For those of you who don’t know what Machinima is I STRONGLY recommend you read this Wikipedia article. But for short Machinima refers to short movies made using real-time image rendering by a 3D Game engine. Some of the most popular game engines used for this are Hallo, Sims 2, Rome total War, World of Warcraft and even Half-Life.
What the artist actually does is control the characters, camera and sets in order to create short movies, most of them quite funny. The reason many artists choose this form of making movies is because it’s quite cheap and it provides a wide array of possibilities with limited resources.
There are many machinima groups out there but one of the most known is ILL clan with famous productions like Hardly Workin’ and Apartment Huntin’ . For more quality machinima visit www.machinima.com.
Here you have a compilation from the machinima serise Red vs. Blue
I’ve been reading about this for a while now and opinions still seem to be parted. Here is what happened: A Belgian user of Second Life was forced ( by using a so called “voodoo doll” that is a piece of code that takes the form of a regular object as a cup or pen or whatever but in fact gives control of your avatar) to perform sexually explicit behavior. In theory a user must give his consent in order for other player to take control of his avatar, but using one of the above mentioned voodoo dolls and some persuasion you can make a user (especially a new one) to give access to his avatar.
Things like these happened before as stated in this article about a similar event that took place in an older text based mmorpg. It was discussed at the time but no real action was taken. Well this time police was involved as you can find on the second citizen forum and in all the others articles covering the story.
The debate seems to revolve around the nature of this act. Is it really a ‘rape’ or only harassment? Well it’s surely a violation of the Terms of Service for Second Life and not only, as one can see it’s still discussed if it’s a legal offense or not.
