Lives Online: CyberCultural Studies

Here’s this week’s machinima goodness: a music video to those upbeat kids, Breaking Benjamin, and their song, “So Cold.” Keep smilin’ guys!

The video was made by Paul Marino using Half-Life 2, and features a lot of footage from the game. (In fact, if you haven’t finished the game yet, there may be a few spoilers in here for you!) I think it’s a fascinating mix of the game’s narrative with the tone and lyrics of the song.

But wait, there’s more! Here’s a special bonus sorta-machinima clip for your edification and enjoyment!

GayGamer’s FruitBrute clues us in to the latest sorta-machinima video by Monty Oum: Haloid:

It’s “sorta-machinima” because Oum takes two iconic video game characters, Master Chief from the Halo series and Samus Aran from the Metroid series, and has them duke it out in the grand tradition of “Who Would Win: Batman or Superman” contests. In this match-up, fortunately, the fight takes an unexpected turn. However, because he’s combining franchises, he can’t use the games’ engines to create the video. He animates it himself. Thus, it’s like machinima, but this isn’t machinima.

The video is pretty darn good. The animation in the opening sequence isn’t great, but Oum’s sense of timing and his skills as an editor are on full display. And the fight itself is fun. I have a major quibble with his choice of music, though: when you’re going to rely that heavily on Matrix-style bullet-time and superhuman fighting skills, using the music from The Matrix just feels redundant.

Also, you should read Oum’s notes (scroll down to the FAQ) on making the video. They did a lot to make me feel better about Master Chief’s electro-tingle, but I really wish the gender play in this video were more about the fact that girl gamers roxxor hard, and less about the straight-guy fantasy that “hot lesbians are awesome.”

(X-posted on Digital Digressions)

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This set of machinima is Second Life-centric, with a lot of information that can help you to become an uber-leet Second Lifer!

Natural Selection Studios has started a great series of “Noob Be Gone” videos intended to help you banish your noobishness.

Episode 1 shows you how to manage your in-world “camera,” how to interact with objects, and a bunch of other cool hacks, tips, and techniques:

Episode 2 shows you the basics for becoming an awesome SL builder:

Have you noticed that the avatars around you can do really cool things, while you’re stuck with the same, sad moves? Well, eradicate your envy with this video by Torley about creating fab gestures:

And for info on just about anything else you might want to do in SL, check out the rest of the massive cache of video tutorials created and posted by Torley.

(X-posted at Digital Digressions)

This week’s Friday Machinima is a blast from the recent past — it’s the machinima video from the midterm exam!

And for more on Text 100, check out their web site. Or watch this (non-machinima) video from Text 100 about branding in virtual worlds:

(x-posted to Digital Digressions)

This week’s Friday Machinima picks up on the ideas we’ve been talking about in class about the tensions between only observing and actively participating in online communities.

There’s been a lot written about online spaces and online games, but not much of this high-level discourse has been done inside these spaces. This Spartan Life changes that. It’s a talk show that features various famous digital theorists, artists, and game designers, and it’s recorded entirely within the virtual world of multiplayer online Halo. (Click this link or the image below to go to episode 1 of This Spartan Life.)

Damian Lacedaemion, DJ Octobit, and the Solid Gold Elite Dancers are your guides to some of the smartest talk around about “the finer aspects of life, music, art, sex, movies and yes, even games.” And it’s all dipped and fried in a golden batter of Halo goodness. Frag-tastic!

There are four episodes so far, but I’m linking you to the first one to get a better feeling for the project. The other episodes are here.

(X-posted to Digital Digressions)

We’re a little late, but imagine with me now that we have traveled to the past. We have journeyed all the way back to the exotic yesteryear of February 23rd, in the year 2007. Spooky.

Okay. Now that we’re all in the right mind-set, we can appreciate our Friday Machinima. It’s non-narrative. While most machinima tell a story, or at least include characters engaged in some sort of situation, this one is environmental.

In fact, it’s architectural. While game engines are great for rendering characters, they’re also good at representing world-spaces.

This machinima is a fly-through of one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpieces, Fallingwater (more properly known as the Edgar Kaufmann House). Located in Bear Run, Pennsylvania (that’s between Mill Run and Ohiopyle, in Southwestern Pennsylvania), it’s a house built on top of, and around, a waterfall. Hence the name Fallingwater.

The house is built directly on the waterfall, and there is a staircase leading down to one of the waterfall’s pools from the living room. It also, famously, is built as a series of canterlevered planes, each jutting out in a different direction.

It’s a beautiful house, and the time and care that went into recreating the house in the Half-Life 2 engine is incredible.

Enjoy.

(X-posted to Digital Digressions)

This week’s machinima comes to us via Lionhead Studio’s The Movies, the same program that brought us our first machinima, “Kissing Lessons.” This week we have a machinima about the race and class problems (yes, they’re related) in contemporary France, “The French Democracy“:

This machinima fictionally recreates actual events in France from 2005. Wikipedia has a nice summary of these events here. Given what we’ve been reading about oppositional politics and activisim made possible by the Internet, what do you think of this machinima?

Today’s Friday machinima is episode 13 from Ill Clan’s “Tra5h Ta1k.” This week’s webisode examines the might and majesty of blogging, video blogging, and YouTube.

As you can guess, the results aren’t pretty.

Today’s Machinima comes to us from Tra5h Ta1k, the talk show from the sick and twisted folks at Ill Clan.

Identity and otherness — as well as the consequences of how we think about (and represent) ourselves and others in online spaces — get a humorous treatment here, but they’re serious issues affecting everyone who communicates with people they’ve never met face-to-face. Playing MMORPGs, online chat, posting to message boards, reading and commenting on blogs… who are these other people out there, and what do they really look like? What do they really act like? Does it matter? Should it matter?

What do you think?

Machinima is MACHIne-made aNIMAtion, in which the “machines” in question are actually game engines. That’s probably not much clearer. The code that makes a PS2 game like Okami produce pretty pictures on your TV screen, or that lets your mighty mighty Night Elf Druid kick monster butt in World of Warcraft is called a game engine. It does lots and lots and lots of math and sends the results to your computer’s processor and graphics card, which in turn send lots and lots of pixels to your screen. In other words, game engines usually are used to create game play.

But certain enterprising gamers realized that game engines are also (as part of their normal operation) producing what could be called movies on your monitor. And, either using the features included in the games or screen-capturing programs, those movies could be saved, edited, re-scored, and displayed outside of the game environment.

And presto-magico… machinima was born!

So, each week I’ll be introducing you to a thought-provoking (or sometimes just funny) piece of machinima.

This week’s machinima, an amusing trifle to ease us into this new feature, is inspired by the recent YouTube phenomenon LonelyGirl15, who asked “So what is the deal with kissing?” (For more on LonelyGirl15, read this.) Well, mixme1 does his/her/its best, using Lionhead Studios’ The Movies game to help Bree out. Check it out.

Special Added Bonus Machinima Cultural Note:

Those wild and crazy innovators at the University of Kansas are now offering a graduate film seminar that will include machinima, apparently as both a subject of study and as something the students will produce. Though similar classes exist at other major research film programs (and Harvard, not usually known as a film mecca) and at schools of design and technology across the world, I salute the Kansas film grads who will finally gain the ability to critique films. As one of the co-teachers of the course, Stacey Fox explains, “‘You can’t critique a film unless you’ve made one yourself.’” Good luck, machinimating Jayhawks!

(X-posted, in a more verbose and digressive manner, to Digital Digressions)