Free Pixel

One of my students - Thomas Lodato - has been playing around with some ideas about how a editing program might look and work if the depicted action is not a pre-rendered movie but a live rendered 3D image. The rough prototype he presents with Spacecam is our idea of a “spatial editor”. Such an editing system first tracks the movements of characters in Unreal and then allows editors to create and control cameras externally in relation to this recorded action.

The main idea is to combine that with a demo recording and demo replay, so one could literally edit a demo playback from an external source. Spacecam is still very rough but I still like the idea of a “spatial editor” that uses maps and paths instead of only timelines and frame numbers. It changes the editing quite a bit. For example, we implemented it on an touch screen laptop and if only the touch screen abilities would have been more stable, it would be possible to create and control cameras very intuitively.

There is also some work under way to combine this work with David Elson’s and Mark Riedl’s Cambot project that stages camera and actor behavior in UT2K4 completely automatically based on a AI system in the background. In fact, Brian O’Neil, Mark, and myself had a short paper at CHI describing how these systems could merge.

It has become a tradition by now: the yearly Machinima showcase held at DragonCon. For the third time, filmmakers and panelists can discuss the state, past, and future of Machinima.

Deadline for movie submissions: June 30th. Strangely enough, this is one machinima even that I - for whatever reason - continuously fail to attend, even though it is right here in “my” Atlanta. Maybe this year! The DragonCon show itself is from Sept 4-7 and definitely a great spectacle.

It seems Sony continues to build bridges to the demoscene. After Plastic’s Linger in Shadows it is now .theprodukkt’s time to harvest the PS3 for some innovative procedural art.

There is nothing announced on .theprodukkt’s web site yet, but the playstation.blog reports that the same code wizards that created .kkrieger and .debris will release a piece on Sony muscle console:

It is not exactly a game or an art piece like Linger in Shadows. It allows you to create your own visual to accompany your favorite music tracks on the XMB, and using the SIXAXIS™ Wireless Controller, you will be able to manipulate the given scene by interacting with and modifying a man and his world. It even lets you tweak your music as you play with it.

Reminds me of some of Julian Oliver’s work - and that is a good thing.

This post is more like an essay I always wanted to write for the machinima magazine, but felt like I don’t really have the time to get a new issue out the door, so it would never see the light of day…

The idea is simple: generic characters make generic stories. There’s a long debate to be had on how important characters are to stories, or the other way around. I personally believe (and I’m quoting a friend here, who quoted someone important whose name I don’t know) that “the story is the meat you take with you, to throw over the fence to distract the dog, when you want to rob the house.”

Or, to say it more bluntly (and highly exaggerated) - great characters can make a mediocre story amazing, while boring characters can make the most compelling story pointless.

Read more »

Not a festival but possibly an even more important machinima event held at the Stanford Law School from April 24-25. Here is the official announcement:

Machinima.
…It has been hailed as the art form of the 21st century.
…It is redefining music videos.
…And reinventing the videogame.
…It might be the future of cinema.

But there’s a catch: if you make machinima, you might be breaking the law.

Or are you? Find out at the Stanford University “Play Machinima Law” event from April 24-25, 2009.

Read more »

It is not a completely new phenomenon: the way that TV commercials pick up game “looks” to sell stuff. Whether it is Coca Cola or the pre-Superbowl ad for Two and a Half Men done in Second Life or the original Game On that won even a Mackie award.

However, it is intriguing to see how games are continuously re-staged in some rather shiny looking movies. Neil Blomkamp, director of the Halo 3 commercial vehicle Combat even had a stint at Cannes and was later mentioned as director for the Halo 3 movie.  His Landfall compilation live action movie has been so successful that it was re-created as proper machinima. Currently the Purchase Brother’s Escape from City 17 is making waves.

They all *look* great. And if the numbers are right and Escape had 1 million hits in three days, then the success of this kind of hybrids can not be questioned. But what is their value for machinima?

Read more »

..here is an interview with Henry Jenkins of MIT discussing Michael Nitsche’s research and recent book, Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds (MIT Press, 2008), “which sums up what we can learn about games by examining them as spatial systems”.

The “part 1″ label for the interview (and the interview itself is not a short one) implies there may indeed be even more installments!

I must live under a very big rock. In his review of his own 2008 predictions, Cory Ondrejka wrote the following:

As the actors join the writers, more AAA content will be developed for machinima, virtual worlds, and the web as a way to give audiences fresh material without crossing picket lines

4 words.  Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog.  Not to mention a steady stream of machinima hitting the mainstream as never before.

Are we in the early stages of a possible fundamental development leap in Machinima-related game development here? This is taken from the beginning of a Nintendo patent that went public today (picked up from Kotaku):

User saved-data storage means S19 stores user saved-data which is generated as a result of a game play performed by a user. Digest saved-data storage means S48 stores a plurality of pieces of digest saved-data which are previously generated so as to be associated with predetermined scenes, respectively, in a game.

Read more »

Here it is: my book. Video Game Spaces. Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds finally exists in a printed form. The beginning of the official blurb over at MIT press reads:

The move to 3D graphics represents a dramatic artistic and technical development in the history of video games that suggests an overall transformation of games as media. The experience of space has become a key element of how we understand games and how we play them. In Video Game Spaces, Michael Nitsche investigates what this shift means for video game design and analysis.

As the title suggests: the main focus overall is on 3D game spaces - how we design, visualize, perceive, and use them. But it also features some references to Machinima throughout and has a longer section on camera work in virtual environments. You can read the first chapter online to get a much longer and more elaborate introduction. And then you can go and buy it.