Free Pixel

Henry Lowood pointed me to this collaboration, 6 Days, of Diltz and DeLappe. As you can imagine, it is not your everyday machinima film but more of an experiment in machinima. I have to state upfront that I really like DeLappe’s work. He seems to really work very effectively on the task to bring the virtual closer to the real.

And this post is not so much about the overall artistic value of 6 Days but watching the film another thought came up – that of the limitations of the engine and what to do about them. In short, I think one can use them, negate them, or bend them and each of the three approaches leads to a different outcome.

Originally machinima was touted as game-base film-making. Looking at 6 Days it becomes apparent that the game engine can be brutally limiting in the range of expressions available. This is not really a new discovery. The game’s interactive design is like a rigid filter for how the engine can be used. When you are a hammer, the whole world seems to be full of nails. When you are only capable of shooting in Call of Duty 4 (the engine used in 6 Days), the whole world seems to be at war. It is about the limitations of the underlying interactive system and the play that evolves from it.

To some extent 6 Days (as well as a lot of DeLappe’s other work, such as dead-in-iraq or his Gandhi performances in Second Life) is exactly taking these restrictions as a jump off point for the art. Dead-in-Iraq might be the most obvious approach. Without a single change to the engine, he manages to build his own statement on top of the ongoing game. As he types in the names of soldiers killed in Iraq into the chat channel of an America’s Army game session, his performance depends on the game running in its usual way and the new connection he creates through his word performance. Truly machinima in spirit and just one step away from pure gameplay movies.

Where DeLappe leaves the game intact but changes the play – others like Kirschner or Condon take the game apart to express something that very often does not refer anymore to the originally intended play. Karma Physics Elvis by Condon or Person 2184 by Kirschner might run in real-time and display the UT2K4 (and UT2K3) game technology in various ways, but they certainly are not about the original game play. DeLappe’s work is. Between these two ideas of either completely utilizing or disregarding one could find all kinds of gray zones.

Some time ago a few of my students (Thomas Barnwell, Paul Clifton, Betsy Gooch, Justin Smith) made a project that rests somewhere in between the two poles. I taught the course as a graduate class and the final project was supposed to be a piece in Unreal that would address the question of the American Myth. Students were asked to develop an interactive piece that would express some element of the American Dream. I liked all the final group projects, but this one might be the easiest to describe.

Barnwell/Clifton/ Gooch/ Smith built on the idea of action painting by Jackson Pollock and combined this with the simplified idea that anybody can “make it” and succeed in their path in America. Their own description reads:

The project is a reframing of the idea that each of us creates our own unique American Dream as we traverse through space over the course of our lifetimes. Trails of changing color are left as you traverse across the virtual space. These trails represent the choices you make during your life, and the changing colors represent the factors that are beyond your control. Once the sculpture is complete, you have the ability to view it as a whole, or print out a physical copy which represents your own unique American Dream.

In practice: the player steers a character over a huge empty map of the USA and leaves a trail of colored particles on the way. One paints an action painting as one lives their virtual life. Here you are traversing the virtual Rocky Mountains:

Once you are finished, you can receive a top down perspective of the picture you have created:

To me, this seems to be a third way of game-based machinima – or whatever one might call this kind of work. Neither does it reject the underlying limitations of the engine by completely modding them away; nor does it comment on the engine itself. Instead, it is a form of re-modeling. There are still important elements of the game present (e.g. that they did not switch off the HUD nor the weapon – which certainly gives a weird context reminding me of completely different US-traits) but it is a bending of the play and the game rules themselves, not a negating (as in Condon and Kirschner’s case) or a rigid re-framing (as in DeLappe’s and Diltz’s case).