Machinima

I heard about the French riots machinima a few weeks ago, but didn't know that style of filmmaking had a name. As the lines get blurred between digital movies and games, maybe we'll see different styles emerge.

Here's another Hollywood Reporter article about the subject.

April 07, 2006

Grown-up video games used for social criticism

By Sheigh Crabtree

In Spike Lee's thriller "Inside Man," there is an arresting moment when an 8-year-old boy, who is being held hostage during a bank heist, makes his captor blanch when the boy casually shows the bank robber scenes from a horribly violent portable video game.

When the robber threatens to tell the kid's father about the game, it not only provides a flash of insight into the thief's demeanor but also expresses Lee's personal take on black-on-black violence, the overt glamorization of gangster culture and the desensitization of video game-obsessed youth.

The moment also points to a quickly developing new hybrid genre -- video game narratives, also known as machinima. Using desktop computer tools, visual artists have begun using the style of video games to create animated short stories. The first wave of these creations often carried light skits or dark, violent and sometimes pornographic fantasies. Now, the genre is evolving to include hand-crafted social commentaries that use the visual vernacular of the gaming world to make pointed cultural critiques.

Whether it is a scalding tract denouncing the glamorization of homicidal gangsters or a view of the Paris riots told from the perspective of marginalized youth or a series of user-generated Web games that depict the plight of Sudanese, video games have become the narrative medium of choice for a generation of filmmakers who wish to dramatize societal ills.

In the case of "Inside Man's" game, which uses Rock Star Games' "Grand Theft Auto" as a point of reference, Lee insisted on storyboarding a custom-made scene rather than building off of an existing game. He wanted to depict a scenario that was even more grotesquely violent than any game already on the market.

"Inside Man" cinematographer Matty Libatique enlisted his cousin, Eric Alba, to create the fictional "Gangstas iz Genocide" game.

Alba brought in a collective of graphic artists he works with called House of Pain, organized by Mitch Deoudes, that includes Casey Steffen, Eric Cheng, Jean-Renaud Gauthier and Scott Lebrecht.

The director gave the House of Pain artists two stylized and exaggerated mock-ups of loose game play meant to appear in the movie for about a minute. One showed a savage stick-up at an ATM, the other a disturbingly graphic drive-by shooting -- both end in homicide.

"In the script, it was supposed to be very violent game a kid was playing, and he was supposed to be really desensitized to the violence of the game but (enamored by) the glamorized gangsta lifestyle," Alba said. "The title of the game is 'Gangstas iz Genocide' so, to some extent, there was an equation that being in a gang has an element of race -- (Lee) was very specific that the characters be black."

Lee asked for the sequences to show two black characters in a ghetto environment dressed in West Coast-style gangster attire: baggy white T-shirts, baggy pants, do-rags and Timberlands. Alba digitally photographed reference stills of buildings near the Marcy Projects in Brooklyn. Portions of "Gangstas" were pre-visualized in 3D Studio Max, then stills were imported as textural samples and added to animated cut scenes created in Maya.

Alba said House of Pain considered using a gaming engine to create an actual machinima for the movie, but they wanted complete control of the animation. The sequence also needed to play both in-camera as a practical playback on the kid actor's PlayStation Portable and also had to be rendered out to play onscreen in full film frame resolution (2K or 4K files), which a professional animation tool like Maya supports.

It took 10 days for House of Pain to produce the sequence. Most of the time outside of production was spent choosing a weapon for a street fight that was both completely over the top -- like a rocket launcher -- but that still had street credibility. The final solution was a hand grenade that gets shoved into a character's mouth. After the grenade explodes, the character's brains splatter on a wall "like a huge bloody Jackson Pollock painting," Alba said.

When Lee saw how brutally violent House of Pain's handmade game sequence was, the director had them add the previously unscripted line "Kill Dat Nigga!" as a subtitle. The final sequence was cut from 60 seconds to 30 because Lee thought that made it more impactful.

Lee declined a request for comment, but in an interview with the U.K.'s Guardian, he said: "I just hope people understand that is an absolute statement about my horror at how violent these games that young kids play are, and also the infatuation with violence and gangsta rap among the black community. It's not a real game, but it's not that far-fetched from the games that are being sold."

