Ricky Grove 01:00
Welcome everybody to a now for something completely machinima Podcast. I'm here with myself, Ricky and Tracy Harwood, Phil rice and Damien Valentine. Each week, we pick a machinima film and talk about it, and each of us gets to comment, and then the group gets the comment as well. This week, we're going on a pick that I made, and so let's get started with that. I am making a little different choice this week. Rather than choosing a specific film, I'm choosing a game, and I'm using the game to springboard a discussion about creativity and originality, because viewers of this show know that I value new and creative ideas above a lot of pretty much anything else. So that's just my particular point of view, and I came across this interesting game by watching a video called the 10 most boring video games ever made. And of course, I immediately popped up to number one. And number one is a game called The Desert Bus, and it is a game that was created in the mid 90s as a satire, as a takeoff on Janet Reno in Congress's comments that games were becoming too violent. We had to have games that were less, that were more adventure and fun than filled with violence. And so Penn and Teller, the wonderful satirists and magicians, came up with a tedious anti game called The Desert Bus, and it was part of an unreleased Sega CD compilation called smoke and mirrors like the magic alliteration there, and it was a satire, and it's basically a game in which you drive from Tucson to Las Vegas, point of view, In a bus. And it is literally all that the game is. You drive for eight hours real time, from Tucson to Las Vegas. And I was fascinated that the commenter on the game went on and on about how bad the game is and how how boring it is. It's the most boring video game ever, ever made, and everything. And I could see that point. But when I started watching, because there's, there's someone who's played and recorded the entire eight hours, I started watching it, and that's not what occurred to me. What immediately occurred to me was, who's driving the car, who's driving the bus, and do they have a passenger, and what would they talk about for eight hours? And then immediately I started thinking about Phil and I taking that bus drive, and what we would talk about. And then that made me think, well, you could make an interesting, funny machinima out of this. And then it got that led me to thinking about the great, great deal of machinima is made as a kind of response to two things, popular culture creations, like movies and things like that, and also other machinima people, they see the game, and they go, Well, I want to tell the story of some character in that. And they choose all the most, biggest, most popular games, Grand Theft Auto, a. Um, red, dead, redemption, Half Life, two. And I was thinking, Well, why don't more people look for odd and weird games to make their machinima from? And it got me to thinking about creativity in machinima. And I can, and I as I was researching some of these ideas, I came across a really great definition of creativity that I wanted to share with you. Creativity is the ability to generate novel, imaginative and valuable ideas or solutions involving thinking differently to bring something new into existence, whether it's a story art or a solution to a problem, and I began thinking, Well, why don't other machinima filmmakers create these interesting films, you know, by by making them original. And what are the benefits? The benefits are that your creative ideas will stand out from the crowd. It'll challenge the creator's mind, and it'll be fun. And if you can use that sense of fun in your machinima or or visual or your poetry, or whatever, whatever you create out of it, it's not only fun for you, but that it fun will be transferred to the viewer as well. So I was interesting, interested in talking to you guys about creativity in machinima and specifically using Desert Bus, but we can also bring into the conversation other games and that we think are interesting or unique, and talk about that. So what do you guys think about this idea?

