Interactive Friction

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A fistful of inspirations

By Harry Milonas | May 15, 2009

For a few laughs, cries and tears achieved by way of the unexpected dramas of competitive game-playing, you can’t go wrong with Seth Gordon’s The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

A documentary of ‘good’ — High School Science teacher, father and all-round underdog, Steve Wiebe — versus ‘evil’ — restaurant/hot sauce tycoon and 1980’s videogame high score holder, Billy Mitchell — versus downright brutal — the original 1981 Donkey Kong arcade machine — TKOK offers an entertaining glimpse into the little-known community and culture of classic arcade game enthusiasts.

The King of Kong is also a great case study of how sly editing can completely change the perceived facts of a story. The aftermath friction of the ‘truth’ and ’scandal’ behind a fair few of the documentary’s scenes has been well debated, with Steve Wiebe himself ready for a rematch to settle the hearsay this June.

That said, not all my documentary inspirations concern the deviancy of competitive game-playing. Well, almost…

Jason Scott, an archivist of retro computer culture and communities (check out his exhaustive online archive of BBS content, or his aptly titled documentary, BBS: The Documentary) is currently in deep post-production on his next, arguably greatest documentary piece.

Scott’s Get Lamp promises to chronicle the rise and fall (and subsequent community-led rise to this day) of interactive fiction. Featuring interviews with Marc Blank, Steve Meretzky, Nick Montfort, Brian Moriarty, Stuart Moulthrop, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and a whole host of other relevant figures to my honours project, it’s a shame the documentary’s release will be well after I’m deep into production.

The public service announcements of the mid-twentieth centure were largely naive in tone to the worries of society. It was only a matter of time before the iconic ‘Daisy Girl’ advertisement (created for the 1964 USA Democratic presidential campaign advertisement) came along and created one of the most infamous and controversial uproars in US television history. It was only televised once for a reason.

‘Daisy Girl’, or by its official title Peace, Little Girl, is a PSA that more often than not holds resonance with new viewers even today — I know it did for me, and I first saw it at the front end of a (rather political) Fatboy Slim music video, of all places!

I’ve always thought it’d be interesting to reinterpret the iconic visuals and structure of the ‘Daisy Girl’ ad, but base it on a more contemporary, yet similarly conflict-centric topic. As such, we somewhat plan to ‘parody’ the PSA in our griefing documentary.

While not strictly documentaries, Valve Software’s lovingly-crafted machinima vignettes for Team Fortress 2 masterfully chronicle the inherently delinquent personalities of the player characters and gameplay offerings, to those new and familiar with the property.

In fact, I only just realised that the second full-length trailer for the game is done in much a similar style as to our documentary’s episode-to-episode griefing demonstrations i.e. different action-centric gameplay footage divided by different styles of play/griefing.

While Fraser and I have already touched upon explicit examples of our documentary inspirations and influences elsewhere, the importance of the broader videogame community relevancy of the examples listed this blog post — even if they aren’t directly concerned with griefing — are invaluable, both culturally and creatively.

[Video source: PictureHouseDF]

[Image sources: GetLamp.com, The Inspiration Room, and Valve's Steam service]

Topics: Transient Spaces (2009), labsome Honours (2008, 2009) | 2 Comments »

2 Responses to “A fistful of inspirations”

  1. The Long Tale » Blog Archive » Documentary: what went right Says:
    June 11th, 2009 at 3:04 pm

    [...] • There was a wealth of resources available online. From DigitalPh33r’s comprehensive guide to making machinima (albeit overlooking the NTSC/PAL issues, but he is American), to stylistic references for the pseudo-1960s look such as promo clips for Fallout and parody educational videos, to the cornucopia of content published with perfect timing by The Escapist magazine and its columnists on griefing and many others. [...]

  2. jenny weight, RMIT » get lamp Says:
    June 16th, 2009 at 11:52 am

    [...] lamp is a doco about IF, mentioned by Harry. I love the nostalgic tone of the interviewees. The genre they created is so transient–is [...]

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