Real-world violence in another urbane corner of the world inspired a 27-year-old Parisian named Alex Chan to produce "The French Democracy," a piece of machinima he created on his desktop computer in one week using a gaming engine.

The short film represents Chan's social critique of alleged police abuse of non-white nationals that provoked the Paris riots in the fall. "The French Democracy" has attracted international media attention, heralding the new maturity and story-telling potential of machinima, which has existed on the geeky fringe of gaming since the late '90s.

Chan's machinima has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times worldwide since it first was posted online in late November. The native French speaker and industrial designer, whose parents are from Hong Kong, said he wanted to present another side of the story of the riots, in contrast to what had appeared in the established media's reporting.

Chan crafted his film in Sandbox mode, a real-time gaming production tool that comes bundled in the PC game "The Movies," which is made by Lionshead Studios and published through Activision.

"Through these tools you can get some more spontaneous reaction or reflection not from mass media but from a simple citizen like me," Chan told MTV.com.

Habib Zargarpour, a senior art director at Electronic Arts in Vancouver, observed that during the past six months there has been a convergence of more user-friendly tools -- in particular "The Movies" -- and more users becoming aware that they can quickly craft stories at home in animated 3-D environments.

"The video game narrative is defining its own genre partially because of its look but also because real-time graphics engines allow people to work faster and get ideas out," Zargarpour said. "That development really puts animated storytelling tools in the hands of almost anybody who has a computer, and that opens doors to thousands of new voices."

MTV's college channel MTVu recently provided financial incentives for young game developers with a conscience to try their hand at the emerging genre. The cable channel set up an online contest with a $50,000 grant to be awarded to contestants who develop an interactive project designed to help stop the Sudanese genocide in Darfur.

The novel online program, dubbed the mtvU Darfur Digital Activist Contest, recently named four semi-finalists from USC and Carnegie Mellon. The contestants submitted games that ranged from fetching water from the village well without being killed to inhabiting a United Nations worker avatar charged with maintaining peace in the region.

John Gaeta, visual effects supervisor of "The Matrix" trilogy, predicts that filmmakers creating personal stories in gaming environments is the next logical step in the evolution of cinema and gaming.

"We'll see a movie that preserves the singular vision of the creator that also allows the viewer-player to observe it, to play it and go into a hybrid exploratory mode," he said. "That's the most exciting format I can possibly think of. That idea is the most powerful new idea. You can't call it filmmaking, you can't call it games."

Hollywood Reporter article

April 06, 2006

IGF keeps indie spirit alive in game industry

By Paul Hyman

Each year, aspiring filmmakers trek to Park City for the Sundance Film Festival with their self-funded, labor-of-love projects hoping to get noticed by Hollywood players -- or just get noticed by an appreciating crowd. The vibe at the festival is its focus on the independent vision, at odds with the formulaic approach to many Hollywood films or involving projects that would just never get made there.

One might ask why there's not a similar event for video games, an industry criticized for relying on sequels, licenses and not enough original ideas. Wouldn't that be a terrific place to show off the creativity of up-and-coming independent developers who might themselves move on up to the big time?

The fact is that, for the last eight years, the Independent Games Festival (IGF) has done exactly that -- judged hundreds of games, handed out monetary awards and done its best to spread the word that independent game development is alive and well and ought to be more visible. The IGF held its latest gathering in San Jose in March.

If you've never heard of the IGF, perhaps independent games need more visibility still.

"Unfortunately, that's where the comparison between Sundance and the IGF breaks down to some extent," says Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA). "For the most part, nobody who's making large-scale PC or console games really cares about the IGF in a material way, simply because it's not their business. If I'm a big publisher who's putting out $10-million Xbox games, seeing some little, cool indie game at IGF has absolutely no relevance to my business. Given the current state of affairs at retail and in games publishing, I cannot take what's at IGF and put it in a box and sell it in the stores."

Indeed, few if any gamers will have heard of any of the titles that the IGF lists as "success stories" on its Web site -- "Terminus," "Tread Marks," "Wild Earth," "Oasis," and "Alien Hominid."