Phil Rice 06:43
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a game like, this is a blank slate, isn't it? You know, it's, it's like you said, there's not any other lore that you're building on. And that may be why it's more challenging to there's a little bit more pressure on the storyteller to come up with everything, or at least on its surface, that's what it appears to be. So but I thought the exact same thing when watching this game. I thought I was thinking more literally of you know, in like you could just make a machinima, that it's just the audio, and so the only visual is the game, but you're hearing the conversation happen, right? That would be the simplest way to do it with no additional assets. Or you could pixel art some some characters and actually have them be ear over the shoulder, right? And yeah, and hearing them talking. And yeah, it's very much. I mean, that's a format that I've, I've played within a few different contexts just in the past 12 months, on my channel with the Ralph and Chuck is two guys standing at the urinal and from male restroom etiquette, and odad is the father and mother from Father frags best driving down a road, and it's just all about there's no action. It's just them talking. It's just conversations. And then a new one that I just launched with Lance, the freelance ambulance driver. Again, it's very simple. It's all about conversations. So this is a nice canvas on which you could do something like that without having any action or graphical wizardry or anything. It just becomes about the writing. So, yeah, I think it's I was, I was really entertained by this, the video that you shared with us of the guy reviewing it. I didn't really, yeah, he spent a lot of time talking about how boring the game was, but sometimes he did so with a bit of a twinkle in his eye, like that. There was this sense of that he kind of also, at one point, he openly said, I kind of admire that, you know, the someone had the stones to actually do this like it's, it's so brazenly against, against type, you know. And I think he understood that it was satire. I do. I mean, I, I hope so. I sure hope so, because it's yeah, if so, he hasn't really paid much attention to Penn Jillette, right, who, by the way, is one of my favorite human beings to have ever walked the earth. He's just really funny, very, very talented and very articulate. So his satire is right up my alley, and I can totally I did not know that they were involved with or responsible for, inspired or however they made this happen, but it totally fits with the style of satire that is their brand. So, yeah, it's funny. I The Little, I think the funniest part to me about this whole thing is the fact that the bus keeps listing to the right, pulling to the right. You can't you can't just leave it, and there's no pause. There's no pause functionality at all. You. And it's all in real time. And if you do let it roll over to the side, a tow truck will come and tow you back to the start again in real time. Just amazing. And oh, and then the the crowding finish is at the end. If you do complete the game all eight hours, you're rewarded with one point. That's just, so that's just the chef's kiss. You know, that's so perfect. So yeah, it's, yeah, I feel the same way. Ricky, this is this kind of of Tableau is inspiring, not not not boring. I mean, I wouldn't want to sit there for eight hours and play it necessarily. Maybe I don't know, I've come to the older I get, the more I value boredom. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. It's it centers around. There's actually a quote that I jotted down a few months ago that I heard Jimmy Carr say. Jimmy Carr is a well known comedian from the UK, and he says boredom is underrated. Bore. Boredom is not a bug, it's a feature. Boredom is unappreciated, serenity. And I've heard people talk about boredom in the in the context of creativity too, that actually it's a it's a shame that we're raising a culture of kids who cannot tolerate boredom. They have to have something in front of their face stimulating them all the time. And what a tragedy that is for creativity, because creativity springs from that quietude, you know? I think that's very true, yeah, so I love that. That's very good. Yeah. I don't love the feeling of being bored, but I love where that brings me. I've learned to use it. And so a quiet drive. I recently moved house, and so my commute is about 15 minutes longer than it used to be, and I love it. You'd think that I'd want to, you know, have less commute, but I love it, because it's the only time in my day where nobody's throwing anything at me, nobody's talking to me, nobody's asking something of me. And the instinct is to, well, let's turn on some music or a podcast or something, which sometimes I do, but many times it's just a matter of, man, this, this quietude is nice. I get to think. I get to just think. I come up with some great ideas. There's the old cliche of people come up with their best ideas in the shower. What do you think that is? It's the solitude, it's the quote, unquote boring context. Is can be really fertile ground if you just let it be, you know, so, and I think this game, it kind of it falls in with that, that whether it was intentional or not, I don't think that was the intent of making this, right, right, right? You outlined what the intent was, right? But I think that's a side effect of a long, boring drive.

Ricky Grove 13:07
Yeah. Is

Phil Rice 13:09
you can. You can come up with some incredible ideas, you know,

Ricky Grove 13:12
if you just so, what would you what would you do? What sort of film would you make from Desert Bus? Phil, well, it

Phil Rice 13:18
wouldn't be an eight hour film, that's, that's for sure. But, yeah, I mean, I'm picturing, my bent is comedy, so I would, for me, it would be, that's just the background for kind of a Tarantino esque, completely unrelated conversation, you know, like in Pulp Fiction, where they're they're parked for a stakeout, and they're talking about the origin of the Big Mac, or in Reservoir Dogs, where, you know, Harvey Keitel is, I forget what they're talking about, but it has nothing to do with the plot or anything. It's just a funny conversation, right? So that type of thing is, probably would be, it it wouldn't be anything about them talking about the road. It wouldn't be anything on the nose like that. For me, that's just, that's just the the approach that I would take with it. So that's, that's the kind of thing I would likely do.

