Avatar Cleanup on Aisle 5
I’m currently reading Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” and, as a follow up to last week’s exploration into Machinima, our class was asked to construct our own machinima piece based on a scene from the book.
This is my first attempt at actually making a machinima short, and let me tell you, it’s not easy! Setting up camera angles, scripting behaviors, dealing with video capture issues, not to mention writing the dialog, storyboarding shots – it’s quite a bit of work. The scene I chose to recreate is from a portion of the book where the main character (”Hiro Protagonist”) is describing how he coded the Metaverse’s “cleanup” routines that get invoked after an avatar “dies” within the virtual world. The dialog is adapted from the original text.
As an aside, it must be that I’m reading Snow Crash, but everywhere I go I’m seeing connections to the creepyness that Neal Stephenson puts forth in his book. Take, for example, this picture I took at a local 7-11 convenience store. Celebrity gossip + Virtual Worlds + Combat Handguns all on the same shelf. The end is near.
MJ + The Penguin + Vigilante Justice
And this image I found while doing research into virtual worlds for kids really struck me as downright weird for some reason.
kind of creepy.
Tags: Machinima, second life, virtual world