That's because, unlike at Sundance, the big game publishers aren't snapping up indie titles, winners or otherwise.

"The publishers aren't looking to be inspired; they just want to repeat what sold last year," notes Della Rocca. "They become more risk-averse as time goes on and less likely to be reinvigorated by the stuff that's happening on the indie scene via the IGF. That doesn't mean the IGF isn't important; it's just not having the impact that it should have."

But success at IGF isn't necessarily measured by how many games are picked up by commercial publishers, says Simon Carless, chairman of the IGF, which takes place in a pavilion inside of the annual Game Developers Conference. Unlike Sundance, he says, quite a few indie developers have no interest in, say, an Activision or an Electronic Arts publishing their games -- or hiring them for future projects.

"Many of the ideas that surface at IGF aren't necessarily in the mainstream and aren't necessarily the kind of thing that the average gamer wants to play," he notes. "There's a lot of really great stuff, but it doesn't always cross over, like many independent films do. And so, while there's a market for indie games, it may not be on a very large scale."

Instead, says Carless, many developers come to IGF seeking recognition from their peers, perhaps some visibility that will make funding the next project easier than the previous one.


"Darwinia"

That's why Tom Arundel came to San Jose two weeks ago, having entered his company's game "Darwinia" (for PC) in this year's competition. Tom oversees business development for London-based Introversion Software.

"Darwinia" is an action game about a virtual theme park running entirely inside a computer network with a population of sentient evolving life forms. Gamers find that Darwinia has been overrun by a computer virus and their task is to destroy the infection and save the populace from extinction.

"We decided that if we could win -- even a small prize -- it would add a lot to our credibility in the industry and improve our profile," Arundel explains. "People have asked us if, at some point, a large publisher came to us and said they'd like to buy Introversion or hire us, would we do it? Our answer is always the same -- not really. Our goal is to be like Valve Software [the independent developer and publisher of the award-winning "Half-Life" series], who we think are quite inspirational. They are coming up with their own ideas, putting out the best products they can, not taking money from anybody and retaining ownership of their IP."

As it turns out, Arundel and his team won the first prize at IGF -- the $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize. That money will now be applied to other projects, including porting "Darwinia" to several other platforms and continuing work on Introversion's next game, an online multiplayer title called "Defcon (Defense Condition)" which is expected to be released this September.

"We have two options right now," Arundel confides. "We can either go out and hire people and try to grow the company. Or we can stay small and do things the way we've been doing. If we did the former, we might wind up so big we'd have 250 mouths to feed. And, in that condition, with perhaps just six months' worth of cash on hand, we'd get pretty desperate to take whatever deal comes along. That's not what we want. So I think we'll stay the size we are."

According to the Introversion Web site, that means four directors and a staff of six, including Arundel's sister who handles the PR and the father of one of the co-founders, whose job it is to package and ship the game boxes from his garage.

In addition to developers like Introversion -- which choose not to be employed by large publishers -- the indie space is populated by developers who have been there, done that, and now want to work on their own.

" Rich Carlson built first-person shooters at Ion Storm, left to start Digital Eel, and turned out the indie game 'Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space,'" says the IGF's Carless. "Now he just wants to do his own thing. Similarly, Andy Schatz had worked in the mainstream industry and left, describing himself as 'a game industry burnout in a dead-end career.' He went on to do his own indie game, 'Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa,' and I'm guessing that even if Electronic Arts knocked on his door, he'd have no interest."

One veteran of big publishers is Brian Kingsley who put in his time as a senior producer at EA, Activision, and Sega. When he left to go out on his own, he took a different path. Instead of developing his own games, he opened Wayzata, MN-based Moondance Games in 2003 to publish those of other developers.

"Brian noticed that independent developers would often submit game ideas -- or complete games -- to publishers that were really fantastic, but they were slightly different from everything else on the retail shelves," says Sarah Borchers, Moondance's CEO. "And that was often enough to scare away the big publishers."

"
Kingsley, who is now Moondance's president, came up with the idea of creating a compilation of IGF entries that could be published on a CD and sold at retail. The result is "Independent Games: Award-Winning Titles From The Independent Games Festival," which is now in retail and online stores, selling for $29.95. His plan is to create a new version every year in conjunction with the IGF.

