My Machinima presentation

I was honored to be asked to give a little presentation on Machinima at Scott Rettberg’s “The Network as a Space and Medium for Collaborative Interdisciplinary Art Practice”. I had a great time and met some truly fantastic and inspirational people! I was squeezed in to the topic of Anthropophagy, which I’m still trying to figure out – but will write more about in another blogpost. My initial thought is Machinima is anthropophagic (not sure I can say that – but what the hell – I’ll give it a go) of game narrative – which opens up a whole box of interest worms. But … it’s not a cannibalistic media in itself. But…yeah… we’ll leave room for that somewhere else.

My presentation is available on Google Docs but I’ll cut and paste it here – as the notes are more important than the actual slides (although you can find them by opening the speaker notes).

GAMEPLAYING FOR THE ARTS

When gaming avatars perform for the camera, not for the game

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World of Warcraft Dashboard Picture, anyone?

Does anyone have a really cool WoW dashboard picture they wouldn’t mind me using for an article (that I’m not sure is EVER going to be published) in the local Bergen press?
I’m really looking for a dashboard so advanced that you hardly see what’s happening in-world. One of those where there’s so much information the interface becomes 2 dimensional instead of 3. I’m kinda trying to prove the point that there’s a lot of information management that goes into playing WoW.

State of Play Conference

It was fun!
The conference started off with a bang. We got to see Glenn Thomas’ “Ideal World. A Virtual Life Documentary” – which is brilliant (Glenn’s also a super dooper, charming and smart man, by the way!). He’s really managed to get the full compass of The Second Life story into it and I applaud him for it!
The panels were exciting and from vast disciplines – which I thought was great! Some of the conference delegates (220 attending) had some amazing questions to the panels, which brought some great insight and discussion. I’m not too comfortable writing in detail here, as I’m in the middle of writing other articles for a serious publication. I’m not used to all this journalism thinking and I’m not sure what’s allowed and not in duplication matters on my own personal blog. So let me tread lightly till stuff gets published.
I’ve met some truly amazing people which I hope to keep in touch with. Lots of bright and colorful minds were present and I felt so privileged to meet them. All shall be mentioned when I dwell deeper into stuff here.
I found being a ‘journalist’ quite hard, however. Finding stuff that was news worthy for ‘regular people’ was challenging, which is why we’re holding off publication till it’s all in a lovely understandable package. It’s also quite hard finding the correct Norwegian words for stuff – any Norwegian readers out there willing to have a go at ‘in-world’? It’s such a great way to pinpoint what you’re trying to describe, “they met in-world”, “in-world business transaction”, I just can’t seem to find the right Norwegian wording for it. I have also found a great appreciation for the word ‘business’ in English. I think we have about alternatives in Norwegian and I find none of the satisfactory! Speaking of which, I need to get back to work.

Those Creative Spammers

Goldfarmers in World of Warcraft are becoming desperate as Blizzard has now inserted a new ‘text-filter on broadcast chat messages to prevent gold farmers from spamming users about their websites’ – I don’t get how it can work, but I guess it really does!

This just impressed me so! Dead gnomes dropping out of the sky to spell an url?! I’m sorry, that just blows me away! So now I guess WoWers will have to put up with rainy days of dead gnomes instead of text spam? I have such a hard time disrespecting such creativity, but then again I’m not a WoW’er so I’m not hassled with goldfarming spam. ;)

My sister enters the world of blogging

My darling sis has started blogging! She’s always been the hardcore gamer of our family and offers some interesting stories from her WoWing. A few weeks in and she’s already in Cerise writing about the frustrations of being a non-stereotypical gamer customer.

She’s also an avid reader and offers her thoughts on the recent books she’s read.

Welcome to the world, Strumpet (honestly…I have no idea where this nic comes from).

Machinima mashups

I’m sure that I can describe this as a distinctive genre within machinima – when using one game to parody (?) another game. Lovely the way that the gaming sound just makes it complete – would it ever work with a rock song? This is the mixing of gameplay mechanics (although is it gameplay mechanics if we’re just passively watching it?)to describe a story, in my opinion, so deserves it’s own genre type within machinima.

But then I get confused when watching this superb film (embedding disabled for some mysterious reason).

Ah – what’s the point of organising everything into definition boxes really?

Singapore

Firstly – CNN launched it’s Future Summit: Virtual worlds today.

“Originating from Singapore and Palo Alto, California, the program features creative visionaries and entrepreneurs leading us into a new age of creativity and imagination.”

Impressive list of panelists really. I don’t even know who to list here – but it’s a good mix of social networking sites experts and designers and MMORPG experts and designers. I’m really going to enjoy following this!

So speaking of Singapore – I just got my ticket for 16 August. My apartment’s getting renovated 20 August by my landlords and my adorable father thought it would be a good idea for me to visit him instead of crashing on a friend’s floor. Not a hell of a lot of protest from me! It will be good to get away and have a vacation – there’s so much I didn’t get to do last time around. Besides, I miss him – chillin’ out with dad is always delightful.

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WoW Machinima music contest

Pointed out by my darling sis – there’s a contest going on for a WoW machinima music video. It’s a collaboration between the band, The Ataris and Blizzard. There’s three The Ataris songs available to choose from and the winner gets a WoW keyboard thingy.

I’m interested to see how this works out – on several playing fields.

One – what does machinima look like restricted by rules?

Two – will The Ataris become a smashing hit because of the machinima music video?

I’m intrigued – and I’ll be paying close attention!