Tag Archives: #transmedia

InterMedia Dating

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HL2 + real world

Last year, in anticipation of Doom3 and Half-Life 2 – and all their machinima potential – I posted a kind of “how-to” page for some indy filmmakers; showing them how a game character might be composited into a low-budget film. Well, it appears a group of Half-Life 2 fans are doing the deed (although their technique seems different) and the Deathfall website has an interview with the 17-year-old behind the project, Australian Nick Bertke. I’m not actually expecting it to be completed (HDRI is a relatively slow rendering process, all things considered), but I certainly hope and believe we’ll see something. Looks like the meet-up between traditional film and machinima is in the dating stage. Having watched some of the Playstation 3 gameplay footage, I’d venture there’s a marriage in their future.

(See also: G4 TV’s coverage – Link)

Selling the Experience

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I had this conversation again yesterday:

Friend: Can you imagine that? Someone paid like a $100 for this sword-thing and it’s not even real! It’s nothing. Make believe. It only exists in the game.
Me: You need to think about it differently.
Friend: But it doesn’t make any sense. They’re buying nothing!
Me: What do you buy when you get tickets to a baseball game? Or a concert?

The only thing I can figure is that the perception of reality blinds people to this obvious commonality: virtual products aren’t much different than most entertainment, whether it be going to the Indy 500 to watch people race cars in a circle or going to Disneyland to visit Space Mountain, none of it is stuff you can put in the car, take home, and place on your shelf.

People don’t play video games because they have to, they do it because it’s fun. It’s a luxury we enjoy in developed countries when our basic needs are met. It’s really just like going to a sporting event. And there is also a social element. Perhaps not as immersive as the real thing (having a beer spilled on you in the bleachers is pretty immersive), but which is more social: watching the television alone in your room or playing Counter-Strike online with your clan?

The point is that what we now think nothing of was unthinkable not so long ago (e.g. paying some guy millions of dollars to dribble a ball on a wooden floor); and what is unthinkable now will likely be common in the not too distant future. Let’s not forget, there was a time when being an Actor was an almost shameful profession (in some parts of the world, they still think paying people to act is laughable). Which leads me to this article over on Gizmag about a videogame tournament with a $1,000,000 prize. Maybe when you read the article, Mark Cuban’s comments on broadcasting these videogame tournaments at digitally-enabled movie theaters doesn’t sound so far-fetched.

Killzone 2 and PS3 Images

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I don’t know how long it’ll be on the front page, but the game trailer for Killzone 2 is well worth a look. If this is what one of the first titles for Sony’s PS3 looks like, it’s pretty impressive already. It’s a bit violent (go figure), but this is a good example of the future of online 3D. Watch it over on gametrailers.com (available as both a Windows Media Video and as a Quicktime).

Motor Storm screenshot

If you don’t want to watch the video, then check out these screenshots over on C|Net (the above image is from a Gamespot early review of Evolution Studios’ Motor Storm). Yes, Mom, that’s a videogame.

(edit – there’s some online discussion over which PS3 movies and screenshots are real time and which are pre-rendered or just cinematics. As of now, it appears the Killzone 2 trailer is a pre-rendered video clip intended to match the eventual real-time game rendering. I’m venturing the above image is also pre-rendered. However, the F1 racing car screenshot on the C|Net link is reportedly real time gameplay.)

Blog In Game

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There’s been alot of “blog talk” the last week or so. BusinessWeek had a big article on it… there were comments and discussions about that… then there was some NYTimes article by Adam Cohen on it yesterday I guess (maybe spurred by the BW thing), that got other people like Chris Anderson over on the Long Tail site talking. I rather liked Anderson’s comment: “The first rule of the blogosphere…is not to generalize about the blogosphere.” Seems that should apply to a lot of things.

Well, after all that (most of which I simply stepped cautiously around), I came upon this entry over on the MIT Technology Review site via the MIT AdLab site about the advertising potential of in-game blogging. It’s not all that amazing an article, but it did remind me that “non-gamish” virtual worlds like Second Life have already embraced this kind of stuff (there’s now an in-world internet of sorts so there should be real blogs popping up any day). Second Life even has a paid in-world journalist who posts entries online on his New World Notes site – and some of what is written is decidely not “game” material. Surprising that Second Life and perhaps other sims weren’t included in that article… almost as if someone else out there doesn’t quite consider them Games. I wonder if, when MMORPGs start churning out real advertising deals and XBox2 players start earning real cash using Microsoft’s virtual business tools, if those too will look less like games and more like regular businesses.

I Want My… I Want My Source TV.

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From Blue’s News today:

Steam News has word on the release of an updated Source client as well as a SourceTV update: “An update for the Steam Client (and the HLDS Update Tool) has been released, along with some improvements to SourceTV. (SourceTV is for broadcasting Source games to large numbers of spectators.)

Just wait til billionaire Mark Cuban broadcasts a large game competition at one of his digital movie theaters. I’ve got to get HL2 soon. All this is too wild.