"We felt that not only were independent developers not getting a fair shake in terms of it being difficult for them to sell their games at retail, but the mass market wasn't able to find these great titles," explains Borchers. "So we're trying to connect the two groups together and, at the same time, help the entire industry grow."

The disc contains more than two dozen games from developers who were IGF 2005 finalists and who chose to participate -- and share in the profits -- plus a game kit that allows users to create their own titles. The IGF 2006 compilation (which may or may not contain "Darwinia" depending on whether Introversion opts in) will be available this fall.

"Because, by definition, independent developers aren't funded by major publishers, they often don't have the funds to be placed on retail shelves themselves or to get into high-profile spaces online," Borchers notes. "We're trying to help them reach their audiences through as many different channels as possible."

Introversion's Arundel confirms that much of the success of "Darwinia" is due to the decision to sell the game both in retail stores (approximately 10,000 units) and on his company's Web site (approximately 8,000 units). In addition, he signed a deal with Valve Software whose digital distribution system, known as Steam, is available to independent developers. He sold another 17,000 copies through Steam.

"That's about 35,000 copies at about $15 per copy," says Arundel. "When you figure we made half a million dollars with no advertising or marketing whatsoever, that's not too bad."

Being able to sell games online via digital distribution has been a boon not only to Introversion but to independent developers in general.

"That's become a really big deal," admits the IGF's Carless. "The fact that digital distribution is becoming more popular and that gamers have broadband access to games is a great thing for indie developers; they don't have to rely on retail stores to bring their games to the public."

Arundel agrees: "Even if you can convince a retail store to take 10 copies of your game and put it on their shelves, you're competing with all the other AAA titles next to them. Most of the time you can't even convince the store manager to 'waste' his shelf space on your weird little game which he's never heard of.

"While it's always fun to drop into a shop and see your game in a nice little box on the shelf, it's just not worth the effort and poor returns. If you're going to be an indie developer, you really can't depend on retail. All I can say is thank goodness for digital distribution."

IGF

Check out the The Independent Games Festival for games less than ordinary. Reported in The Hollywood Reporter Video Games column for April 6th.

Games and companies mentioned in the article:

• Terminus
  
• Tread Marks
  
• Wild Earth
  
• Oasis
  
• Alien Hominid
  
• Introversion Software
  
• Valve Software and
• Steam
  
• Moondance Games
  

searching for an original game

I'm searching for games that don't follow the typical map of Nintendo Mario games, where you walk around jumping on things or collecting things, or first person shooters where you do the same from a three dimensional perspective. Inspired by Nintendo's upcoming Brain Age for the Nintendo DS and the latest pet simulator, Nintendogs, I've begun a search on the craziest, weirdest, most oddball games around, in the hopes that the game industry will soon grow to adding to these titles.

Currently in the news:

Nintendo urges game makers to innovate(3/24/06, Reuters UK)

Brain Teasers(3/27/06, Wired News). See also: Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson and PQ: Practical Intelligence Quotient from d3 for PSP.

You May Unrot Your Mind(3/28/06, Washington Post)

Nintendo DS Brain Age. Available in the US April 17th.

Brain Age Nintendo site.

Google search for "weird Japanese games":

Intelligent Artifice post on Happiness Controller, from Sony. GamePro article about it.

Intelligent Artifice post from 2003 about innovative games. Post from 2003 about strange Japanese games, part 1, part 2.

rant, whine, 'splain, espouse... link to japanese flash game site.

GamePro article about Uo, a game where you play a fish.

Finny the Fish & the Seven Waters. The Sony Uo game where you play a fish, described by ign.com.

Games * Design * Art * Culture post about the state of the gaming industry.

Eidos Fresh games.

Fluid. A music making tool/game.

Baby Universe. Image-making tool/game.

It came from Japan: Volume 9 from gamespy.com. The second installment of this column's look at Japanese game oddities, from 2003. Interesting genre: management sims. After reading that the game consisted of being a sports manager, I was less interested as I would have been had it instead been some radical game about being a middle manager at some no name company. There is something sublime about playing a game based on mundane tasks.