Sburke42's Blog

Digital Story- Tibia Machinima May 13, 2010

My Digital Story involved making a machinima by screen capturing footage from the MMORPG Tibia.  I used to play this game when I was younger so I was already familiar with the concepts and constructs of the game.  There were many parts of the video that I wanted to employ.  Some of these were normal things that you would do in the regular process of playing the game.  However, these became even more interesting since I could add commentary to them.  The rest were things that could only be added in using video and audio editing.  These things like the drug trip and prostituting were also the most fun parts of the video to work on.  This was because it was fun and interesting to do things outside the normal use of the game and put in scenes and ideas that were not even actually possible.  These parts were very similar to the “My Trip to Liberty City” video that we watched in class.

One of the fun things about MMORPG’s is the interaction with other people and other characters.  I was able to use some people in the video without them even knowing it (some may have even been solicited by me as a hooker).  I also did not have control over all aspects of the game so some scenes took very long to create the setting I wanted to and end up with a scene that worked well for the overall video.

Originally, I thought that I would have to use successive screenshots with audio overlaid, but I was able to find a simple (and more importantly, free) screen capture software for Windows, AviScreen Pro.  I had to take some time to learn how this program worked, but eventually got the hang of it.  Screen capturing rather than many screen shots also made the project a lot easier and I think it works a lot better than my original plan would have.  The game of Tibia is also a pretty simple MMORPG which also helped me.

I think this project effectively made something new using emerging digital networked tools.  I think the project was also pretty creative outside of the normal constructs of Tibia.  I also hope that maybe even just a few of the scenes can get a laugh out of viewers.  Games are designed to be played a certain way, but it is when people get creative in these games that I think a lot of fun can occur.  I actually had fun making this project and am pretty happy with how it turned out.  Enjoy!