It was a weird movie
I have tried to play Second Life twice. The second time was only because I thought maybe I did it wrong the first time. It wasn’t boring so much as horibly laggy, but being forced to pick a silly last name really didn’t help.
And yet, for some reason, librarians are fasciated with the damn game. It can be described as ‘a MMO but free,’ the last word of which acting as a can opener to my hypothetically feline ears, but the appeal breaks down once I remember that I don’t have the patience to sit down at a computer for that long anymore if I’m not being paid for it. I hear there are flying penises, though, which does sound interesting (they’ve even escaped into reality).
I understand the appeal in that it makes our profession, generally thought of as antiquated and deprecated, seem more cutting edge. We add ’2.0′ to the end of everything… people do that these days, right? But — and it hurts me to say this, as a geek — just because you can doesn’t mean you should. In library school I once said that we don’t need to be familiar with every new technology when it’s released, just before it hits the mainstream. Second Life is approaching that point now; it may be there, but I’m too apathetic to keep track. I also read Joystiq and Kotaku, so I’m not exactly qualified to judge popular awareness.
Which brings us to the Law of the Game post I saw this morning. It’s about the legal aspects of machinima, which I really don’t care about. I have friends who make it, and I watch their work when they make it, but at this point they’re all captures of character models standing around with voiceovers and jokes. Or if there aren’t jokes, there will be attempts at drama that will probably fail.
The screenshot caught my attention, though. Does that guy’s shirt say somethingabout Librarians? Wait, they cite their reference for the definition of machinima. Oh, look, it’s library machinima.
The sad thing is, I’ve watched some of this before.
