Update - 04/22/2007 - 04/28/2007 - LAST ONE WOOHOO I'M GETTING OUT OF LOS ANGELES

For my final entry I read The Xbox Auteurs by Clive Thompson in The Best of Technology Writing. The first thing that came to mind as I was reading the first paragraph was Red vs. Blue, which I had first seen 3 years ago, and true enough it was exactly the subject of the article. I've seen quite a few episodes, though certainly not all of them, but didn't really know much of the background behind how the project got started. I found it pretty funny that to make the characters "talk" and such in-game they just wiggle them around and try to bob their heads and such, as it always seems to be pretty decent in the episodes I've seen, though I guess they've gotten pretty good with coordinating the voice overs. The part about the creators getting a lot of fan mail from actual soldiers was amusing, though not surprising since the videos don't really have actual combat most of the time, something that is paralleled in reality.

The part about Bungie and Microsoft not really minding the creators infringing upon their intellectual property wasn't as much of a shock to me as the author. As he later points out, it was good publicity that non-usual gamers might receive, and in my own experience, I can remember the days of Asheron's Call (a mmorpg of Turbine and Microsoft) when it was trying to compete against Sony and Everquest. Everquest was dominating and energetically tried to hunt down online auctions of in-game items (such as ones listed on ebay). Microsoft, on the other hand, just turned a literal blind eye to such auctions. I always speculated that Microsoft thought if they allowed casual/new gamers in Asheron's Call to buy gear and in-game money online to advance their characters faster, they'd be more likely to keep playing AC instead of having to do most everything from scratch in EQ (though there was of course an underground market in EQ, just harder to access and with more fraud risk involved).

The stereotypical gamer definitely came out in the part about the ad for Audi made using Torque...with the 42 year old guy lusting over some digital character woman he wanted to buy to use in the ad for crying out loud. The section about the Sims characters not cooperating and behaving like childish brats, I mean real actors, was nothing if not humorous for the art imitating life aspect.

The behind-the-scenes aspect given in the article was interesting, but I still don't think there's going to be a huge market, or even a dependable decent sized market, for these types of movies. Hopefully for the creator's sake they can find some niches like Red vs. Blue to do and keep them going as long as they can, and while I wouldn't be surprised if they were able to do this for a living for a while longer, I don't think they should bet their retirement on it either.