Ricky Grove 14:12
So the focus would less be on the spectacle, aspect of the visual aspect, to put on the writing and the characters, yeah, in

Phil Rice 14:21
a way is a shame. In a way is a shame, because the whole, the whole point of this game, I think, is to draw attention to its pointlessness. And what I would end up, my instinct would be to ultimately make the viewer kind of ignore that, that by the end of watching my three minute, five minute conversation, they wouldn't think about how boring that desert road was at all it. They probably wouldn't even notice. And maybe that's a shame, you know,

Ricky Grove 14:53
however, however, it would fit in with the the idea of creativity, yeah, because you would be transforming. This experience into something else, yeah, yeah, you know, red versus blue, it occurred to me was one of those, although it's not a boring game, I never found it particularly interesting because the visuals were silly. The guys were they were all locked in this particular kind of movement and everything. What made that show interesting was the comic writing in it.

Phil Rice 15:26
Yeah, well, and that's true from scene one. Scene one really was, was the the, if you ask me, it peaked there like that was, that was the ultimate these two guys standing in this landscape, but they're having a conversation about existence, right? It has nothing to do with the game, nothing, anything to do with the game at all. And, yeah, it was, it was entertaining that way. That's my favorite part about the classic machinima apartment hunting, is that these conversations that they're having, you know, they're walking through, and this apartment that they're evaluating, talking about why Dukakis lost the election in 88 you know, just amazing. Amazing. They used, they used quake, this boring, first level that everyone knows about as a place to have these very witty conversations, random conversations, you know. So, yeah, this, this inspires that kind of thing for me, yeah, yeah. When I was watching it,

Damien Valentine 16:25
I was thinking about the the real time aspect of this journey I haven't watched. I need to find that video just to see what happened. I know about the point at the end, but does anything visual happen? Like, do you see the city in the background coming closer, or is it just, does it just stop?

Ricky Grove 16:42
I don't know there's a guy. I'll give you the link to the guy who played the entire eight hours.

Damien Valentine 16:49
I was kind of curious about that, but I didn't want to sit down for eight hours and play it myself to find out. What I came to my mind was two other games, Microsoft, flight simulator, the whole series of those, because those flights are real time as well. And, yeah, that's right, if you really wanted to, you could recreate a transatlantic flight that would take seven or eight hours or longer, depending on what you want to do. And that, again, is in real time. Obviously, with that game, you can speed things up, but you can fly that long journey, and it's going to be incredibly boring, because no matter how much of a flight enthusiastic flight enthusiast you are, nothing's going to happen. And, you know, they get a little bit of turbulence or something, but you're just going to be flying whatever the flight path is, until you get close to the destination, and then you land again. And then the other game that came to mind was actually elite, dangerous, which is probably more exciting of a title. But again, there's some incredibly long journeys that you can take something that I did was there was a clue in one of the tie in books, there was something hidden in the galaxy for people to find, and it was a vague description of where it was in the galaxy. And as far as the game world is, it's actually not far away from where the main events of the game take place compared to the whole galaxy. I thought I want to get involved with that. It still took me five days of game time. Not that's not five days a minute, right? That's it took more like two weeks, because I had to stop and sleep, eat and do other things, but five days worth of just flying through space, and after about half an hour, you've gone past the inhabited parts of the galaxy. So you're not going to get attacked by pirates or anything else. You're just flying from one star to another, to another, to another, to another. It was incredibly boring. And you do have some risky moments, but because when you jump into a new system, you're close to the star, so you have to maneuver away quickly, otherwise you die. But you also have to refuel by circling around the star quite close to it, which is, again, it's it's risky, but by the time you've done that 200 times, it's not like you're just used to it. It's not exciting and it's boring. So I was thinking, How do I entertain myself when I had I think I was listening to audiobooks or music or whatever. Yeah, so,

Ricky Grove 19:44
so if you were to make a movie inside of that particular game, what would it be? How would you go about doing it?

