:) I'm actually at the Game Developer's Conference this week in San
Francisco, hence the slow response. Oddly fitting actually.
So, movie snobbery aside (which is what this has been primarily), what
does it really mean to use game engines to do this kind of work?
Oh, and by the way Red vs. Blue (R vs. B) f*cking rules!
Then one day he realized that the videos he was making were
essentially computer-animated movies, almost like miniature emulations
of Finding Nemo or The Incredibles. He was using the game to function
Ok. One gripe. His stuff was actually funny. Plus it wasn't like he
could manipulate the models at whim. He had to work within the
existing engine. Way harder than setting up an animation in Maya or 3D
Studio Max and hitting play.
He created a comedy series called Red vs. Blue, a sort of sci-fi
version of M*A*S*H. In Red vs. Blue, the soldiers rarely do any
fighting; they just stand around insulting one another and musing over
the absurdities of war, sounding less like patriotic warriors than
like bored, clever, video-store clerks. The first 10-minute episode
Less like M*A*S*H and more like Halo Clerks. A much more apt
comparison if you actually look into video game culture.
Red Soldier: Why are we out here? Far as I can tell, it's just a box
canyon in the middle of nowhere, with no way in or out. And the only
reason we set up a red base here is because they have a blue base
there. And the only reason they have a blue base over there is because
we have a red base here.
Which is also a joke about (*cough* *cough* poor) video game design,
totally lost on the author.
When they were done, they posted the episode on their Web site
(surreptitiously hosted on computers at work). They figured maybe a
few hundred people would see it and get a chuckle or two.
It also helped that the boys on Penny Arcade (www.penny-arcade.com)
linked to it.
Instead, Red vs. Blue became an instant runaway hit on geek blogs, and
within a single day, twenty thousand people stampeded to the Web site
described it as 'Clerks' meets 'Star Wars,' and the BBC called it
riotously funny and said it was reminiscent of the anarchic energy
of 'South Park.' Burns realized something strange was going on. He
Ah, now geek culture comes into the article. Why the M*A*S*H reference?
Video games have not enjoyed good publicity lately. Hillary Clinton
has been denouncing the violence in titles like Grand Theft Auto,
which was yanked out of many stores recently amid news that players
had unlocked sex scenes hidden inside. Yet when they're not bemoaning
Sex scenes only available on the PC, a market which has declined by
nearly 70% in the last two years. On console you can't unlock it. No
mods. And for the most part what Hillary Clinton has been up to is
pandering to the religious conservative and right wingers in the US so
she can claim she's a moderate. Not to mention that Democrats in the
US for a large part have had an impressive interest in censoring media
and giving up our rights to content providers. Gee... thanks.
Now, I will say that game developers have been pretty retarded,
failing to grasp that the public is watching them, and continue to
release stupid sh*t like GTA, which as a gameplay mechanic is fun, but
if you bother to think about the content it's pretty whacky.
the virtual bloodshed, cultural pundits grudgingly admit that today's
games have become impressively cinematic. It's not merely that the
graphics are so good: the camera angles inside the games borrow
literally from the visual language of film. When you're playing Halo
and look up at the sun, you'll see a little lens flare, as if you
were viewing the whole experience through the eyepiece of a
16-millimeter Arriflex. By using the game to actually make cinema,
Burns and his crew flipped a switch that neatly closed a
self-referential media loop: movies begat games that begat movies.
OMG... yawn.
And Burns and his crew aren't alone. Video-game aficionados have been
creating machinima—an ungainly term mixing machine and cinema and
pronounced ma-SHEEN-i-ma—since the late 1990s. Red vs. Blue is the
Yes and no. A lot of machinima is actually done by making mods for
things like Quake 3, which isn't what the R vs. B guys are doing. It's
more like the mash-ups you already see all over youtube.
Yet as I discovered, real-life soldiers are among the most ardent fans
of Red vs. Blue. When I walked around the Rooster Teeth office, I
found it was festooned with letters, plaques, and an enormous American
flag, gifts from grateful American troops, many of whom are currently
stationed in Iraq. Isn't it a little astonishing, I asked Burns when
the crew went out in the baking Texas sun for a break, that actual
soldiers are so enamored of a show that portrays troops as inept
cowards, leaders as cynical sociopaths, and war itself as a supremely
meaningless endeavor? Burns laughed but said the appeal was nothing
sinister.
Makes sense to me. I think
