented as being an incredibly helpful and safe space. Naturally, this concept has found its way into cinema with documentaries such as Joe Hunting's We Met in Virtual Reality attempting to highlight just how powerful of a space online communities can be. Screening as part of the 2023 Outfest Film Festival, Jane M. Wagner's Break the Game also looks at the power of online spaces but through a very different lens. Rather than looking at a larger community, Break the Game centers around the Twitch streams of Narcissa Wright. Wright once was one of the most popular speedrunners, someone who tries to find shortcuts and tricks to beat video games as fast as possible, in the world. Things changed, however, when Wright publicly transitioned and began to receive more and more hate as a result.
The film finds Wright at arguably one of the lowest periods of her career as she struggles to gain even a few hundred viewers and is dealing with mental health difficulties which are only made worst by her struggling career and the constant hate she receives. In this sense, Break the Game is a film like no other when it comes to focus. It is clear from early on in the film that the internet is a toxic place for Wright, but the internet is also her entire life. It is her connection to others and to a feeling of success, at least it was when she was at the top of the world. Dissecting the character and heart of Wright leads to a naturally compelling look at fame and the emotions one can face when one feels their time in the spotlight has come to an end. Due to her vulnerability, the film also finds a unique look at isolation and the problems one can face when they rely on online connections as their main force of interaction. While not entirely toxic, Wright does manage to find a girlfriend through Twitch, Wright is open and honest about her feelings of isolation and loneliness with the connections she makes through being a creator on the internet not fulfilling her true desires as a human. The internet has been a constant force of debate. While some praise the internet as a grand place of possibility, some demonize the technology and share extreme absurd claims such as blaming it entirely for rises in violence and mental illness. Without falling into either of these extremes, Break the Game successfully finds a nuanced look at online connection with authentic highlights of both the good and bad.
While these thoughts create profound and poignant moments throughout the film, they are inconsistent, to say the least. Break the Game is told almost exclusively through archival footage of Wright's streams with a specific focus given to the time she spent playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and trying to achieve a world record speed run of the game. While the editing of this gimmick by Taylor Levy is strong enough, this provides an inherently limited look at Wright's life at the time. With no interviews or narration to help shine more insight into Wright's mind at the time and only the ability to see what Wright publicly shares in her time streaming which only takes up a portion of her life, following the narrative of Wright can prove to be a challenge. The audience is only given half the pieces to the puzzle and is expected to be able to naturally understand the complex ebbs and flows that Wright goes through. This is not a necessarily intuitive process to follow, however, and the audience naturally has to fill the gaps with assumptions which causes a disservice to the story being told. The film also does a rather poor job highlighting the lower mental points of Wright's journey that sees genuine actions of self-harm and crisis, emotions and moments that should be carefully handled and delivered.
This messy nature of storytelling makes the film's thesis hard to fully appreciate or contextualize. While there are memorable moments and themes throughout the film, it never feels like the film can truly sink its teeth into one of these concepts and find a moment of true revelation. The biggest closure comes from Wright's journey of coming to terms with the fact that the internet cannot provide the happiness she is looking for, but even this is a rather basic conclusion that never expresses the deeper concepts at play in this decision. The audience can put together a more meaningful understanding of these events by looking at what the film implicitly provides, but the film's refusal to create these connections for itself is a clear wasted opportunity.
Within Break the Game is an incredibly important and needed conversation surrounding internet culture, but the film sadly fails to take full advantage of this conversation and live up to its own potential. While the audience can still engage and put together the pieces enough to come away with a basic understanding of what is brewing within the feature, poor choices in filmmaking and narrative will make this a far more difficult process than it actually should be.