Damien Valentine 19:55
Well, for the any dangerous what I might do is have just the. Either in the copy of his ship, and he's on this long journey, he knows that nothing is interesting going to happen, and that's just his journey. Maybe he talks to the ship's computer, or if he's got a passenger on board, he may talk to them or crew member, but he's not going to get attacked. There's no pirates or aliens out to get him. It's just his everyday life is this long journey from one place to another. Maybe he's talking about what he expects to find when he's there. And in my case, I didn't find anything. So I made this long journey for no reason, because even you, when you get to this area, of space where this mystery is, it's huge. So other people were finding it because we had to do is fly low on planet, close to the surface planets, and you're visually looking for something because it will not show up on the sensors, because it's there's no power. So you could have something with that as well. So like he's looking out the window of his ship, making sure he doesn't crash. But because he's low enough, he needs to be low enough to see anything. But that also lowers his ability to see very far, because he can't look down over a huge area of landscape because he's too close to it. So he's just looking out. Is that something? No, it's just a rock

Ricky Grove 21:25
you could do. So you did mention that there was a moment of conflict when you're warping to the next system and you come near a planet. So that's a that's a little tight spot there. That could be a bit of drama, yeah,

Damien Valentine 21:41
so you could build up some music as he's jumping in, and maybe he knows he's running low on fuel, so he has to prepare for this close maneuver to the star. And music builds up, getting really tense, and then nothing happens because he just does it, and then he goes on, right?

Ricky Grove 21:57
So it's sort of slice of life kind of film, yeah,

Damien Valentine 22:01
you could do something like that. And, you know, show that space is I think the lesson here would be, space is huge in a way that most science fiction doesn't tell you.

Ricky Grove 22:11
See, that's a wonderful idea. I think that I would, I would watch a film like that.

Damien Valentine 22:16
Well, I'll see what I can do to come up with something for you. I think it would be

Ricky Grove 22:19
fun, especially the conversation with the AI, because the AI would have no ability to empathize with the guy, and the guy might be sharing some of his personal concerns or worries, and the AI just has no, no interest in that. It just comments on the obvious. Yeah, you might have a source of comedy there. Yeah, here's an interesting

Phil Rice 22:44
thought with, with, with the bus. Ricky, your your first question was that came to you. You said was, who's driving this bus? What if the answer to that is, nobody, nobody's driving the bus. Somebody just wakes up on the bus. Nobody's driving it. They have no idea what's going on. They're just thrown into it, so to speak. And are trying, and it's a mystery is going on, and there's no clues. They just know that they're headed somewhere. And there's no, yeah, no clue as to what's happening. It's, it's totally like, it's, this is like a John Paul Sartre film or something, right? You know, some kind of existential commentary. I'm thinking of like the Sam Rockwell film called Moon. Yeah, he's, he's there for, what is it, two or three years by himself, and basically is kind of going mad, which is what isolation would do to pretty much any human being. Total isolation. It'd be funny if someone with no sense of time, they have no watch, there's no clock in the they're just they wake up and this bus is just moving. It's like something out of Heidegger or something, right? That just is life. That's life. You just wake up and you are moving and don't know where you're going and when it's going to end, and nothing is important. I say Heidegger, and I'm doing French accent. So that's that's great, right? That makes a lot of sense. Existentialism, for sure, yeah,

Damien Valentine 24:18
just giving me an idea, there would be random conversations between the passengers, and one of them's got an iPad and he's watching speed,

Ricky Grove 24:28
see, that's very funny. The existential

Phil Rice 24:31
passenger would be like, I wish there was a bomb on his buzz.

Damien Valentine 24:34
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ricky Grove 24:39
What are your thoughts? Tracy, oh,

