Inside the World of Webcraft

This clip, like the last one, I found in the "classic" listing on Machinima.com. It shows that when people can spend as much time expressing themselves as much as they want, and they consider what they're doing to be legitimate, they start to self-maintain their community. In other words, communication becomes community.

To give you an idea of how immersed these people get in their niche of the world, I picked the first post on Machinima.com's message board. A quick google search of the author's alias returned profiles on so many gamer websites that they couldn't be listed on one page of google results. I checked the results, they were all about the same person. Some of them were from 3 years ago, some of them were actually written by the gamer's xbox, which apparently has its own blog. By looking at the different websites, I could see what this person had been interested in / infatuated by during the last few YEARS. And because these are social network sites for the most part, I could see that this person's friends were along for the ride. So yeah, pretty surrounded in the gamer niche world.

PS. This clip is a critique of a gaming platform, each of the character types, those character type powers, aimed at the makers of that platform, and a review of an hour and a half movie made by one fan. It goes into more depth than Today Tonight. (admittedly not too hard)

Retro Rules

Animated characters and scenes are being used to tell very real and human stories. And though some sophisticated puppets are given very human expression, the very best Machinima cinematography is firmly rooted in the articulation of the early gamer world.

Hence flashing red screens tell us when things have turned sour.

Machinima research: Freeman's Mind (Ep3)

I like the first half of this one. Obviously a good Machinima vid is all about narrative. This one also has spot on observations about the crappiness of some video game spatial design.

The pain in architecture is...

... losing the places you love

... Rising expectations and a shrinking budget

... getting neighbours to get along

Machinima research: Red vs Blue

So this does a pretty nice job of giving a sense of place, and has a bit of character - both in terms of the storytelling and giving life to characters. Its character is a little like Firefly, which has that comfortable hometown feel - or at least, a longing for it...

Be a lot nicer if it wasn't advertising for some Microsoft product.