The places I love

Ok so this is going to make me look very geeky.... But I just can't stop myself from loving Heroes of Might and Magic III. Yes, just version 3. I love the long periods of thought in between each go, the time to figure out exactly which strategy is best, the pixel art creatures, the short list of games you can play, the small range of randomness in each new game. It's a finished package.

It's probably 10 years old at least. I have to force myself to stop playing it at times!

Some thoughts about loss

RE: losing the places you love.

Architects get this in a few ways:

• Fond memories of places they lived in or travelled to
• The buildings they design for others, and then must move on.

Anyone can relate to having lost that sense of involvement in stories and adventures from their childhood. Lost innocence maybe?

Gamers have a similar sense of loss, as do machinima makers:

• Games, like movies these days, are often remakes or retakes from the golden days of sci-fi, pixel-art games or the like, allowing a new exploration of a familiar world
  
• Machinima will often try to look more fake rather than more real, partly because it's so much harder to look real, but partly also because there are a lot of good memories rooted in earlier - less advanced - games.

Many people think that the essence of good game design is being lost when all the focus is on bigger being better.

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.