Personality Profiles, Machinima Ratings, that kind of thing
As part of a management seminar for work this morning, we all took a personality test. I don’t recollect which one it was (no, it wasn’t Myers-Briggs), but in a way it was like all the rest in that vaguely horoscopic way. I’m someone who is terminally impaired in terms of zodiacal awareness, so I’m the kind of guy that will accidentally stumble upon the horoscope section of the newspaper, not be certain of what sign I am, and browse through several of them thinking, “Yeah, that could be me.”
That’s kind of the way I felt about the kinds of generalities the test presenter / speaker was passing off as Confucian wisdom. And ultimately, the test told me something I didn’t need a Scantron page to tell me… that I’m a jerk.
Okay, it didn’t say that at all. But isn’t it odd, our human preoccupation with categorizing things into neat little boxes? We even do that with each other. There are people who never get past skin color as a method of classification, and others who won’t take a dating step without verifying astrological compatibility. Michel Foucault lamented about the widening definition of insanity civilization has used to distance itself from the different or unusual. Hell, our own governments draw jurisdictional lines based on categories which, if they are not meaningless to us as people, damn well should be.
The notion of a personality test isn’t inherently a bad thing, though. These kinds of information about people can be used for positive purposes. The old “wearing the other guy’s shoes” thing. Which, incidentally, the Adrian Monk in me would never permit me to do.
So I’m sitting there, wishing I were somewhere else, and I had the “A-ha!” moment I thought would elude me for the session. Unfortunately for the presenter, it had nothing to do with introverts vs. extroverts or task-oriented vs. people-oriented.
As a musician, I loathe the use of “genres” in music. I find myself resenting it when people hear something I compose and immediately diminish it by throwing it into a category or genre, like they’ve stamped a piece of beef with a “Grade” and they’re moving on to the next slab.
And in some way, whether we’re talking about genres or engine classifications or public ratings or any other “boxification” method, as a once and future creator of the stuff, I find it sad to see it happen in machinima. It does seem to be excessively reductionistic and cheapening.
But you know what? It’s also necessary. I mean, let’s face it, the act of classification is a major part of why science has progressed the way it has, whether you’re talking about the table of the elements or the order of family, phylum, genus and species as applied to organisms.
And while it’s annoying what some people do with demographic statistics, wielding them as political sabres, that doesn’t make census takers sons of the devil. While it’s irritating to many bands to be lumped into a broader musical genre or to not make it to the top of the Billboard charts, those systems are extremely helpful when people are shopping for music, looking for other bands they might like, and talking about types of music in general terms.
Same goes for machinima. Right now, visiting Machinima.com as a newbie and looking for good films is a bit like visiting the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark and trying to find Moses’ bones. We need additional layers of classification, because there are so many films now it’s just maddeningly hard to find things we’re pretty sure we’ll like. A rating system would be another method of classification that many many visitors would find valuable. There is no evidence that having a list of top-rated films will cause films absent from that list to get little to no views. It doesn’t happen to albums which don’t make it to Billboard, it doesn’t happen to vendors on eBay who aren’t the top-rated. No one has been able to demonstrate a convincing example that some pestilential neglect will wash over the majority of films, because (I believe) there is no analogous situation elsewhere on the net (or anywhere) where that has been shown to be the case.
Will top-rated movies get more views by virtue of being top-rated? Of course. Isn’t that what we want? Don’t we want more people to experience GOOD machinima, without the hunt through the NSA warehouse? If we establish a currency (ratings), then we setup a situation where acclaim and higher viewership can be earned, not deserved, not gifted by an enlightened elite, and not stumbled blindly upon through the magic of chance.
Ratings are certainly a more appealing a measure to me than grouping films by engine, which I think is ultimately a classification that - if we know what’s good for us - will one day become obselete.
But that’s a whole other discussion, and I’m just not a guy who likes the corn mingling with the mashed potatoes on the plate. Or at least, that’s what my test told me.
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The Billboard charts could hardly be a place to find out about music since Top 40 and the likes are where the crap music hangs out at. People have strange entertainment values - they like stupid things. If something is not on the charts, the chances of me looking into it are greater.
Machinima is much younger than music, so the charts would surely be used as a method of seeing what this new form of cinema has to offer. This is where the whole people are entertained by stupid things deal comes back into play. I first discovered machinima through Red vs Blue. RvB prevented me from getting into machinima a lot sooner because it is so dumb. Any serious filmmaker that thought that this is what machinima was all about would be steered away as I was. RvB is, of course, probably the most popular thing in machinima right now. To me, RvB promotes machinima as a community but demotes it as a serious artform.
I have no idea, at this point, where to stand when it comes to the idea of ratings and rankings. So, instead of whether or not it would be beneficial, I would ask if it is necessary. My answer, at this point, would be no - at least not until the good films outweigh the bad in exposure. I would say that we still have at least two years until that happens.
Poor films take no time to make. That is why there are so many of them. Good films take time to make. That is why there are so few of them.
Comment by ninety-nine — March 6, 2006 @ 7:56 am
Hey, ninety, thanks for reading!
