Machinima: when gamers become architects

Lately I've been spending my lunch breaks watching a new type of media that's appeared on the web over the past year or so -- Machinima refers to the process of utilizing 3-D gaming technology to construct new narratives -- some violent, some funny. New gaming worlds such as Halo, played online with the XBox, offer gamers immersion in a vast world teeming with kids in Iowa tweaking on Mountain Dew and intent on killing you. They've also spawned an array of engines that allow gamers and developers to become architects--expanding the game's territories. This has led to a new genre in which developers have used these engines to construct short films, comedy sketches, and whole series to trade on the web.

Many of these, as you would imagine, pay homage to the violent war games and science fiction stories these worlds have been created for. You've got your scifi assassin shows and Star Trek spin offs and a clatch of shows inspired by the war in Iraq or dedicated to reenacting World War II battles (in the case of the Iraq War, reality covered in uniform sand and pixellated encounters in which the good guys always win). Many of these can get boring after a while--their creators seem obsessed not with narrative form but with the mechanics (or architecture, to be more accurate) of making the films themselves. Meant to be shared with fellow developers, the purpose of many of these shows seems to be to show off the developer's skill at perspective, or fade-out.

Zerohawks Movie (Omaha Beach) is a violent, two minute rendition of the D-day landing at Omaha Beach, taking its cue from Saving Private Ryan by not sparing the splatter. The clip has been rendered in a sort of grainy, hazy, washed out fashion as though shot on the ground.

Soldiers land at Omaha Beach in Zerohawks Movie (Omaha Beach).
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Another genre of Machinima is a decidedly philosophical. Antechamber promises a meditation on "voyeurism, modern media and the human condition." A man dressed in white in a white room fiddles with a video camera. His lip is bleeding. It's rendered so carefully, and yet the limitations of the technology bring it down--the roughly hewn human figure, the boxy movements. A Few Good G-Men is an impressive rendering of the courtroom scene in A Few Good Men, but the computer-generated Colonel Nathan R. Jessop is a pale comparison to the filmic version.

Voyeurism in Antechamber
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A rather poor substitute for Jack Nicholson gets grilled in A Few Good G-Men
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One of the most popular Machinima series is Red vs. Blue, which takes place in the Halo game and concerns two groups of soldiers--red and blue--engaged in a tedious stand off that leaves the soldiers plenty of time to wax existential. This is Waiting for Godot in a 3-D virtual world as they stand just out of range of each other pondering the reasons behind their existence.

Spartans ponder their existence in Red vs. Blue. ....................................................................................

Mostly, I've been slightly disappointed by Machinima--it's still too new to have worked out its kinks--until recently. I've just discovered This Spartan Life: A Talk Show in Game Space which is just that--a talk show that takes place within the online Halo game world. This is absolutely fantastic. Hosted by Chris Burke (aka Damian Lacedaemion), the show has alien DJ Octobit playing remixed gameboy music, choreographed dancers that perform between sessions with guests, and a two-man camera crew that doubles as ground cover when those tweaked-out kids from Iowa stumble upon set and open fire.

Bob Stein and Chris Burke pause the interview to escape some disgruntled "guests" ....................................................................................

The best part of it is that they have actual guests--cool guests--in this first episode its publishing maverick Bob Stein and the artist Peggy Ahwesh. Bob Stein arrives in some sort of armored car--he crashes and the host fears he's died before they even had a chance to talk. But Bob's okay--and after killing off a few rude 'guests' that have stumbled onto the show unawares, they have a nice little chat about the future of publishing. The interview with Peggy takes place in some sort of dingy abandoned fortress, where she discusses her work, She Puppet, which was recorded as Peggy played the game Tomb Raider, pushing the sexy feminist icon Laura Croft to interact with the violent, masculine world of the game.

Bob Stein, in the red armored suit, discusses the future interactivity of books on This Spartan Life. ....................................................................................

The show is smart and often hilarious, and the limitations that hold other versions of Machinima back are exploited. The final segment of the show is a 'debate' on environmentalism in which the debators, among their arsenal of statistics and rhetorical devices, also wield weapons and drive tanks.

"Debating" environmental public policy at the end of This Spartan Life. ....................................................................................

I've always been a fan of appropriating technology--and given the state of technology, it really shouldn't be a surprise that the obsessive gamers are now becoming architects of their own online worlds.

new releases of astro boy are in the works; why pedophiles also obsessed with star trek; i think i could live here; gay batman gets busted; police may never know if she died before or after minneapolis inspectors boarded up her house; gay twin cities bloggers; the end of summer and this sums it up perfectly...music and movies in loring park