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Meet The Machinimakers: The 2006 Machinima
Festival Report
This Spartan Life's Chris BurkeGS: How and why did you first start This Spartan Life? Chris Burke: My co-writer John Keats and I were working together on some sound work. We had seen a bunch of Machinima and were really interested in it as a form. I wanted to do something like an art piece. When I first come up with this idea, I thought it would be something the Rhizome.org people would be interested in and I might post it there; a few artists might think it was kind of cool. I knew about Eddo Stern’s stuff. I had seen Red vs. Blue and wanted to do something different. I had just gotten Halo 2 and Xbox live at that point, and realized [Xbox Live] is really a social space. You’re in there and killing each other, but if you stop killing each other for a second, it’s a social meeting place. You can walk around, you can show people things. There’s really a whole community there of people who specialize in breaking the game or extending the gameplay into areas that were not intended in the game. I got inspired by that phenomenon. I thought a talk show would be the most rewarding thing you could do there with the way that technology is now. You have the headset, you can communicate with each other verbally. While the avatars are limited in their movement, you can walk about and respond to the 3D environment, do things in it. I thought it would be an interesting to have a combination of a talk shows and documentary, like Bill Moyers, where he interviews someone while he's walking. GS: What have the responses been for TSL? CB: We posted TSL on the web in July of 2005. It was received very well from a whole difference audience that we never considered. Several different audiences; one of which was gamers. G4 TV did a story about it, and our site was knocked down by the hits that we got. It got us out there to a lot of people that wouldn’t have seen it. We had this really eclectic demographic. Half of the audience was 15-20 year old gamers, and the other half of the audience were media professionals and academics. It was weird walking that line where we wanted to appeal to both of those sets of people.
GS: In the piece that screened at the festival, you interview media provocateur Malcolm McLaren. You use your medium to appeal to 15-year-old gamers, a population that might not have been exposed to McLaren. What do gamers think of your content? CB: To the extent that it’s successful, it’s hard to say. We definitely lose some of the gamers with the stuff we do, and we lose some of the academics with the stuff that’s more game-centric. There’s a lot of Halo in-jokes in the show, gamer in jokes, L33t speak. Some of the academics don’t really get it or aren’t interested in it. We try to balance around the middle. We’ve had a lot of our fans say, "interview this game designer, interview that guy who did the voice for Master Chief in Halo." While we’re very interested in that, I feel like that’s the easy way out. That would be limited what we do. I want to interview people who have nothing to do with games, or would be fascinated with what you can do in a game. People like Malcolm [McLaren] walk around that game, and was like, “This is weird!” He doesn’t really come across like that in the show but during the interview he would say, “I seem to be lost, the whole place is falling down!” |
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