Break the Game: Jane M. Wagner’s Award-Winning Portrait of a Trans Gamer

First-time director Jane M. Wagner just won an award at Tribeca 2023 for breaking the rules.  Or, as the TFF press release puts it, for taking “innovative risks.”  Her astonishing screenlife doc, Break the Game, explores digital socializing; it will resonate with anyone who has ever shared anything online.  Moving, absorbing, taut and intimate, it confronts timely subjects—gaming, social media, mental health, trans visibility—all through a focus on a single gamer.  Prepare to be transfixed.

More from the Tribeca press release:  “Within the sterile confines of an electronic universe, the director reveal[s] the critical core of human connection, kindness and growth, which we can shorthand as the real meaning of love.” 

In other words, Break the Game is one of the most original, skillfully-crafted movies featured in this year’s festival.  It’s also supremely relatable.  The film follows Legend of Zelda speedrunner Narcissa Wright and her tumultuous experiences with internet fame after she comes out as transgender.  Co-starring is Alex Eastly, aka D_Gurl:  a transgender Twitch streamer-turned-musician who becomes Wright’s love interest … and delivers key insights into their online perils.   

Some quick context for non-gamers.  A speedrunner sets out to complete certain video games in world record-timing, usually by exploiting in-game physics.  It’s a lot like landing a skateboard trick—nailing an intricate combination of moves by reframing the limits of a physical space—and it’s a lot better when there’s an audience.  In Break the Game, our gamers are also Twitch-streamers:  they record and publish live videos of gameplay with their own online commentary for a largely anonymous fanbase.

For fellow gamers, Narcissa Wright is basically an Olympian.  She rose to fame for her world record completion of The Legend of Zelda:  The Ocarina of Time.  In 2014, she finished the sprawling adventure in a jaw-dropping 18 minutes and 10 seconds.  In 2020, she reduced this to an astounding 8 minutes and 12 seconds.  Fans also love her for her savvy commentary:  she explains her speedrunning exploits in professorial detail.

When Wagner first came across Wright’s Twitch stream, she was blown away. 

“I was moved by Narcissa's openness, by the passion of the community that formed around her.  Even when she was having a hard time, she seemed less alone because she was sharing her story.”   

For better or worse, Wright gives a lot to her audience.  While streaming her gameplay, she shares everyday banalities. In one sequence, she naps onscreen while her fans watch. 

“I saw this as the future of media, of relationships, of how we communicate with one another,” Wagner enthuses.  “I'm the same age as Narcissa, and I’ve never seen my digital life reflected onscreen.  So once I started telling this story, I couldn’t stop.”

Break the Game follows Narcissa Wright from her late 20’s into her early 30’s.  After introducing the young streamer’s celebrity in an early montage, complete with meme compilations and merch-wearing fans, the film reveals Wright’s albatross:  when she came out as transgender in 2015, her transphobic fanbase turned vicious—but instead of dropping out, she persisted.  

“What struck me is how much she believed in the power of the internet,” Wagner remembers.  “Even though she was already being harassed, she was certain that if she just did what she does so well, which is break games, that that's what would matter.” 

Starting in 2017, with Wagner documenting the journey, Wright begins her comeback.  Her goal is to seize the world record for another beloved Zelda game, Breath of the Wild.

The rub, of course, is that this is about Wright’s identity:  her mental well-being as a trans woman and her livelihood as a professional streamer.  Both are inextricably linked to her fanbase.  How does Wagner explore this?  In one of Break the Game’s many clever comparisons, Zelda’s arch-villain—the swirling malaise Calamity Ganon—stands in for the insidious hive mind that looms at the end of Wright’s quest.

But viewers, fear not:  Break The Game is by no means a trauma dump.  Wagner & Co. tell Wright’s story with careful urgency, but also with deep affection. The film balances pain with hope.  

“As someone who has grown up online, I feel like there are so many depictions of digital life that are overly sensationalized or critical,” Wagner explains. “With Break the Game, I set out to make a much more nuanced depiction.  It can be amazing when you make online connections that transcend the screen.”

