Machinima and Games
Kris and Sascha talk about games and machinima
sites: machinima.com
open source game engine: the cuibe
Good Machinima:
definitions:
CGI: Computer Graphics Interface. The name given to computer graphics used in movies.
FPS: First person shooter, a standard game where you see from perspective of the main player. eg doom, quake, halflife
game engines: the underlying part of the game that is usually seperate from the colours and story line, which sit on top of it. the game engine's role is to do all the heavy mathematics regarding gravity, explosions, body weight, how walls work, how the ground works, etc. Advice: use a pre built game engine. The mathematics required are beyond the scope of the transmission network.
Notes:
Machinima - Game engines for machinima: Grand Theft Auto - a game about car-jacking, robbing, etc. - people have used the game engine to create stories - most of the game is very story-based, cinematic - tools available to make stories in GTA are really good. Halo is a v. popular comp. game about shooting aliens and stuff, but they have very good cinematic scripting tools. Other Game engines: The Sims, Call of Duty (about World War), World of Warcraft, Cube (open source), Warcraft, Red Alert, any other game with modification tools. When machinima first became popular, people were making cinematic scenes, and were released as files you have to open in game engines - then first film came rendered in video - you could play in VLC, etc. - that has now become a more popular way to produce machinima - can distribute on youTube, etc. Games - In terms of using games and machinima as activist tools, in addition to recording stories or making videos, a lot of people are getting into making games, where the game itself, story-line, interactivity etc have a social message. Will show some examples - people making games to address all sorts of social issues - gamesforchange.org - which is a blog, portal about social actions, games. One interesting example from US is "Dying for Darfur", which is about situation in Darfur, child soldiers, etc. Idea is actually playing games does some kind of political work - the tasks you are trying to do inside games carries a political message - a typical task in a game is "kill other people" - you have weapons and have to kill the enemy - not saying that is bad or good - interesting things happen with social networks around games, etc. - can be really fun, form friendships, but killing is the major narrative. One thing activists are doing are making games with v. different types of tasks. eg. work with people to make a house, get water to your village, etc. Kris: Computer game called SimCity - where you control a city, build parks, towers, railways, etc. - has been used by urban planners world-wide to plan cities - used by very serious software developer to become more accurate - what happens if you build a park next to an industrial zone, etc.? The results in game are generally very accurate - your population goes down if you build not-good-roads, traffic increases, etc. Possibilities with games: Teach people how to navigate through a city during a protest; How to vote, etc... Example: Fire Escape training system Kris made for degree thesis - modification of half-life to teach people how to escape from building during a fire. In a game like Half-Life (popular first-person shoot 'em up.. ) - has become v. popular become allows modifications.. The games based on half-life include about saving refugees, about World War II, also few people making educational games about half-life - Kris' fire escape game being one of them. (What is an engine? Defines game physics, what happens when u fall from building, bang into wall, involves lots of math & physics, etc.. ) This is whhy you should use existing game engine so you don't have to spend time with geeky physics and can spend time designing characters, etc....
Sample Flash game that Sasha has brought: Sasha going to show some MAchinima clips + some activist games. 1. http://www.machinima.com/ - can browse through lots of machinima clips - most is not political, but is interesting since you will find out what is happening with world of machinima.
2. Darfur is Dying game - made by students at the University of Southern Cali... was made to increase awareness about situation in Darfur - picked up by MTV, who bought game from them -- good side is lots of people saw it, bad side is MTV owns the game and friends can no longer do new things with it.
Game made in Flash that can be put on website or downloaded locally - in browser ... a whole genre of social action games is small flash games that you can play in browser - generally have very short learning curve - designed so that you can play and learn very quickly - as opposed to multiplayer games where people spend a lot of time learning game-play, etc. Is really good for campaigns, a particular message you want to get out very quickly -- you can send a link, loads in browser, and end of game you can have some action for them to take. In Dying for Darfur, you chose a character, and then you have to forage for water. Navigate by using arrow keys and hide with Space Bar. You run around and hide from trucks coming to kill you - the character icon is really cute, which makes you identify, and the game is really really easy - only arrow keys and space-bar ... at the end of the game, it tells you what happens to boys / girls who are captured by the militia in Darfur, let you take action on situation in Darfur, etc.
Usually, you would find a way to make game educational + use the game to let people take some sort of action .. would be v. cool if we started encouraging more radical action using the game-space ...
http://molleindustria.org - is a more radical game group - uses sick humour to make political games ..
eg. Faith Fighter - chose your belief and kick the shit out of your enemies - religious hate has never been so much fun.
eg. PedoPriest - you are a priest and have to molest little boys, etc.
eg. MacDonalds - have to manage MacDonalds - discover all the Dirty Little Secrets that made MacDonalds one of the biggest companies in the World .
You decide to bulldoze forest, destroy town - you get Anti-Globalization movement alert, etc. - you can corrupt a health officer, climatoligist, etc... teaches people about the globalization movement, how multinationals work, etc...
Q: how easy is it to make a flash game Sasha: Same as any software development project - u need the Flash software, and things are a lot easier if there are a bunch of people collaborating, etc.. - large games would have bigger budgets than hollywood films and people with very specific tasks.
3. eg. Red vs. Blue - Based on very popular first person shooter called Halo - premise is you are running around killing aliens - multiplayer version where u are fighting other people - teams of people trying to capture the other persons' flag and kill everyone - guys made machinima called Red v. Blue using screen captures recording on their comp. and adding audio dubs to tell some stories (funny clip with characters in the game talking about why they're there, etc... ) - subverting game narrative which is normally only "kill everyone all the time" - reason its funny is undermining expected narrative - can do that with a lot of different kinds of games.
