While waiting for lunch today, I chanced upon a weekly movie guide and saw that one of the titles was Dota (Nakakabaliw). Roughly translated, that means Dota (Drives [You] Crazy).
Thinking (and hoping) that it was some sort of joke, I checked it out and found this trailer. It’s in Filipino (Tagalog), but trust me when I say that you don’t really need subtitles to figure out most of what’s going on.
In case you can’t watch or were perhaps too emotionally scarred by the video, Dota (Nakakabaliw) was summarized by Rappler to be “the destructive story of lives ruined by Dota. A group of teenagers get into a series of misadventures stemming from their obsession with the online game.”
From the video, we can gather that it’s a story of a guy who was so obsessed with the game that he stopped going to school, got into a fight (with a keyboard and CPU tower), hit his head, and became a dazed, crazy (fruit-stealing) boy who was later found by his parents and love interest as he was dancing in the middle of a school gymnasium.
I don’t know anymore.
I could be wrong about some details of the story, but that doesn’t change the fact that the movie trailer is still another poorly-researched and misleading portrayal of Pinoy Dota. I’m no movie critic, but I’m a gamer, and I can tell you that this movie has done a horrible job of portraying gamers as people who throw system units at each other, or use a keyboard as a deadly weapon.
At the end of the day, I sincerely hope that this movie is a joke; that it’s satiric, and that I just reacted too soon to a late April Fool’s prank or something. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go play some actual Dota 2 to calm myself down.
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The Filipino media’s hate for gaming, and why that’s wrong
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