I’m still playing around with The Movies, one of the computer games I picked up last weekend. The screenshot above is from the last movie I uploaded. It’s not the most recent one, though, and I plan to upload a couple more as soon I get a bit better at storytelling in this medium. One of the non-poltical blogs I read, The Long Tail, has an interesting review of the game, which also notes some of the issues I noted with storytelling and creating movies in The Sims 2, as well as the desire — which I share — for a method of unlocking everything in The Movies‘ sandbox mode.
I’ve pretty much stayed inside the box of what’s possible with the game and the storytelling framework it provides. I’ve stuck mostly to rather slightly-subversive-but-mostly-standard gay romance flicks. I’ve even got a gay western where the cowboys make out instead of having a shoot out, and get married in the local saloon. I’m working on one that deals with someone revealing military secrets about torture, but I’m still getting it right. I may have to wait for more items (sets, props, costumes, etc.) to be unlocked as I make further progress in the game.
In the meantime, the game’s website includes a link to something called “Scene Maker,” which let’s various people create movies via email. Maybe I’ll try a joint film project on this blog, with anyone who wants to participate and gives me their email.
Other players are pushing the envelope a bit further, including French players who put together The French Democracy, a movie about the riots in the French suburbs that were all over the news recently. Based on what I know about what it takes to produce any kind of detailed story in the game, this is a pretty remarkable achievement.
Apparently it’s also a fine example of “machinima,” which I’ve seen before but never knew there was a term invented for it. It’s been done in games like The Sims 2 and World of Warcraft. It’s also made the New York Times.
Video-game aficionados have been creating ”machinima” — an ungainly term mixing ”machine” and ”cinema” and pronounced ma-SHEEN-i-ma — since the late 90′s. ”Red vs. Blue” is the first to break out of the underground, and now corporations like Volvo are hiring machinima artists to make short promotional films, while MTV, Spike TV and the Independent Film Channel are running comedy shorts and music videos produced inside games. By last spring, Burns and his friends were making so much money from ”Red vs. Blue” that they left their jobs and founded Rooster Teeth Productions. Now they produce machinima full time.
It may be the most unlikely form of indie filmmaking yet — and one of the most weirdly democratic. ”It’s like ‘The Blair Witch Project’ all over again, except you don’t even need a camera,” says Julie Kanarowski, a product manager with Electronic Arts, the nation’s largest video-game publisher. ”You don’t even need actors.”
I’m not sure how “democratic” it is, though it does put some of the tools for using media to tell stories in the hands of anyone who can afford a computer, a copy of the game, and an internet connection suitable for uploading movies. That list of qualifications automatically disqualifies huge swaths of people without the resources to afford the above, or the knowledge and leisure time require to use it; much the same as blogging. But it does put certain access and media tools in the hands of more people than had access to them before.
Since we’re likely to see more stuff like The Movies, including expansion packs for the game itself, Im wondering just what are the possibilities for a medium like this? If it can be used to create commentary on a story like the riots in France, how else might it be used? I, for one, would like Washington-themed backdrops, so I can create my own political thriller. Any other ideas out there?
Well, I’m game (heh) for collaborative project, though I’m still getting the hang of the interface and what can be done with it. So I’m not sure how much I could actually contribute. I’ve been thinking about adapting an Edward Albee play, though his plays tend to rely heavily on delivery of the dialog so I’m not certain I could pull that off, even if I do have a coworker with acting experience and with whom I’ve done voiceover work already.
Actually, my next movie may be about peak oil and the collapse of society. I think I even have a working title, “The End of the Fix” or maybe “The Long Ride Down.”
While it’s true that too many people don’t have access to technology (let alone safe drinking water), some of the people who do have access are important, I think.
For example, there are a number of virtual workers in 3rd world countries for whom machinima is now an option. While a virtual world worker putting in 14-hour days for a "virtual sweatshop" might not be able to casually create and edit a video on their boss’s machine, they could direct a machinima piece about their home and circumstances while "in-world"; the video being handled by someone else.
Just imagine seeing the virtual site of the benzene contamination in China. Imagine if people in the U.S.S.R had been able to create a machinima documenting Chernobyl. The communicative power of a medium like this is pretty powerful and I suspect we’ll be seeing some surprisingly informative machinima efforts in the future… much of it from the developing world.