4. French Democracy - http://www.machinima.com/film/view&id=1407 based on French immigrant issues, based on electrocution incident - uses game engine to describe political situation / history of what happened there ...
Sasha: Examples from other people, etc.. Sam: Kids in class disappointed with China team not getting into World cup, played FIFA and made China win, and recorded it and put their own audio commentary saying great things about China .. LAchlan: Interviews done in MAchinima - interesting to see two space-suited characters bouncing around and interviewing eachother.. Sasha: Machinima.com actually has an interview series - different types of people interviewing eachother, etc.. could use it to do remote interviews of eachother inside games... and include that in films .. Another example is defeating censorship by using interaction inside games .. multiplayer games will have 1000s of people playing inside the game and can talk with text / voice - one action of an example that happened is in World of Warcraft - is a fantasy game where u are a knight, elf, etc. - assemble team, go on missions, etc. - inside this game, some activists used it to defeat censorship inside China - Free Speech activists went in inside game and went to Chinese servers and inside the game they had an object that signalled people who were participating in this and Chinese people could ask these people to get them information about a particular thing since the game itself was not being censored -- so a Chinese person could ask a person outside the fire-wall to search for particular information and that person could paste it back into the game.. Shiraz: Are there any tools that I can download to make machinima? They used many characters, how did they make them? Sasha: In French Democracy, for eg. - all characters were not all inside the game - they made them by importing images, mapping faces, etc. - you can also make it just using the game as it is, as in Red v. Blue - just do screen captures - script, play the game, and screen cap.
Sam: Does anyone have experience with Cube, Open Source game engine? Sasha: Wikipedia has a list of FOSS game engines -
Q: What are the softwares you can use for Screen Capture? A: For Linux, xvidcap - for Mac, pirated copy of Snapz - Windows, HyperCam Oomleo : First we must learn how to create a good resolution for their monitor, etc. - the difference between dpi, ppi - why there is 300 dpi on screen - need to understand the pixel-based nature of your monitor to do good screen capturing .. Share a bit about pixel-art - take care about screen resolution - when u do machinima, should use 800x600, so that it looks good online - must learn a lot about the quality a lot before just capturing, capturing, capturing...
Sasha: if the initial version you capture is not high enough resolution, it will look like crap when you screen it. You don't have to be afraid of it, though - you can just get any software and try playing with it - try different settings and see what that looks like later. Don't wait till you know everything about it ..
Lachlan: For what its worth, French Democracy game was made with a game called The Movies - is an economic simulation where you are a Hollywood film director where your aim is to make movies -- so its really a game to make Machinima.
Kris: To find out more about Cube, you can go to www.cubeengine.com
Kris: Talked about Fire-Escape game - chose Half-Life because it was really popular in cyber-cafes in Penang - its the engine I knew best - I took the mod and distributed it to the cybercafes - would install it on all the machines - when you play half-life, you can chose what mod you want - one that makes everything multi-coloured, makes it World War II, also this Fire-Escape mod where you don't have guns, etc. but just have the purpose to escape from this building on fire. If you want to make your own mod, you need editor provided by the Half-Life company + C++ or Visual C++ - need to know a bit about programming, 3-d modelling, etc.
Halo for Mac - there is a community even around the demo version of Halo for mac - there are virtual communitites around making mods for it, and making a mod is a good way to talk to that community - its worth doing some research if you want to do a campaign targetting young people to find out what games they are into - go to cybercafes, etc... chose a popular game and you can make some mod as part of the campaign that your organization is doing as a really good way to reach people.
Sasha: Mobile phone games - you can play games on cellphone - people are doing game design for mobile devices - I worked with group called ZNQ - they make games about various things, one about HIV - basically a quiz game - using Java for Mobile - people can download it onto their phone for free, play the game - it asks you different questions - how you can get HIV, etc. - so there's ways you can use mobile phones and mobile games for social awareness and activism.
Dongwon: One thing - in the digital world, there are some board games - found one called Capitalism -- in that game, there are State, Capitalists, Students - which shows the logic of capitalist society - u can play that game to raise consciousness of society..
Kris: Was a very popular training program sponsored by the US Army called America's Army - millions of American kids are playing it - is available to download for free, etc. Also a Singapore military game called Project War Chamber - mod of Operation Flash-Point, sponsored by Singapore Military... Sasha: Setup a LAN Halo Demo...if a bunch of us got into this game, we could all hang out here so create a script and make a machinima ...
Kris: one of the biggest reasons to do MAchinima, mods are a way to propogate human rights issues, etc. to computer gamers who are a big target audience -- you can actually also put a slogan on your character, eg. Free Palestine, Stop NAFTA, etc...... in Half-Life, you can spray Graffiti on the walls, etc... is a really good way to quietly inject socio-political issues in computer games...
Oomleo: Friends from Ruangrupa created a movie with The Sims - now you can create your own face and play the Sim with your own face - the camera can be put anywhere in the game - if you go to Jakarta, you can buy a pirated DVD of the Sims:) and you can create a movie - get a husband / wife and create a porn movie with the Sims ... everything can be possible with a plugin - u can record any kind of scene and customize it completely ...
Sasha: that reminds me - one of the previous versions of the Sims - one game designer was a Gay Activist - inserted inside one Sim Scene, inside a party scene - they made it so the default setting for making out at parties was all same-sex make-outs ... it was a big scandal in the US beecause right-wing people said Sims was promoting Satan.
Oom:
