Stranger 109

Yesterday marked the first day to submit your Second Life machinima as part of Koinup’s promotional contest to both provide another outlet for films based in Linden Lab’s growing online community as well as draw machinimators into their social networking site dedicated solely to user-created content. If you are unfamiliar with Koinup, it attempts to merge Machinima.com with Facebook to provide this online venue for those who share the interest of using their games to create their own content. Though the site offers the option of subscribing to a specific “world” such as SL, WOW, or The Sims to name a few, the content seems to largely come from Second Life. And given the fact that both WOW and The Sims both have rich sites dedicated to machinima made in these games, it makes sense to target the more nascent SL machinima community. The contest specifically seeks machinima music videos and requires that entries use a selection from a list of artist who have provided their music for the contest so as to avoid the usual IP issues that arise when machinimators opt to use mainstream music that they do not possess the rights to. The contest runs until April 29th and winners will be announced on May 6th. Two winners will be selected by judges while a third will be selected by the Koinup community.

As an online phenomenon, machinima has always existed among a virtual community so it is no far stretch to see it now at the center of its own social networking site. As for the future success of Koinup as a destination for machinimators to commune and share their interests, only time will tell. Ever since Rupert Murdoch decided to buy MySpace and Facebook expanded its user-base beyond university students, everyone has been trying to capture lightning in a bottle with the next great social networking site. And as far as specific niche sites dedicated to very specific interests, there has yet to emerge a great example of how this can become successful. Because at the end of the day, social network sites are only about community in theory. Primarily they are about monetizing online traffic, as both MySpace and Facebook have demonstrated. Online forums where people shared common interests go back to the early days of IRC discussions and the WELL. In fact, the very cornerstone of the Net rests upon the creation of spaces to provide public forum for interests of every sort. From sites like Machinima.com and Machinima Premiere, machinimators and fans of machinima have had places online to develop rich virtual communities. So while I applaud the Italian-based Koinup site and their efforts to further unify disparate machinima interests and create another outlet for machinima to be shared and discussed, I can’t but help point out that developing a social networking site for machinima is more about marketing and Google Ads than it is about the culture surrounding this growing phenomenon.