Erunno’s Thoughts…

Before I start with my classic rants…

Now where was I? Oh yes… ranting… Mmmmm…

As an “opening” post after a few months of inactivity I’ve decided to talk a bit about the place I live in, Slovenia. Or as our guild joke goes: “In Soviet Slovenia, raid wipes you!”… I don’t get it either. Apparently there’s something with my accent.
But I won’t talk about the lovely hills, grasslands and cows that we have here, oh no. I’m going to rant about the fact that I’m actually the only machinimator in this damn place?!

Slovenia has a quite large geek community. Though it’s not that active “around the globe” we still have one. We got those pesky Anime (and Hentai) geeks, Sci-Fi wannabe Picards, the undead that are the WoW community (I’m so dead if one of them reads that…), Tech geeks etc. we got a bit of everything.

Except machinimators.

And not just WoW machinima in general, but everything! No Sims, Half-Life/Garry’s Mod, Halo, Hello Kitty Island Adventures machinimators, nothing! I tried to find at least one. I scouted all the geeky forums, web sites and portals. I’ve search trough several Slovenian video stream sites. Now there can be only three explanations for this. Either the other machinimators are really, really good at hiding, or they are releasing stuff as a Slovakian or I am indeed the only one. And I’m not amused by it at all.

Yeah sure, I could brag myself as the only one but that’s kinda stupid since half of the people don’t even know what exactly I’m doing. And I’m not a really good example to be the head of the whole community (and only member and admin and manager and contributor…). Whenever I mention what I do, people mostly think of silly gameplay movies and 12 year old boys yelling obscenities at each other. Guess that most of the gaming community consists of uneducated (in the field of geekdom, harharhar) idiots, smashing keyboards and yelling “Boom headshot!” and not actually realizing that some games actually have stories. Good ones even. So the people who actually look at games as art and not only as a way to see gore and to feel like a “lover of mothers”, I salute you.

Anyway, back to the point, machinima. I know that machinima is not a “must have” for every country, but I think it kinda mirrors the imagination and “education” of the gaming community in a land. There have already been mentions of machinima in Slovenian press. There have been articles about the art in several gaming and technology magazines, TV shows and even in some of the serious and big weekly newspapers. And still, people don’t look at it as a way to do movies, but as, ugh, frag-movies.

So if anyone who is reading this is Slovenian, try it out. Do a short machinima in the game of your choice or kidnap some friends and let them watch Tales of the Past III on a big ass TV! Don’t leave me here alone. I’m a horrible representative for my country.