“We’ve all had the experience of being prisoners of our own bodies,” says Blake Hunt, one of eight members of the world’s first all-quadriplegic esports team, the Quad Gods. “Video games are a place you’re allowed to escape from, and then it’s not so much about what you’re physically capable of doing, but what you’re capable of doing.”
Hunt and his teammates are at a memorial service in Central Park for Chris Scott, the gamer and former skydiving instructor who initially came up with the idea for the Quad Gods while undergoing treatment for his spinal cord injury. In a film packed with poetic reflections on what it means to live in a body that doesn't always work the way you want it to, Hunt's meditation on the power of games as a democratizing force, a form of physicality in and of itself, stands out to me as the central thesis of Quadruple Godswhich airs on Max on July 10. At a time when there is much to fear when it comes to technology, particularly emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, Quadruple Gods offers a refreshingly optimistic counternarrative of how these tools can level the playing field for people who are consistently left behind by society.
Quadruple Gods is a film that combines many films at once. It elegantly blends several classic documentary formats, such as sports, competition, and animation, but what ultimately makes it work is the fact that it paints vivid, humanizing portraits of its main characters. As a viewer, you are not confined to the confines of an esports competition. Hunt and his teammates, Richard Jacobs, Prentice Hall, and Sergio Acevedo, generously invite you into their lives as they navigate New York City (via wheelchair, car, and bus), drive their kids to school, date, and do their best to navigate a world that, in Hunt’s words, “isn’t really designed for us.”
I loved Quadruple Godswhich was a passion project for director Jess Jacklin that was years in the making. Ahead of the film’s HBO premiere today, I spoke with Jacklin about how she discovered and developed this story, the challenges of making a movie on screens, and what she hopes viewers take away from it.
Photo courtesy of Alex Joyce
The Verge: How did you discover this story?
Jess Jacklin: I met Dr. Petrino, who was a neuroscientist on the film. I told him everything I knew at the time because I suffer from a lot of chronic pain from a condition I have. At the time, he was participating in VR trials to help rewire pain receptors in the brain, and I was fascinated by it. I went to see what he was doing, and Blake Hunt, who is one of the subjects in the film, was actually part of Petrino's VR trials at the time. Chris Scott, who you saw[in the film]was actually championing this idea of an esports team. It was his idea, and everyone was there talking about it casually. I was like, “What? This is amazing. I have to get involved.”
I met Chris and I was filming with him for a while. This was pre-COVID, back in 2018. I think they had a name picked out for the team and were starting to get a sponsor here or there, and he passed away. That was what motivated all of us – them to keep going and me to start pursuing this as a feature-length project.
You seem to have been interested in the therapeutic potential of technology for some time. To what extent did this story challenge or confirm the ideas you had before you started writing it?
One of the most important things I learned during the process of making this film was how to think about identity as a disabled person in terms of a social model of disability. It goes against what you might see in a traditional hospital setting, which is considered “the medical model” in academia. There’s a lot of: How do you rehabilitate? How do you fix it? But it kind of misses the idea of the whole person, which is dismissing that as part of someone’s lived experience and not necessarily wanting to change who they are, but maybe wanting to decrease the amount of pain they have or thinking about rehabilitation in other ways.
I felt like being in the lab, doing my research, and being immersed in this world opened me up to all the nuances of the disability experience, which I think I ultimately found in the film. For example, someone who was born without the ability to hear has a very different experience of themselves and their identity than someone[who]went through a traumatic event and lost the ability to hear. This spectrum of experience became something that I was very interested in. Even within the three main subjects, who you might think have all had very similar experiences, they are all very different in what they want and how they see themselves. That became something that I felt was really important to explore in the narrative as I was making it.
Quadruple Gods It's a sports film, a competition film, an animated film and a character study all in one. I'm curious to know how you came up with combining all those different formats and incorporating competition into the narrative of the film.
I knew from the beginning that I didn’t want to make a traditional sports documentary. I didn’t want there to be a relationship that was being plotted and asking, “Will they win? Will they not win?” I never felt like that was the goal. I also felt like what video games meant to them was something bigger than that. It wasn’t about proving that they were as good as other players or anything like that. It just seemed too shallow for what the real experience was.
I thought, Well, the sporting element can be good for the structure. It gives us a sense that something is progressing, but I also didn't want to be tied down to that. I thought it was a good device and also a good way to show the difference of opinions on it. It was a real point of tension. It comes out in that scene where Richard asks, “What do we all want from this? Do we all want the same thing?” Because I realized it meant something different to each of them.
Your contributors see a lot of opportunity in the technology, primarily in the form of video games, but there's also the scene you just described where they're using ai to create their digital avatars. I'm curious to know how you think their attitudes toward these technologies and the very real benefits they offer counteract and nuance some of the public skepticism and fear that's out there right now around some of these emerging technologies.
It offers something different to people who are not mobile. There's a lot of potential in this. The truth is that a lot of them were gamers before they got injured. The three main characters were already playing video games. It was like, “Oh, cool, now there's this technology that allows me to do something that's not new, but I'm doing it in a new way.”
I think that in general for the disabled community, designing things with all body types in mind is a good way to think about design because it ends up benefiting everyone. The example they use a lot is the curb cut. It was created for wheelchairs, but women with strollers could use it. When you design openly, you can include everyone.
ai came into the process of creating this project and everyone was feeling like, “Wow… my God, I just uploaded my photo to this device and all of a sudden I’m this character and I can create these things.” It was great to see them explore with it. I think everyone found a really fun and creative outlet, even in this exploration of avatars. I found Prentice writing scenes, exploring animation, and playing with ai just because of the process that we were in. I think I’m optimistic about what technology can deliver. I think it’s easy to be optimistic. Black mirror above all, but I am cautiously optimistic about what it can offer.
What kind of visual challenges did making a film about technology pose and what solutions did you find?
I remember the early conversations with the editors and the idea that the movie was going to be a bunch of people sitting in front of a computer for the entire movie. I thought, “Well, the most interesting thing is not the video games, but these people, and their lives are so dynamic.” That’s what I decided to focus on. It’s not what you expect. You don’t expect someone to be an Uber driver. You don’t think about them raising their kids and getting on and off buses. To me, that was like saying, “Well, I… willpower Sometimes I have them sitting in front of computers, but at least I can balance the movie with all these other dynamic scenes.”
Do you have any updates on the Quad Gods and how their team is doing this year?
One really exciting development is that Andy, who was the newest recruit of the Quad Gods and who you meet at the end of the movie, just came in second place in a big tournament. The next generation of the Quad Gods is coming in really strong, so everyone was on his live stream watching him compete for the championship. I mean, they ended up coming in second place, which was amazing. I don’t remember what the game was, but he’s been doing really well from when he was just learning how to use the quad stick when we filmed it to where he is now. He’s gotten really good at it.
Quad Gods will be streaming on Max starting July 10.
