Slashdot Mirror
For the First Time, a Video Game Trailer Is Eligible To Be Nominated For an Academy Award (eurogamer.net)
For the first time in 90-year Oscar history, a video game is eligible for an Academy Award, specifically the recently-released game Everything. From a report: The 11-minute trailer for philosophical pontificating simulator Everything is eligible for an Academy Award -- a first for a video game promotion, boasted game developer David OReilly. The marketing material in question is included under the Academy's category "[best] animated short film," which it became eligible for after winning the Jury Prize for animation at the VIS Vienna Shorts film festival. Everything's lengthy trailer focuses on the correlation between the universe's smallest, biggest, and most remote entities, all while being narrated by the late British philosopher Alan Watts.
The video has not been nominated for an Oscar.
However, it *is* eligible to be nominated, which is a first for a video game trailer.
Calling Watts a philosopher is questionable at best. He read and wrote spiritualism, mysticism, and how profound an experience it was to get high.
Nothing he wrote was on any serious philosophy topic nor was what he did write meaningful to religious studies. He was largely popular for being eccentric, pro-psychedelics, and one of the first educated British men to write about eastern mysticism.
Rather clever though for ensuring his daughters own most of his copyrights. They will likely stand for over 150 years if the law does not extend copyright futher. In the running for the longest held in history.
The video has not been nominated for an Oscar. However, it *is* eligible to be nominated, which is a first for a video game trailer.
So it joins a very short and distinguished list such a the classic film Home for Purim and it's lead actor Victor Allen Miller who said "It's such an honor to be almost nominated".
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
If ever you need to say whole lot about not much of anything, this is a prime example of how to do it.
From what I see, if you loved Amiga graphics demos, you'll love this. Here's a 20-minute play video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz0ncBjk2V4
Reminds me of a monkey and football, but then again, I've only been consuming video games for 34 years.
>> Why are the animals somersaulting all the time?
Because they want you to buy a VRML demo for $60. ("OK, so we imported a bunch of 3d models. Now you can move them around. Next month maybe we'll animate them or add some logic to make them interact, but in the meantime [SHINY].")
How about: Tumble-bears
There is no way that they will animate them given the sheer quantity of them. I'm thinking thousands, if not tens of thousands, of models.
I say this as someone who owns the "game." For those looking for an actual game, look elsewhere.
Basically this "game" is a novel way of listening to Alan Watts.
"His name was James Damore."
All of what you see and hear in the trailer is actual gameplay. The game is a giant sandbox that lets you switch between creatures and objects at massively different scales, from fundamental particles to large constructs of the universe... all while reading tidbits of existential text, markov chains, and finding clips of Alan Watts recordings to listen to. Every object you "become" also gets added to a library where you can read more information about it.
It's certainly not going to appeal to everyone, but it's fun for what it is trying to do and show you. And it's not, as one comment said a "VRML demo for $60", it's a simple $15 sandbox that tries to make you think.
Snarf This.
From what I could tell, it's a fancy graphics version of Spore where you can play at any stage.
A few noteworthy bits from the dialogue to be disturbed by: 1. Humans grow with a view of "me" in the world but should grow out of that into a new view. Leading into 2. Humans have no more significance than anything else, including atoms, cells, etc...
I'm probably a bit overly sensitive, but this self depreciation has been played pretty hard by social engineers over the last couple decades.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
So the only requirement for a game trailer to be in the running for an academy award is that he was tripping on acid when he came up with the idea for his game. I'm going to put that trailer firmly in the "WTF did I just watch" pile.
For the first time in 90-year Oscar history, a video game is eligible for an Academy Award
How many video games were there 90 years ago? How many video game trailers were there 90 years ago? 25 years ago? It's not like the Oscars have been holding down the video game trailers for almost a century.
If you want to see a trailer that does deserve nomination, you should look at the trailer for Crawl. Excellent voice acting and writing, and it describes the game really well.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.