The NY Times recently described a Hollywood increasingly fascinated with Video Games as a less expensive alternative to movies-as-entertainment (Out of Hollywood, Rising Fascination With Video Games). True, Ludology.org (April 12) questions whether movie moguls know how to make games. Nonetheless, there could be another angle here: on the front page of the April 9th Wall Street Journal (see: When Art Imitates Videogames, You Have 'Red vs. Blue') we discover Red and Blue is profitably making short internet movies based within Halo. Games as movie production platforms? What next, Virtual Worlds as movie studios? Casts of thousands?
While the idea of using games to make movies is hardly new (e.g. Wired in March 2000). What is the next step in the evolution of this entertainment motif? Does Lionhead Studio's upcoming computer game The Movies (where you play the producer in a simulated movie studio and create actual short films) subliminally hint of a bigger idea to move this niche activity into the big time: why not a production studio within a Virtual World? What would it take?
A cautionary note here was sounded by Clive Thompson (July 2003) who was largely unimpressed with wares shown at the New York Video Festival:
In each case, the game-makers had crafted little dramatic scenes where you stop playing for a second, and just watch the characters deliver prescripted lines. And uniformly, these scenes were simply awful. The scripts were pretty leaden, and the characters looked static and inert. And the crowd of filmmakers noticed it. You could see them looking around at each other, going, what the hell? This is crap. This is shittiest filmmaking I've ever seen in my life.
Yet, hope (Clive again):
But then something else came on the screen, and completely blew them away. It was a short video done by a fan of the snowboarding game SSX. The gamer had pretty much mastered the game, and perfected the most incredibly cool moves imaginable -- really hilarious stuff that simply wouldn't be possible in real life, like having a snowboarder jump off the board, spin around through the air like a ballet dancer on point, and then grab the board again in time to hit the powder at 100 miles an hour. The gamer recorded hundreds of shots of these moves, and stitched the best ones together into a video set to the Evanescence tune "Bring Me To Life"... The filmmakers loved it. They went berserk. Because here, finally, was something genuinely innovative. The insane camera angles in the game -- soaring through the air alongside the pirouetting snowboarder, zooming in and out in the blink of an eye -- would be physically impossible in the real world.
Imagining how a snowboard vignette, however cool, might scale into something with the narrative complexity of, say, a Lord of the Rings, is mind-boggling. And this is where, perhaps, Virtual Worlds come in. Just perhaps Virtual Worlds are the only conceivable places where throngs of little innovations, communal experiments just might come together in a cost/time effective manner. What sort of society would it take? What game design?
Couldn't it be that given the right mix of environment, technology, and producers, there could be world, a shard somewhere, where amateur actor and director wannabes and costume designers can find themselves mixing it up within a heightened-reality-shared-frame-of-reference to produce something coherent, large, and cinematic. Lights! Camera! Action???
