machinima
In the rat-a-tat-tat of new post-industrial cultural forms, I had never heard of machinima (despite the Wired story I somehow missed). Although the elision of machine and cinema sounds like a Debordian/Cronenbergian hybrid, machinima is actually more fimoculean. (That is officially the first use of the adjective form of fimoculous. OED, here I come.) It refers generally to short films that are recorded and viewed in real time on a computer. Specifically, machinima is playing a video game in such a way as to create narrative scenes which are recorded and played back as legit movies. Excavating popular interactive forms (games, digital media) for traditional narrative (character, plot) is mind-bogglingly cool to me. Over the weekend, I watched a dozen of these filmlets at a Walker festival, Quake! Doom! Sims!, Transforming Play: Family Albums and Monster Movies. The curator, Katie Salen -- who worked on Linklater's Waking Life, is a contributing editor at Res, and is currently working on a new release for the Xbox Broadband initiative -- guided the audience of digi-film fans and gamers through various forms of Jackassian juvenalia and Warholian ennui. I want more.
p.s. Sorry, today it was either talk about machinima, or ceaseless Cobain memorbillia and the new the new Doonesbury blogger. Machinima won.