Suspenseful, even funny, Break the Game runs the gamut of emotions that anyone might experience in a web-based community—including lighter, genuinely touching moments, like Wright’s budding romance with Alex Eastly, aka D_Gurl. 

“D_Gurl wasn't a part of the film at all when I first started,” Wagner admits, “So that was quite the surprise.  And her inclusion adds a much-needed message of humanity.”

At the start of the film, Wright’s social life takes place exclusively online—she even relies on meal replacement formula in order to keep gaming—until Alex Eastly, aka D_Gurl, slides into her chat.  “I found Narcissa's stream just as I was starting my own transition, so her story resonated with me,” Eastly explains.  “It was clear that she was immensely talented and highly ambitious.  And she was a good sport when I gave her a hard time.”

Precious few films explore online courtship as successfully as Break the Game.  In Eastly and Wright’s playful back-and-forth chats, Wagner’s film captures the heartwarming spirit of a quality RomCom:  instant nostalgia for Millenial/Gen Z viewers who grew up texting their crush. 

These chats also reveal more than the power of human connection.

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For starters, Break the Game’s digital content offers valuable creative insights.  Because the film’s narrative is told almost entirely via video streams, it poses a unique challenge.  As children learn on adolescent playdates, watching someone else play a video game isn’t fun.  So watching someone else watch a third party play a video game sounds like the death of cinema—right?

“So many people told me that someone’s experience on a computer couldn’t be cinematic,” Wagner sighs.  “For a long time, Break the Game featured a lot of verité footage. I did whatever I could to film Narcissa in the real world, I interviewed her followers, I tried to make a more traditional documentary.  Eventually, I realized that I was betraying the true nature of the film.  I was afraid of embracing the material.” 

Wagner’s instincts paid off.  “It took a while for me to trust myself as a director,” Wagner continues.  “But slowly, I realized that leaning into Narcissa’s world could actually work—but in a way that I think people aren't used to or haven't experienced yet.” 

Six years in the making, Wagner’s documentary had no shortage of material.  “All those chats in the film are real,” Wagner reveals. “I'm lucky that Narcissa saved so much of her archived streams; that gave me the raw ingredients to tell her story authentically.  One of my deepest ambitions was to make it feel like we were truly in her world.”

Wagner directed, produced, co-edited and co-DP’d the film.  While it was a huge learning curve, it also led to cohesive storytelling and familiarity with the subject.

“There were 3,000 hours of footage to go through,” Wagner laughs ruefully.  “It would have been very prohibitively expensive to bring someone on from the beginning and watch all that.  In my past life as a TV producer I’d only done basic editing, I had no experience with sound.  On Break the Game, I learned everything.  I think I was able to capture intimate footage with Narcissa as a result, because it was often just me in the room.  She felt really comfortable.  And wearing so many hats ended up giving me a mastery of the material, which I think helped the film have a vision.”

Wagner speaks of her film like an incredulous parent.

“It definitely took a long time for the film to figure out what it was,” she laughs.  “I always wanted to root it in Narcissa's live stream, but when I started filming, nobody outside of the gamer audience really knew about streaming.”  

In other words, Wagner didn’t let anyone talk her out of it; she made Break the Game for herself as the audience.  In the process of honoring her original intent, others began to connect with the material too.  As her edit progressed, her rough-cut was accepted into several prestigious industry labs, including the True/False Rough Cut Retreat, IDA's Docu-Club, the Sundance Music & Sound Design lab.   

“I got feedback.  I got consulting editors who came on to help the process.  I had to learn to trust my instincts, but I also had to learn when to collaborate.”  Much of this took place during Covid:  a virtual tour-de-force where co-editors Nina Sacharow and Stephanie Andreou helped Wagner make magic.  “I want to shout out Nina Sacharow who came on at an early phase, had a baby and then came back at the very end,” Wagner grins.  “We were finally able to work together in person over the last month of post, and we developed a shared language.  Her work was invaluable.” 

“After Covid, we finally got to do test screenings, and I could tell people were engaged.  Eventually, the verité footage just kind of melted away, and what we left in the film felt powerful and intentional.”

Together, Wagner and her collaborators find clever ways to reflect life as a streamer by exploring in-game thrills and emotions.  Among the film’s best sequences are those that illustrate Wright’s emotional journey via her in-game adventures.  One genuinely suspenseful sequence follows Wright as she tries to nail a speedrunning glitch—Breath of the Wild’s stasis-launch—which exploits the game’s ragdoll physics to send her avatar, Link, hurtling through the air.  Other sequences are simultaneously elemental and brilliant: a poignantly timed “Start New Game” screen; a real-world drone shot that mirrors in-game geography; a montage of Wright arguing with trolls as she clobbers Bokoblin enemies in Zelda.

As a whole, Break the Game builds toward an emotional crescendo that gives Wright’s whimsical in-game efforts real-world stakes.  Her virtual battles echo her real ones, and vice-versa. 

Yet these comparisons never feel on-the-nose. 

It's commonplace for documentaries to rely on animation where footage is lacking; here, vivid graphics ice the cake of a deeply compelling narrative.  In its final iteration, Break the Game combines archival footage—mostly from Wright’s gaming streams on Twitch—with delightfully whimsical animation.  Wagner employs a variety of techniques:  “screenlife” VFX supervised by Andrey Shu (who also worked on Searching, 2018); vibrant pixel art by Pat Ackerman, lovingly animated by Emily Wolver (in a similar vein to We Are Little Zombies, 2019); livestream commentary highlights like those seen in Spree (2023)—an anonymous mob that’s equal parts trolls, group-therapy, and Greek Chorus.  To know that these chats are all real doubles their impact.

In part, this film sings because of its mix of earnestness and meticulous attention to detail.  Instead of the self-conscious portrayal of being online that’s so common in current movies, Break the Game litters its superbly animated sequences with nostalgic Nintendo easter eggs.  In one pixelated montage, seasons pass outside of Wright’s bedroom as she grows up—and graduates from playing Zelda on the Nintendo 64 to the Wii to designing her own games, with her school bully written in as one of the bosses.

“It was very laborious,” Wagner laughs. “I think the instructions for all those graphics are probably hundreds of pages long, with tons of assets. But I think they feel very authentic.  And I’m glad I wasn’t working alone.” 

Wagner’s team also includes composers Jeffrey Brodsky and Jesse Novak, whose electronic score deftly incorporates a catchy acoustic song composed by Alex Eastly (aka D_Gurl) under the film’s credits.  Complete with pixel art depicting each collaborator, this delightful final sequence underscores Wagner’s intentional effort to make her collaborations as diverse as possible.

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But those are just the top layers.  Equally important, Break the Game is a bellwether for a growing cadre of stories about the mental health crises afflicting today’s youth.  As these issues gain urgency, both our ability to communicate them effectively as storytellers—and our responsibility to depict them carefully and authentically—are of paramount importance.

This is a large part of why Tribeca 2023 awarded Wagner the unusual—and prestigious—“New Documentary Director Special Jury Mention.”

Once we’re invested, Break The Game’s social conscience emerges.  This film is built not just to entertain, but to spread awareness—not via academic interviews and statistics but through visual ingenuity and empathy.  Instead of hammering an agenda, Wagner communicates complex ideas without superimposing opinions, probing humanity through one personal story. 

“I tried to avoid being overly didactic,” she explains, “to put you inside the stream as an audience member ...  which is how I engage with this material myself.  There are moments where you want to help, but you don't know what to do.  Sometimes you don’t even know if it’s okay to be watching.”

One example:  during a particularly traumatic moment in Narcissa Wright’s stream, anonymous commenters weigh in.  “I feel like we shouldn't be listening to this.”  Another chat user responds, “No, we need to hear.”  Questions like this engage the viewer directly:  we’re not just witness to Wright’s struggle, we’re participants. 

That said—Wagner certainly has opinions.  And hopes the film brings them to light.  “The parasocial relationships between creators and their audience is a big issue for mental health and identity in the digital world,” she warns.  “It’s not like a one-to-one relationship, it's more like 1.5 to one where the creator knows there's an audience watching but they don't know who they are specifically.  The film explores how that relationship can influence streamer behavior.”

At their worst, Wright’s anonymous viewers act entitled toward their content creator, ready to consume her like a product.  Nightmarishly, this commodification of being can feed into the streamer’s own decisions.  When your livelihood is linked directly to a horde of toxic fans, you may start to crowdsource life decisions from the wrong places. 

Most of us have been there—including Wagner. 

“Even people without big followings will make polls on Instagram saying ‘should I wear this, should I wear that’… but when you're a streamer, your audience is your income.  So there's no easy way to separate yourself from what these viewers want or think.  Your behavior is shaped by their opinions, good and bad.” 

Because of all this, the team behind Break the Game made specific efforts to treat its sensitive subject with care.  Throughout the filmmaking process, Wagner made sure that Wright led her own narrative, and above all felt safe.

“That was extremely important to me,” Wagner asserts.  “Even though it wasn’t the norm back in 2017 when I started the film.  Especially because, as a trans woman, Narcissa was clearly being marginalized, vilified.  When we first met up, I asked if she’d ever discussed any of this with a professional; she said, ‘Well, I saw a social worker and they just didn't understand my streaming life.’” 

Not a mental health expert herself, Wagner enlisted several advisors—Malikkah Rollins from Doc NYC; Courtney Knowles from the Jed Foundation; Blair Durkee from GLAAD—to help protect those both on-camera and off.  “I made sure that she had professionals helping her navigate the experience of watching herself during this really difficult time of her life—and that she knew she’d be able to see the film and weigh in before it was released.  We had an open forum for discussion.”

When it comes time for Break the Game to reach a wider audience, Wagner also plans to add an online list of resources for those who, like Wright, are living excessively digital lives—including Take This, a mental health advocacy organization that serves the needs of online gaming communities.

In the meantime, the best we can do is try to keep our mental health separate from our digital life—or at least not completely co-dependent. 

Eastly explains her own policy:  “I really try to keep the two separated.  The internet is a tool:  it can help you connect with like-minded people; it can bring you information about, in my case, unpacking dysfunctional family systems and narcissistic abuse; it can help you put your art out into the world.  I think where a lot of people trip up is thinking the internet can meet all of their emotional and social needs:  it can help, sure, but ultimately the kind of connection it brings is a poor facsimile of the real thing.”

As for Narcissa Wright, she chose not to attend Tribeca 2023.  As she told her director, “Being in the spotlight isn't good for me.  I really want to focus on my mental health and healing."   Instead of a public appearance, she wrote a note for Wagner to share with fans of the film: 

“What the film depicts has been an ordeal for me, but it also feels like a letting out of some of the emotions and misadventures that happened during that period of my life.  Jane has been a professional throughout the entire filming process, and the use of on-stream footage made the end result feel genuine.  I think what I need now is some space to find my footing in whatever endeavor comes next for me, whether that be a creative process, refining skills, or emotionally healing.  Thanks everyone who watched the film.”

The hope now is that Break the Game inspires others to share their stories, to embrace vulnerability and forge lasting connections.  After all, this film is a hero’s journey as primordial as the Zelda games themselves:  satisfyingly intuitive; easy to fall in love with; profoundly rewarding for those who take the time to pay attention. 

Trans creator Alex Eastly sums it up well:  “Break The Game shines a light on how readily and severely cis-heteronormative society will turn on queer people when it has the power of anonymity.  All too often, sane and healthy responses to untenable societal and material conditions—conditions which are often the direct, deliberate result of policy decisions by those in power—are dismissed as ‘mental illness.’  I just hope that this film will help people recognize how little social media platforms like Twitch do to protect their marginalized creators, and how important it is to have a strong support network completely separate from one's online community.” 

Now, it’s about breaking the system.

Break the Game is available for streaming on Tribeca At Home until July 2nd.