Tracy Harwood 24:40
okay, so I slide, yes, I get that. I get all the in fact, most of my thoughts are actually in a very similar direction to the way you were going with that. But I also had a look at the film, and I also had a look a little bit of what had happened to the to the game. And, yeah, I mean, apart from being. Me being a totally boring game, which this guy does discuss very well. I think there are a couple of things that are noteworthy, and one is actually the community that has emerged around the game, because it's evidently not about playing the game itself, unless, of course, you're somebody that's, you know, you need that kind of moment of meditation, where a game like that, you know, this can kind of take you into a to a point of Zen, if you like, or you're a prisoner and you've got years to hand during which you can do nothing else. But this, the community that sort of grown up around it, is very much a well, it's cult like, from what I understand. And I don't know if you you picked up on the fact that there are this group of comedians that come together on an annual basis called loading, ready run, who are sponsored by the audience to play the game as long as they can, and they've raised a huge amount of money for children's charities. And in the process of doing this, this year, very creative. Well, exactly this year, they raised over a million dollars for a bus run that lasted over six hours, which they streamed on Twitch. But have a guess how much they've they've raised in all the years that they've been doing this. 15 years they've been doing this, they meet annually to do this. Have a guess how much? 10 million, 12 million. Wow, $12 million can you imagine that? I mean good in them, really, for for doing that. But of course, it's not about the game. It's all about the community, and the fact that this thing brings people together, and they are, you know, they're clearly sort of live streaming their the fun that they have in trying to keep the bus on the road, presumably, as they kind of take turns and be, you know, virtual passengers on this kind of very, what did they call? It? Very, very similitudeness content, which is stupefyingly like reality, which I think is great, it's great description. So that's, I think, one type of community that's kind of coalesced around it, but clearly there is a machinima community around it as well, although, to be fair, I could not find much of the content. And my guess is that the Machinima community that probably created a lot of stuff not dissimilar at all to the sort of stuff that you're talking about probably existed on machinima.com and because, you know what this inspires, I think isn't, isn't edited, you know, high quality content, but it's more like, let's play stuff very much, I think. And you nailed it, Nikki, when Ricky, when you were talking about red versus blue, because that's exactly what it brought to my mind as well. You know the fact that you've got these featureless characters, which allowed these drunk gamers as they were to tell novel stories. That's how Rooster Teeth came to be in the first place. They were just bunch of guys that got together and, you know, played games and just told stories to each other. And that's what this is really this is a this is exactly the kind of medium that enables that kind of creative work to develop. I think

Phil Rice 28:48
it's that kind of vehicle, if you will, exactly,

Tracy Harwood 28:52
exactly it is. I did find one particular artist, a guy called Dave ball, who has put together a in a very serious way, though not in a very humorous way, in a very serious way. He's put together this soundtrack of him reliving memories of road trips. So you know, whether it inspires people to think about all the times they've been on long, boring roads, and you know, the arguments that have ensued, or the places that they visited on the stop offs or whatever, I don't know. But there's, there is an artist whose video I will put a link to so you can kind of have a

Ricky Grove 29:28
little I'd like to see that, yeah,

Tracy Harwood 29:30
but there's, there's many, you know, when you look at these, there clearly has been many that, and I would suggest a lot have disappeared over the years because they got taken down when the servers were sort of closed. Yeah. I mean, I would be very interested to see what people do with this nowadays, because, of course, you know, there, there are many more, you know, people seem to be a lot more creative now with the way that they think about things. Is then, I don't mean it in terms of the editing. I think the editing thing was the most creative aspect of the early days of machinima. But people are a lot more creative now because they've been exposed to a lot more different ideas through channels like YouTube. So I'd like to see some more stuff done with this kind of thing?

Phil Rice 30:24
Cool, yeah? The whole meme culture, right? Exactly, someone putting a pixelated Ryan Gosling on this bus or something, right? It's, but it's a scene from some movie or something, yeah?

Tracy Harwood 30:36
Well, exactly. I mean that. You know, I was also thinking about God. I didn't realize anybody had actually played this to the to the end, because I couldn't, couldn't find that video, and I certainly wouldn't be sitting to watch it. However, the other thing that I picked up on is that, you know, you can play it through once and get a point, but there are a maximum of 99 points available. Go out. One point

Phil Rice 31:05
that's 33 straight, 24 hour days, 792 hours.

Damien Valentine 31:12
The actual score counter is something like seven digits.

Tracy Harwood 31:21
Very funny, fantastic. Well, you know, then it led me to, sort of led me on a slightly different path, which is, I wonder if anybody's actually written a tool to do it. And sure enough, somebody has. It's not an AI tool, because this was done quite a few years ago.

Phil Rice 31:40
But there are an auto key thing right to automatically press a key at a certain point or button, yeah, yeah.

