black mesa frog
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‘↵Black Mesa‘ meanwhile is here—and above is a fine specimen of machinima—many more of those over at the ↑critter week thread. … Continue reading
Tag Archives: machinima
frags with love
‘Im just five hours old … Truly beautiful to behold …’ Fresh from the mint, here is KerLeone’s very first frag movie—high quality definition, editing, and frags, plus a gorgeous soundtrack. It was he, my old on- and offline pal, who brought me to ↑Quake more than a decade ago … and it took him that long to create a frag movie :) Enjoy! … Continue reading
shell of ghosts
Here is a snippet from the recent ↑interview with William Gibson, which Bryan Alexander (who ↵pointed me to it) ↵liked especially: It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve … Continue reading
delayed access
Just another ‘little’ rant on economized politics reigning academia—skip it if you can’t stand it anymore. Last night I woke up around one o’clock in the morning and couldn’t find sleep again. So, in trying to catch up with my personal reading schedule, I spent the rest of the night by burning through Steven Poole’s “Trigger happy” (↵Poole 2000) and especially ↑Henry Lowood‘s “High-performance play: The making of machinima”. I ↵already knew that the latter is a real gem, but somehow shifted it from desk to desk in didn’t come around to read it till last night. Already after … Continue reading
lepus
BizoO in S3DF4 Another one, ↑“Lepus” (2005) [18:39min | .ogm | 440MB] by fei of ↑Shaolin Productions—he says: Movie was done in a few days, it’s not a 1 year project like Get Quaked 3 but this was a real joy to make, no pressure and one of my favorite game types: CPMa defrag runs. (with some vq3 thrown in.) This movie is not made for the fans of Speed trail or even Cetus the Movie, but more for the likes of KOS-RUNS :P fast and pretty! This was a nice coffee break vid, inbetween GQ3 and my next … Continue reading
more infinite trajectory
deathmatch is to tricking as kumite is to kata Just recently ↑Cory Doctorow voiced his fondness of “Tricking iT2″ [see below] by ↑Team iT: “Even if you’re not a Quake player (I’m not, particularly, though I live with a retired member of the UK national Quake team) this is every bit as engrossing as any parkour video or Olympic demonstration sport.” Very well said, but, I am afraid, I have to mention that this is not simply a “20-minute video of a virtuoso Quake III player doing the most amazing “rocket-jump” acrobatics”. Rather it is the audiovisually most impressing … Continue reading
event horizon 2
There are always the prophets of doom [pun not intended]—cyberpunk has been declared dead and to be a forgotten relic of the 1980s, ↵Q3A has been labelled accordingly, and trickjumping … now someone even has called a vote at Wikipedia to delete the entry ↑Strafe-jumping, and that in the face of articles like ↑“Strafing Theory” by injx being online. It already went so far that even I sometimes thought that ↵my being concerned with Q3A stuff meanwhile is purely of historical interest. Far from it. Nothing is dead. Just recently Team Event Horizon’s second team tricking movie has been … Continue reading
the making of machinima
↑LOWOOD, HENRY E. 2006. “High-performance play: The making of machinima.” To appear in: Videogames and Art: Intersections and Interactions, Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell (eds.), Intellect Books (UK), 2006. Also to appear in: Journal of Media Practice: Videogames and Art issue (2006). Machinima is the making of animated movies in real time through the use of computer game technology. The projects that launched machinima embedded gameplay in practices of performance, spectatorship, subversion, modification, and community. This article is concerned primarily with the earliest machinima projects. In this phase, DOOM and especially Quake movie makers created practices of game performance and … Continue reading
machinima: finding its way
Coincidence again—just last Monday, while composing ↵demo and ↵snaking and strafe-jumping, I found ↑“Diary of a Camper”, not this blog’s subtitle, but allegedly the very first instance of ↵machinima. Today I found ↑Machinima: Finding Its Way, representing “not only a somewhat loose retrospective of Machinima’s history, but also the blurry lines between fandom, subversive fetish and grotesque commercialism”: Machinima is a hybrid medium, a mix and remix of filmmaking and game culture. Its life started in 1996 as an afterthought—a nearly overlooked existence within the gaming community, then known as “Quake Movies.” In the last ten years however, Machinima … Continue reading
demo
It’s time to clarify the ambiguous term “demo” as used within gaming culture. For that purpose I’ll quote from some ‘emic sources’. 1. Let’s start with the obvious, Wikipedia’s entry ↑Game demo: A game demo is a freely distributed demonstration or preview of an upcoming or recently released computer or video game. [...] Game demos come in two variations: playable and non-playable (also called a “rolling demo”). Playable demos generally have the exact same gameplay as the upcoming full game, although game advancement is usually limited to a certain point, and occasionally some advanced features might be disabled. A non-playable … Continue reading