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Zarathustra Studios

Conference #05

Participants: Frank Fox (US), Peter Rasmussen (AUS), Michelle Petit-Mee (CAN), Bill Klimke (US), Zachariah Scott (US), Doug Dyson (CAN), Ricky Grove (US), Matt Dominianni (US), Johnnie Ingram (UK), CJ Ambrosia (US), Ben Grussi (US), Sasha Rudie (US), Sam Midwood (US), Damien Valentine (UK), Phr0zen Katsu (SL), Orfeu Miles (SL), Stampshady Grimm (SL), Vivienne Cassavetes (SL).

Guest host Frank Fox reports: “We touched on about 13 subjects during the first phase on my deck by the shore, then moo transported us up the street to her place and brought out a magic wand full of many physical and visual effects. The discussion veered off in a more freewheeling manner from there.” Both Bill Klimke and Ricky Grove blogged about the event. Congratulations, Frank, on a tremendous success!

The topics:

  1. Half-life Machinima and Garry’s Mod - initiated by Zachariah
  2. Antics - initiated by gToon querying ceedj
  3. the CSI/NY episode using SL - initiated by Matthew of Electric Sheep
  4. Unreal Tournament III - gtoon and others
  5. Machinima Film Festival in New York, when is it going to come back?
  6. Shooting movies in SL and the use of its joystick flycam as well as Matthew’s camera technique
  7. Crazytalk
  8. The upcoming Online Machinima Festival and cocktail party
  9. The Open Sim project and what it could mean to the machinimator
  10. What games are you playing? gToon’s playing of The Witcher piqued everyone’s interest there, as well as waiting for Mass Effect to release on the PC
  11. Matthew’s avatar punched out Ricky’s avatar in a good natured tussle
  12. Second Life’s future and what might be next for MMOs

That’s it for the structured discussion. From there we continued to moo’s place for the visual part of the evening and generally got goofy.

11 Comments

  1. Hi Phil,
    It seems there is a cosmic connection between these meetups and when I am somewhere over an ocean at 30k feet. I’ve had a flight that’s conflicted with the last few meetings, but I’m keeping up :) If anyone has questions about CrazyTalk or comments, then feel free to let me know. Thanks! John

    Comment by John Martin — February 25, 2008 @ 4:35 pm

  2. Were you planning to continue having these conferences in Second Life?

    Comment by Elf — February 26, 2008 @ 11:36 am

  3. Elf, there is no definite plan to make SL a permanent home for the conferences. That being said, the feedback has been tremendous, the turnout very high, and the number of technical issues way way down from the previous Skype hybrid setup… so it seems very likely that we’ll use SL again and soon.

    Comment by Overman — February 26, 2008 @ 1:50 pm

  4. Just so the feedback isn’t misrepresented — I (and the other people I brought along to the conference previously) are… not so enthusiastic… about Second Life, to the point where we probably won’t be attending future conferences if they occur there.

    I don’t want to make a big issue out of it, but I suspect greater turnout is due to the number of people who’ve already taken to Second Life. If you’re going for a more Second Life centric audience, I suppose this makes sense for you.

    Comment by Elf — February 26, 2008 @ 5:08 pm

  5. I personally don’t need the gatherings to be in Second Life, but I didn’t enjoy being relegated to Skype’s text chat while waiting for one of the eight or nine lucky people on Skype’s voice connection to throw me a bone about what was being discussed vocally. I don’t have an automatic dislike for Skype, so when it gets it technological act together I will be happy to join back in.

    Comment by FLeeF — February 26, 2008 @ 6:00 pm

  6. I agree, skype is limiting for those large discussions. Overman had indicated a web based technology (a voice/text solution) that might be interesting.

    Comment by Elf — February 26, 2008 @ 6:29 pm

  7. I agree with Elf on moving the conferences away from Second Life. Before, when we used software that was common among most users, the meetings were easy to pop in and listen. Now that they are hosted in Second Life, it’s become a pain, and slightly scary, to install the software needed and join the worlds I have heard so much negative feedback about.
    If you could move the discussions back to Skype, or a better location if there are others who dislike that, it would be greatly appreciated. The conversations are nice to listen to, and it would sadden some of us if you kept them in a location that we find so undesirable.

    Comment by Thundara — February 28, 2008 @ 7:03 pm

  8. I joined in the 4th conference with Elf and friends, and very much enjoyed it. Although I agree with the technical limitations of Skype, there are alternatives that provide a more robust voice chat server (Ventrilo anyone?). Even the SIP Communicator connection we joined from had sufficient quality for good voice chat without degradation or delay. There are alternatives to Second Life, and to limiting this discussion to a single games environment.

    Second Life is not, I believe, an appropriate setting for a machinima conference that is supposed to discuss all forms of machinima and be platform independent. The moment this conference becomes a Second Life Machinima conference, then I’d agree with this as an appropriate hosting location.

    Put it this way - would you host the conference on a WoW public test realm? No. Then why Second Life? I do not enjoy SL. It is not an environment I wish to participate in, personally - it is directly composed of all the social norms I wish to get away from when I create machinima or play computer games, and this desire for escape determines the games I choose to play or not to play. SL’s social environment has evolved into something of a glorified sorority or clique - something I truly despise.

    Aside from the social aspect there is the risk of this conference now becoming SL-centric instead of embracing broader uses of gaming technology in machinima. Personally I think the greatest advances in machinima of late have been in mixing media, such as Baron Soosden’s recent music videos.

    I would not force WoW on a machinimaker who is not interested in WoW, I would not force them to create a character to participate in a conference - so why is SL okay? Just because most of the avatars created are somewhat humanoid, doesn’t mean that I like the technology or want to participate in discussion in this environment. The highly conventional social setting actually forces an expectation of humanoid avatar creation - something I do not wish to do when representing myself to an audience. Added to that, it IS platform-dependent and not as backwards compatible as WoW - many reasonable but older graphics cards (probably mine included) will not support it or will not perform well with SL.

    Second Life, to me, is rather faddish. It cheapens our broad discussion, it becomes ‘trendy’. It limits us.

    Sadly, I will not be enjoying this next conference, or any future conferences in Second Life.

    Comment by murkdeeps — April 15, 2008 @ 7:51 pm

  9. Thanks for the feedback! I wrote a response and ended up going longer than expected; I’ve posted those thoughts here: Next Audio Conference, and Thoughts

    Comment by Overman — April 16, 2008 @ 2:19 am

  10. Murkdeeps. You can come dressed as a plate of jelly, people do. There is no pressure to conform, only your own internal pressure.

    Comment by Kate — April 16, 2008 @ 4:29 am

  11. Well put, Kate, my thoughts exactly. I respect those who find SL an awful place to hold a meeting in, but I don’t agree that having machinima meetings there “cheapens” the discussion at all. I use SL solely as a free, easy way of interacting with other people from around the world. At Machiniplex, we’ve recently moved our Premieres to SL simply because Skype was not a dependable medium. I’ve spent hours testing Ventrillo, Dim Dim and any number of programs for group discussion and all of them perform poorly (if at all) compared to Second Life. While not perfect (or permanent, as Overman has said) SL is a good choice for international meetings at the present time, in my opinion.

    Comment by Ricky Grove — April 16, 2008 @ 12:11 pm

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