File this under "game culture" rather than games.

One of the phenomena I find interesting is what I call "gamanimation," by which I mean movies that come out of games. Not movies that go into games--those are cut scenes--but movies created from games. They fall into a lot of different categories: fan-created film featuring footage captured from games, Flash or Shockwave animations created on game themes, and machinima, independent film created using a game engine.

Flash Stuff

Probably the best-known bit of gamanimation is, of course, All Your Base Are Belong to Us (Flash required), one of those things that became a net phenomenon some years ago. Set to a pretty decent techno score, it features both brief snippets of visuals from a game, along with a lot of photoshop art overlaying bits of goofy badly-translated game dialog onto things like Budweiser swim suits, motel signs, etc.--inexpicable, in a way, but fascinating.

Flash has been used for some other pretty cool short bits, too. One of my favorites is Pong: It's Not Just a Game, which is equally hard to explain. Then there's the Xiao Xiao series--a collection of short videos (and a couple of games) in Flash, all featuring little stick figures and fast, violent, Hong Kong chop sockey action. The best, in my opinion, are Xiao Xiao 5 and Xiao Xiao 7, which makes explicit game references (e.g., the villain is labelled a 'boss').

Arcade: True Story is a little different--it's essentially a conversation between a boy and his grandfather over a game of checkers, playing on the sometimes incomprehensible language of gamers, and quite funny. It's not fan-created, however, but a short advertisement for Gamespy Arcade, a piece of player-matching software.

Perhaps the most touching little Flash piece I've seen, however, is the MAME Song. "MAME" is, of course, Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator, a bit of software that allows you to play otherwise unavailable early videogames on your PC. The Mame song is set to a slightly edited version of the song "Fame", with visuals built using characters from early games--and the song definitely works. "I'm going to live forever"--indeed you are, Ms. PacMan, and MAME will help ensure that you do.

Game Video

Moving on to videos drawn from games, one of my favorites is Addicted to Ponage (This is a 56+ zip file; once unzipped, the file is a DivX, meaning you'll need a DivX player installed on your machine to view it.) The visuals are drawn from the Science & Industry mod for Half-Life; the music is a peculiarly serene bit of electronica, and serves to draw your attention to the sheer beauty of the visuals created through gameplay, rather than emphasizing blood and thunder, as so much game music does. Indeed, this kind of format--non-interactive video accompanied by music--lets you see that games can be beautiful, and their beauty is part of their appeal--in a way you almost never notice during actual gameplay, because you're too busy just trying to survive.

The Bungie.org movie site features a whole host of movies using graphics from Halo. The best known is Randy Glass's Warthog Jump. It's based around a Halo exploit; essentially, if you pile a bunch of grenades under a Warthog (a military vehicle in the game) and set them off, the physics engine flings the vehicle (and people in it) into the sky--giving players access to parts of the game geography the developers had never really intended them to see :). A nicely edited piece showing some amazing Warthog jumps--with appropriate music, ranging from Sinatra ("Fly Me to the Moon") to Hendrix ("Kiss the Sky"). (Quicktime format, hi res at 23.1 megs and lo at 10.2.)

I also quite like Asshole, game footage set to Dennis Leary's very funny song "I'm an Asshole". (Quicktime and WMV formats, 6.7 to 22.8 megs.)

And Right 2 Dance, featuring a techno tune by that name, is essentially a fan's plea to Bungie to do a PC version of Halo--PC gamers have a right to dance, too.

Machinima

Finally, we turn to machinima. This is a whole little underground film movement devoted to producing film using game engines. 3D animation packages let you produce models and textures you can plug into something like the Quake engine; the game engine lets you animate them and synch animations to audio. Put it together, and you've got a way to produce animation in, at least potentially, a far smaller budget than conventional means. It's also peculiarly unlike conventional animation, incidentally, in that the character motions are "played" by people as the video is "recorded"--thus it is, in a sense, closer to puppetry.

The best known piece--if only because it appeared on MTV--is a music video created using the Quake II engine for Zero 7's song "In the Waiting Line," directed by Tommy Pallotta. You can view a (pretty lo-res) version here.

The machinima (or is the singular "machinamum?") I like best is from the Ill Clan, a group of guys from Brooklyn. Their best short is Hardly Workin', a story about two lumberjacks taking a job at a greasy spoon. The site offers Quicktime, DivX, and Real media versions--but don't play 'em! They suck--audio doesn't synch up, and sometimes drops out, and the resolution is not great. If you have Quake II installed on your machine, download the Quake II version and play it in the engine to see this thing the way it's intended to be seen. Apartment Huntin' (on the same page) is also cute--you'll need Quake I to play it (although, again, inferior versions are available in other media). Because it's Quake I, the visuals are a lot cruder, of course.

I'm also fond of Hugh Hancock's Eschaton (installation instructions at the faq), built in the Quake I engine (and only playable using it). It's supposed to be close to two hours when complete, but only the first two (of four) episodes are finished (and it's been a while, so I'm not sure that Strange Company will ever complete it). Since it's Quake I, the visuals are a little crude--but there are still some impressive visual effects when the Cthulhoid horrors show up. (I do note, though, that the dialog comes across as a bit surreal--the story ostensibly takes place in Chicago and Arkham, Massachusetts, but the creators are Brits--English accents in the mouths of supposedly American characters.)

At present, the machinima community seems most excited by Anachronox: The Movie, billed as "the first feature length machinima film". I can't get all that excited about it, though; essentially, what Jake Hughes, the director did, was take the cut scenes from the game Anachronox, splice them together, edit them down, and call it a film. The cut scenes were created in-engine rather than as pre-rendered video (an increasing trend in 3D games), so it does qualify as "machinima"--although the fact that you can get a 2 hour movie out of the game's cut scenes makes me wonder to what degree that fact led to the game's failure. I don't mind a cut scene or two in a game, but I really don't want to be spending that much time watching instead of playing--one reason I'm not fond of the more recent Final Fantasy games, of course.

An Evening's Entertainment?

So--some night, instead of turning on the tube, go through these links. You'll have to jump through some hoops to get the machinima to work in-engine--and don't even try the non-flash stuff unless you have a broadband connection. But hey, you've got an evening's entertainment here, and it sure beats "reality" TV.


posted by Greg at 9:54 AM