Machinimart

Awesome news for the world of machinima in general! Forbes reports on massive funding for machinima.com, quoting CEO Allen DeBevoise:

DeBevoise says the success of the site is partly due to a trend in video games, where the main product is increasingly supported by additional marketing and entertainment, like downloadable content or online videos. He cites as evidence Machinima’s “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2″ video content, which attracted 125 million video views in the first 100 days.

The road gladdens the obsessed ghost.

The Sydney Morning Herald calls machinima “one of the most exciting and fastest-growing new art forms sweeping the world” and announces what sounds like a brilliant festival:

The art of Machinima is soon to be celebrated at a new Australian exhibition at the Queensland University of Technology.

The exhibition features over 60 Machinima works from artists including Australia’s Chris Howlett and Austrian Friedrich Kirschner. The exhibition begins with the first clunky films created using Doom and Quake in the mid-90s through to sophisticated contemporary films.

QUT says the exhibition “highlights a growing insurgency as contemporary art forms develop outside of traditional art fields, bringing brand new art forms to the fore”.

This is a very exciting time to be working on machinima, and it’s only a matter of a few years before it becomes accessible to all–not just as entertainment, but as a widespread form of expression. Wish I could make it to the festival this year! Here’s hoping it becomes an annual thing.

Article is here: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/games/blogs/screenplay/new-art-form-lifts-game/20100706-zz4k.html

This is art:

And so is this:

Roger Ebert has written a detailed retraction of his foolish April blog post claiming that “Video games can never be art.” I was surprised and happy to see this retraction. I think I was surprised because I’m not used to seeing ANYONE, even Roger Ebert, back down from such an emphatically stated position unless they’re somehow forced to (by legal/financial/political pressure, etc.). But on the other hand, I was even more surprised by the initial post. It seemed to me out of character for Roger Ebert to be so closed minded.

I personally don’t play video games. But machinima is most certainly an art form, one that relies upon the artistry of video game design principles and platforms. I’ve tried video games and they haven’t much captured my attention, but I’m very well attuned to the fact that they CAN BE, and OFTEN ARE, art. Ebert writes,

I had to be prepared to agree that gamers can have an experience that, for them, is Art. I don’t know what they can learn about another human being that way, no matter how much they learn about Human Nature. I don’t know if they can be inspired to transcend themselves. Perhaps they can. How can I say? I may be wrong. but if ‘m not willing to play a video game to find that out, I should say so.

I don’t play video games either, but I’ve seen and heard enough to say that they very much CAN inspire people in the ways described above. In fact, from what I’ve seen of Portal, it gets me thinking the same way many great films do. Same with regards to Fallout. The storytelling, imagery and metaphors in some games are simply brilliant. It really doesn’t take 40 hours of gaming to come to that conclusion.

The new post is here.

And this too is art (in a Star Wars kid type of way):