I think the charts ARE necessary, because right now it’s playing Marco Polo to find what you like. Even to someone who thinks that crap rises to the top, well… the charts help them too in an inverse way, don’t they?
I happen to be someone who, like you, tends to find likeable material in places other than the Top 40 list; there are exceptions, certainly, where something like NIN’s The Downward Spiral gets all kinds of attention, but for the most part I find myself out of sync with “pop” sensibility. That being said, the majority of people DO like the top-charted music - that’s why it’s the top charted. The fact that our opinion is different from the masses doesn’t mean they are stupid; it’s just what it is, we’re different.
Comment by overman — March 6, 2006 @ 11:20 am
Good post, Overman. I think your comments are right on when it comes to science using categories to furthur understanding, but you are stretching it when you use that observation to build a case for ratings on machinima.com. When you say there is “no evidence” you are probably right. Although I haven’t done any huge amount of research into the topic. There might be studies that will shead light on the idea. No, my take is based on my experience and what I think is common sense. Top rated anythings are used, not as tools to help people find the so-called “best” of anything, but as popularity polls and methods of advertising for whoever is using the rating. Would Melville have qualified for the top ten novelists in his time? People make choices about what’s “best” not so much on examing or studying their choice closely, but on what someone else has told them is “best”. At least the majority of people do this. I don’t want a machinima film being rated by someone who gives it two stars because it wasn’t like “the Matrix”. You are absolutely right about the need for some sort of grouping of good films at machinima.com (why not let Paul write an intro track for the new site which includes a list of “good introductory films”), but a ratings system just turns it into People magazine.
PS I like your comments, ninety-nine, especially the bit on RvB. I think your experience is typical of many who visit machinima.com for the first time.
PPSS. Overman, anyone who quotes “Foucault” in their blog is my hero!
Comment by gToon — March 8, 2006 @ 12:08 pm
Thanks for reading and for your comments, gToon! The Melville point is a good one; I’ve thought also about painters and composers who got zero acclaim in their own day. However, this IS a different era, and we now swim in a global sea of opinion that has no historical precedent that I can think of. Works of art and literature can be exchanged in seconds, whereas they took a lot longer to traverse the globe 150 years ago. Popular opinion on a global scale was not an available option, as we lacked the technology to effectively tabulate it, and we as nations weren’t playing very friendly back then anyway.
Perhaps the best case scenario we can wish for is, since Machinima.com is headed in the ratings direction, that they implement it in such a way to where people who want to disregard them can still have a pleasant experience using the site. I’m optimistic about that, but we’ll have to see how things go.
Comment by overman — March 8, 2006 @ 4:40 pm
Hmm…well, I returned your strong serve with a little bit of spin, but now you’ve lobbed it back to the corner… damn you! I give you an 8 out of 10 blogger stars (hehe)
Comment by gToon — March 9, 2006 @ 12:08 pm
There is a site for World of Warcraft machinima and videos, warcraftmovies.com.
They have four video rankings on the front page: Latest 10 recommendations, What’s Hot This Week (ranked by number of downloads), Last 30 Updates, and What’s Hot This Month (ranked by number of downloads.
There is also a 1-10 rating system that just seems to be there for kicks. It does not affect the rankings, but I can imagine that it pretty acurately reflects them.
When I played abomination of a game, I would just watch videos from the first two mentioned top ten rankings (recommended and most downloaded). Nothing else.
The last 30 updates is obviously a nice tool there to allow users to see everything that is submitted outside of what is popular.
I am unsure of how much this feature is used, but I know that I never used it so that I did not waste any time on a piece of crap.
Their current statistics are as follows:
Movies: 5924
Space taken: 510.2 GB
Total runtime: 785 hours
With that much data, there should be more than just the top movies being viewed. Or so I would think.
There are a few reasons why I do not go outside the top ten box:
1. It makes it feel like the “safe zone”. The best of the best are there, and you can be safe from those wretched wtf movies.
2. Most World of Warcraft movies are pathetic.
3. There was another reason, but it slipped my mind. =)
This is not to say that the top ten was a good thing. It does not necessarily tell me what is worth watching. In fact, most of them were really bad.
I could browse the video listings and find which ones are the good ones without watching them by observing: title of the film, genre, spelling, punctuation, grammar, description, username, file size, number of movies submitted, and maybe even the 1-10 rating.
Before you think that how the filmmaker presented his or her film in terms of correct usage of the native language has nothing to do with the quality of the film, consider this: If your work is good, you will present it well. “YOU’RE ONLY CHILD HALO MOVIE BY CLAN BLAH WATCH PLZ!!!!!” does no such thing. I will pay as much attention to that film as I will the threads titled along the lines of “NEED HELP MAKING MACHINIMA MOVIES WITH HALO PLZ!!!!”
I do not need that top ten to point me in the right direction. It has been my experience that at least eight out of the top ten (80%!) should be destroyed rather than watched.
That top ten list is evil! =)
Comment by ninety-nine — March 10, 2006 @ 8:35 pm