Iraq

So, it's five years since the fiasco started.

I was always against invading. It's easy and universally fashionable to say so now, but not entirely uncommon  back in 2003 here in Britain either. My opposition was not the typical pacifist stuff; I thought my objection to be far more objective. Naturally. Giving a vile and obdurate dictator a kicking sounds good on paper, but right at the heart of the Middle East? Clearly, this was to be no Falklands. It was the political equivalent of sinking Italian leather shoes into a doorstep gift of flaming excrement. To be blind to this fact beforehand was the worst excess of hubris. That we made an almighty balls up of the occupation thereafter is the very opposite of a surprise.

It'd be good to think that such a woeful mistake will serve a good lesson for the future. That is not however clear. Even if my favoured Obama takes the White House, the long term reaction to this mid-sized cataclysm of an unforced error may well be out of rational control. Vietnam – a war and a failure so very different from Iraq that it's surprising their political overlap seems as substantial as it is – underlay the zero response to the Rwandan cut-throat genocide two decades later, and the humiliating withdrawal from Somalia after some Black Hawks did indeed go down and it was thought better to quit entirely. Somalia today is a much more hateful mess than Lebanon, or even perhaps Iraq … but fortunately for us we just choose not to care, for no discernibly logical reason.

In politics so much can be overreaction to fingers burned in the almost forgotten past. A little moustachioed central European fellow won his rise to the very worst excess of power because of that. Who would war with an irascible but not necessarily unreasonable dictator while the world still mourned its lost sons of 1914? As it turned out: everyone. Just a little too late.

I'm not trying to make any point here about specific conflicts on the horizon, as those we scarcely ever know. I'm certain that the world is a better place today than it was while the Soviet Union existed. But there'll be folly, madness and ludicrous hubris forever more so long as we are alive! There's no such thing as an end to history. Well, that any human will live to glimpse.

A Night at the Machinima

Until this weekend I'd never heard of a little game called The Movies. Wikipedia has the details as always, but in short it's a something of a cross between the Sims and Theme Park, at least to my rather outdated feel. There are two games to it: first a build things and train people game like so many before, and second the good part; which is what we spent an evening on.

I was at a friend's who had just recently picked up The Movies on a budget title impulse. He already had a game in progress where he'd been attempting something of a Harry Potter remake, with actors tailored as best as he could approximate them given the game's often clunky tools. Since he already had that progress saved, I asked if we could try making a new feature, borrowing the cast and sets he'd already spent the time constructing.

The concept we settled on was the Hitman. The games have a film noir feel to them, and having seen the limitations of this Movies title, that was pretty much the recipe to escape the worst of those. Dialogue is made a morass of mumbling Simlish, fist-fights and swords are pretty dodgy, cars are very visibly filmed against rolling backdrops, and you've never really quite as much control over the camera or the actors as you'd want. But hey, it's there, and being a challenge it's not without its charm.

What we came up with over the course of four hours then was a dark tale of the solitary assassin, doing his work in a city of eternal darkness and eerie mists. The fellow who had earlier been cast as Harry Potter duly shaved his head and donned the all black suit of an urban professional … albeit with double breasted jacket and a bit more flamboyance than we'd have preferred given a broader wardrobe. The ginger lad was recast as the trigger happy law, which seemed to suit him. While the girl – I'm not a Harry Potter fan myself so I can't ever remember the names – was vamped up something special as the mandatory mysterious woman such movies need just as much as guns and nonchalance. A little far fetched maybe, but I couldn't help from choosing the black afro and Vampira combo!

The story evolved as we were planning the scenes: each of which is a moderately customisable pick from a fairly broad menu for each set. All was going well by the time we'd finished the planning phase, though it was not to last. One thing we'd forgotten was a director! You need one "in game", despite your own essentially directorial control. We nominated an untrained cast member who can be seen as the janitor with broom in the subway. Far more consequential however was our negligence of the extras. We'd been cunningly trimming them from scenes and actions in the planning phase, only to discover with horror when our little sims did the actual filming that at least some of these deleted positions were still there. A ginger haired lass in garish miniskirts was a repeating feature … single-handedly responsible for our deleting the hitman's shots in the car chase sequence as she was inexplicably sitting in the passenger seat for all to see! She also accompanied the cops down the subway stairs, a ludicrous arm waving accomplice as they approached with guns drawn. A final discovery – which had us in stitches when the scene was shooting – was that the female cop was chased against the subway car's door by a Swamp Thing of all the apt bloody luck! Argh! Ed Wood, your genius lives on this game all right.

Post production cured most of the trouble though. In fact this side of the game was better than I was expecting … by then. Your control is a lot more direct, so my able offline editor friend could trim the shots from appalling cheesiness down to their moments of passable drama and symbolism. The music choice and timing was also better than we'd hoped. While the details were being done, I quickly cobbled together a script for the all but silent short's much needed onscreen prose. While the rest of post production may have been about reducing cheesiness, I must admit I did ham it up a bit with some especially literal lines for the old man's sweet early 80's word processor. Indeed, it was the idea behind that computer's appearance which set up the tale in the first place.

I must say we were both quite impressed with how it finally turned out. We had a decent little noir for our evening of battle with the game. Savoured all the more for the knowledge of the horrors we had to cut out! If our virtual studio had been pressing DVD's, the out-takes for this one would be quite special.

If only I'd remembered to change the characters' names to our more fitting "Hitman" and "Vampira". The original idea had been for it to be a presentation by the Rank Xerox Organisation too, but building on another save game's deeds puts an end to that. Back to the very 20th century studio title then. I still remember the shorts we never made…

Anyway, without any further ado: the Hitman.