Tracy Harwood 31:46
Well, so you know, when it veers to the right or whatever, you know, it's automatic. You can imagine how somebody would love doing that sort of thing. An AI these days. Well, I'm sure they don't override it somehow. But you know, three months of sitting there playing a game. I mean, I can't imagine who would ever want to do that, but, yeah, you know. The other thing is, I did find a whole list of so called boring games, which, which I'm guessing is what you've looked at, but was very interested to see on that list that they're actually worth quite a few other open world Sims as well, including things like The Sims and Second Life. And you know, whilst, whilst, I suppose Desert Bus has very few assets that you could kind of play with, and it's very simple in terms of what it's about. I mean, you know, all of these other games, like, like Damien was saying, are really just Sims? Yeah, they're just Sims of a different nature. And real time is basically the,

Ricky Grove 32:56
well, I would maintain that Sims and second life are far more varied and interesting than Desert Bus, by the way. Desert Bus, you can get a copy on iOS and an Android if you're interested in checking it out. We'll give you the links on it as well. Last thing I wanted to comment on was that I think something you should think about are weird places in video games where those those things that aren't story driven, but they're odd and unusual, can be a source for machinima filmmaking. You know, there's a video that I saw on YouTube called weird places in video games that I'll give you the link to to watch. And lastly, I wanted to say that the film I would make from Desert Bus would be a radio, the radio program, and it would be set in a kind of post Holocaust world in which there's a guy, an astronaut, who has been abandoned on a space station that's orbiting the Earth, and he's figured out A way to broadcast his own little show with music that he likes and stuff like that, and that's what's on the radio. I think you could use a AI to create a pixelated hand turning the knobs of that particular station to come up with stuff. And I would do a short film based on this astronaut talking about all kinds of things his life, the problem that he's in, his fears, his worries, his sense of humor, encouraging people. Are there any survivors down there? What are you doing? You're probably on a butt. Striving somewhere, you know, that kind of thing. That's what I would I love. That's the kind of film that I would make out of it. I'm sorry, did I cut you off? Did you have more

Tracy Harwood 35:10
to say? No, you carry on. I mean, your creativity, far and away, exceeds my sort of creativity. But, I mean, it's very interesting that I think we've all kind of gone down similar paths thinking about it. Think the meditation side of it is is really where this kind of game would would have particular significance. I think if you can use it to put yourself in a mind state where it enables you to think more creatively, right? There would be an opportunity there as well, not just what you can create with it, but how it gets you to that?

Ricky Grove 35:42
That's a good point, getting yourself into a creative mindset. And I would urge that machinima filmmakers watching this podcast to try it out. There's a list of games, PC games, most of which are abandonware on archive.org of God. Well over 150 games you could browse through that check them out. Almost all of the games are available to download and play, so it wouldn't cost you any kind of money, but I urge you to start thinking in a different way about how to put together a movie using non standard kind of games telling your own kind of personal story in a way that you want to. And that's the point of picking this game and talking about creativity,

Damien Valentine 36:30
I've just had one more terrible idea you could make with this game. Oh, my God. So like, it takes eight hours to get from the start to the end to a video that's eight hours long, and throughout all of it, is a child saying, Are we there yet? The very last time they ask, the driver says yes, as he gets to the end

Ricky Grove 36:56
of the video, it's creative. I'll give you that. I'll give you that one of those things where the rewards don't quite justify the efforts.

Phil Rice 37:08
Yeah, and Damien, I don't know if you've seen recent birth replacement rates tats, but we actually do want people to have children, so time for that video, right? Yes.

Ricky Grove 37:28
Hey, every idea is an interesting one. It's just you pick the one that moves you forward. You know, all right, well, unless anybody else has anything to say, that's our show. If you have any comments about this game, or ideas that you wanted to share, or something that we said that spurred a comment, talk at completely machinima.com is where you should send that we do. Look at all of them, we take them seriously and then throw them away. But that's no big deal, because we love you audience, and we're working on the metrics to get ourselves up to at least two people watching. So thank you, and I appreciate your comments. Tracy, Phil and Damien, and I'm Ricky Grove, and we'll see you next week for Damien's pick bye bye bye.