Free Pixel

It took us a while, but at long last the videos for the Art History of Games event are online. If you missed it, have a look. I have my favorites but go and browse yourself … you can even get a glimpse of Henry Lowood in action.

Systems and methods are provided that record data in a videogame, such as a user’s character and performance in the videogame, and generate a book, e-book, or comic book based on the recorded data. A narrative data structure generated from the recorded data may include pregenerated text and images, and may provide for insertion of the recorded data into the narrative data structure. The recorded data may be converted into natural-language text for insertion into the narrative data structure. In some embodiments, the system may record screenshots of the videogame and insert the screenshots into the narrative data structure as illustrations. The narrative data structure may be provided to a location for printing as a book or other publication or may be electronically formatted and provided as an e-book.

Does that ring a bell? Recording data from a game play session and creating a narrative from that? This is the beginning of Patent No 20100203970 filed by Apple in February 2009 (you can search for that kind of stuff here). Their idea was to automatically generate comics or novels from game play – e.g. from Mass Effect – as patentlyapple.com reports.

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It just became official that the Egyptian Oracle project received its NEH funding. Congratulations to Jeffrey Jacobs and the whole crew. The project promises a form of digital puppetry for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Friedrich should be involved and I will participate as advisor.

More info from the official blurb in the application after the jump. Read more »

Matteo Bittanti, whose posts I generally like, recently tweeded about an interview that announces Miltos Manetas as “the first machinima-maker” based on his series Videos after Video Games (1996-2006). Oh boy.

The interview has some moments and I would love to discuss Manetas’ work a bit further. But I did not really get beyond that first statement. Without discarding Manetas: he is not the first machimina-maker. By a long shot.

But as this title is up for grabs, the question is: Who is? And what is this first Machinima ever produced?

For the sake of the argument, let’s skip all nit-picking and have two categories:

1) First Machinima created by a company (e.g. a cut scene)

2) First Machinima created by a player or group (e.g. a demo or hack or gameplay recording of some sort)

.. wherein “machinima” means that the graphics had to be produced in real-time to start with. Again, this is not about a definition war – done that been there – but really a look back in history to find the origins. Things are bound to get muddy in the early machinima soup. I will try to find some early hits but help would be greatly appreciated.

I saw the movie back then, but somehow I missed it: Kathleen Turner played in Monster House and not just any part, she plays the coolest part: the house.

According to Hollywood lore, Zemecki’s convinced her to take the part arguing that she had played the sexiest animated character ever …

… now it would be time to play the ugliest. Good call!

Monster House itself is a bit of a strange mixture. The acting is all mo-cap and has its Polar Express zombie moments but this one is a lot better than the other Zemecki’s adventures in this area (Beowulf? Christmas Carol?) and it is mainly because of the house. The “real” actors are much more cartoonish in Monster House but they can still be strangely off. However, the “fake” house is spot on. A real showcase of animation in full action. In the making of special features of the DVD you can see a glimpse of Kathleen Turner all wired up for the performance capture as she leaps forward … literally playing the house.

There is also another making of that talks about the special controls they used to control the camera – and I wished we had seen that before we worked on comparable problems. It is not so easy to really see the actual set ups used in real life and we could have used it as a much better starting point than the Wii controller we used originally.

Finally, I had to wonder what happens to the data set of these kind of movies. As full-blown performance capture pieces they could be re-used in all kinds of ways. Yes, Monster House was also released as 3D – one more reason to see how those camera swoops were made. But I am thinking about other options, too. This could be the perfect data set for a Machinima were a new director could get down and dirty. Gil Kenan, director on Monster House, was pretty fresh from film school himself and went straight to an Oscar nomination with that one.

It turned out that I was able to visit some exhibition spaces during my stop-over in Berlin. On the one hand, it is Biennale time and so I stumbled down into cellars in Mitte and up into Kreuzberg’s attics to look at the stuff that art is. Frankly, the setting was not much different in the other visit I managed: Andreas Lange took me into the rooms of the future Computerspielemuseum in Friedrichshain – still one big empty building site with a lot of renovation ahead until they will open some time in winter.

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There is not much music left on the Music Television network these days.  Anyway, the story starts with a random encounter of music on MTV: Green Day’s “Last of the American Girls” kicking it off with “She puts her makeup on like graffiti on the walls of the heartland.”

Being hopelessly out of fashion with my musical taste, I can still see how that fits into a commercially viable pseudo-revolutionary post-punk philosophy. What was somewhat different was that the video was the Green Day: Rock Band version. All band members appeared rendered in low poly goriness and half-acceptable lip synching.

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Picking up on Erik’s last mail and following the Ebert “issue” … if it really is one. It so happens that I got completely blown away by Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle just the other day and it also just so happens that Ebert noted this film to be one of Miyazaki’s weakest:

A parade of weird characters comes onstage to do their turns, but the underlying plot grows murky and, amazingly for a Miyazaki film, we grow impatient at spectacle without meaning.

It is probably obvious that I could not disagree more – but this is not about the issues of taste and film reading as such. Instead, let’s use Miyazaki’s film as a jump off into a machinima issue – that of an animation world versus a game world.

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but they can inspire 1296 comments (and counting) when attached to Roger Ebert’s latest blog post on this hoary old topic. At least he replies to some of them.

And some ripostes are rather witty.

Don’t worry guys, he’s just too old to understand.

Ebert: Don’t worry, Chance. you’re just too young to understand.

Ebert is taken to task for never quite defining art, but still saying games can never be art. He may have replied to this somewhere but to find that reply is rather daunting. I was amused by his statement that Shadow of the Colossus cannot be art because 10 gamers agree with him, Spot the problem with that argument.

One can develop a kind of obsession with those lovely Rube Goldberg machines done in all kind of game engines (and real world craziness). They are obvious plays off the underlying physics engine but at the same time, they are displays of the world they are staged in. Ending some ridiculously complex chain reaction with a kick into Breen’s behind is just the right way a Rube Goldberg machine should end in Half Life and it is different from a non-engine specific machine with just the same functionality. Stupendous and hilarious and material stuff.

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