Stranger 109

Yesterday New World Notes was the first to report on what has become the biggest story for the world of Machinima. HBO has apparently offered a “six figure sum” for the rights to a machinima series set in the Second Life universe that began back in March. Entitled My Second Life: The Video Diaries of Moltov Alva, the first episode in what has been described as a “documentary” series was created by a multimedia artist by the name of Douglas Gayeton. According to an email sent from Geyeton to New World Notes some of the highlights of the deal were:

“HBO purchased the North American television rights.”

“They have decided to first submit it for an Oscar in the Animated Short Subject category.”

“They are then hoping to premiere it at Sundance. It will probably screen next spring on HBO.”

Not since Microsoft crafted a deal with Rooster Teeth Productions to allow them to continue the Red vs Blue series has a major corporation backed machinima as a potential earner. This deal, however, has one major distinction due to the fact that part of the SL intellectual property rights policy is that the creator retains all the rights to his or her creation. Unlike game engines like The Movies, where Activision retains the rights as agreed to by the user in the Terms of Use, SL as an open source project grants this necessary freedom that makes such a deal even possible.

There are a number of implications this landmark deal has both for the world of Second Life and machinima at large. Not the least of which is that we are likely to see a huge spike in the volume on SL because everyone who has tried making machinima with that engine will likely try and catch lightening in a bottle just like Gayeton. So be on the look out for the Second Life channel on Machinima.com. And inevitably there will be the haters out there that can’t believe someone would pay for this series of all the machinima out their. I plan to review Gayeton’s first installment for tomorrow’s Machinima Spotlight so will reserve my comments until then. However, the first thing to point out is that the freedom of the intellectual property rights that SL offers is more than likely the single biggest contributor to this deal. Linden Labs has done a great job of offering a rather powerful piece of software that gives some endless possibilities to machinimators. There are certainly other engines that offer far more graphical punch like the HL2 Source SDK, but that is the property of Valve and machinima created with it could not be sold for “six figure sums.”

Which leads to the second implication to consider: What if this series does great at Sundance and wins the Academy award? That would certainly be a watershed for machinima as an art form. But would that make the legal terrain more or less treacherous for machinimators? On the one hand, every engine would be seen as a money making tool outside of the realm of game design and likely become locked down even further by developers. In fact a cottage industry of real-time 3D animation software would become as professionalized as Maya or 3D Studio Max, and most likely as expensive. So the once expansive and “democratic” medium of machinima could become yet another professional division of mainstream media. On the other hand, the improvements to those higher-end 3D animation softwares will continue to raise the bar of what audience demand from big names like Pixar. So what can be achieve graphically from real-time engines will never be as valuable to a studio. So perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between. Developers like Valve, who have created very powerful tool sets for machinima, could create reasonable licensing agreements that allow for a deal with companies like HBO but insures that they get compensated for providing the necessary tools that make such films like A Few Good G-Men even possible.

The final point to make on this deal would be to point out that the other major factor contributing to this deal is the momentum of hype that continues to poor into the Second Life universe. Clearly, corporate America has placed its chips on this project of SL and believes it represents a very important part in our future media consumption. You throw in Sony’s adoption of a similar interface in the form of it’s Home network for the PS3, and you can begin to see why an HBO would take such a risk. So as much as I would like to say this deal represents a vote of confidence in machinima, I can’t help but think this has far more to do with the property of Second Life than anything else. Regardless, this is an important day for both machinima and SL. How it all pans out is yet to be determined. Lets keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.