Antivirus companies have recently put out an advisory for a piece of malware called "PWSteal.Wowcraft". And what does this computer virus do? As Symantec describes it:

PWSteal.Wowcraft is a password-stealing Trojan horse that attempts to steal the password to the "World of Warcraft" game and send it to the creator of the Trojan.

This is ever more evidence that the economy of virtual worlds is becoming so lucrative that crime -- in all its variants -- is moving there. Over the last few years, we've seen all manner of chicanery, such as "dupers" that, like real-world counterfeiters, flood game worlds with duplicated merchandise and money, mucking heavily with the world's currency and economy. There have also lately been on-line muggings, and, as I reported in The Walrus a year ago, mafias and organized crime. Given, of course, that a world based on code is eminently hackable, we're likely to see ever more -- and ever weirder -- crimes as time goes on.

At first, when I heard of the Wowcraft trojan, I thought hmmm: Virtual-world crime is considerably easier to pull off than real-world crime, because role-playing games are filled with virtual items that are easy to steal. When you steal someone's World of Warcraft password, you can go in and force their avatar to hand over all their goods and in-world currency to the criminal's account, then quickly sell the stuff on ebay or any online game-merchandise site. It's very easy to make game-world stuff liquid.

But then I realized, hey, how is this different from real-world digital crime? A Russian cracker gang gets the information to your bank account, goes in pretending to be you, transfers the money to a foreign bank, then extracts it and washes it clean. Sure, role-playing games are rife with possibilities for identity theft. But the real world of commerce and finance is itself, by now, almost indistinguishable from a role-playing game.

I can't wait until a US-based court gets ahold of one of these cases.

(Thanks to Kottke, Steve Emrich and Joe Wilson for these!)

Right-wing and left-wing partisans alike have blogs they travel to every day for their daily screechifying, such as Instapundit and Daily Kos. But do these sites have any effect? And who's winning the war of ideas -- and producing more real-world influence -- in the blogosphere?

A new report by NDN PAC, a progressive group, has been the first to try and quantify the impact of both conservative and liberal blogs. The results are surprising: They conclude that conservatives had an early headstart, such that in 2003 the right-wing blogosphere was two or three times larger than the liberal one. But by 2005, progressive blog world had erupted in size -- triggered by the 2004 elections -- and is now double the size of the conservative one, in terms of sheer traffic.

Yet NDN concludes that liberal blogs are not necessarily having as big an impact, because of fundamental differences between the way conservatives and liberals use blogs. Liberals may have more traffic, but they have fewer overall blogs. To put it another way, progressives have a small number of enormously-well-read blogs, which conservatives have a large number of blogs with small audiences. That's partly because of how conservatives use them: NDN claims that the right mostly uses blogs as extensions of pre-existing party structures and organizations; they also more often devote blogs to local issues. The upshot is that conservative blogs have a bigger impact on the real world, since they're connected to real-world party structures and are focussed on real-world problems all over the country. As the report writers note:

Pennsylvania offers a useful case study. Philadelphia is arguably the nation's progressive blogging capital. With at least fifteen of the one-hundred and three progressive blogs surveyed by MyDD, not to mention ten of the top fifty most trafficked left wing blogs, one might imagine that local Pennsylvania political blogs are dominated by progressives. Yet, the primary two sites dedicated to Pennsylvania statewide politics were Grassroots PA and Keystone politics, both of which are conservative. Even in a region steeped in popular left wing blogs, conservatives rule the local political blogosphere.

It's a really interesting report -- I've never seen anyone analyse cyberspace this way.

The latest example of citizen newsgathering: At 9 am this morning, there was a stabbing murder at Teany, the teahouse owned by Moby in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Yet by 3:41 pm, as Rachel at FishbowlNY reports, no local papers had posted any news on their websites. The only news came via several blogs -- including a first-person account from a blogger named Sarah, a piece and a photo (which I've used above) of the crime scene on Gawker, and a note on Gothamist. Granted, this isn't terribly in-depth newsgathering -- the Gothamist posting merely pointed to the Gawker entry. But the comments are quite interesting, including a note on Gothamist by a neighbor:

i live in that building and it was horrible to leave my apartment this morning to find a pool of blood outside of the doorway and then have to climb over the railing to avoid the murder scene.

Yipes. Perhaps predictably, at both Gothamist and at Sarah's blog, the commentors wound getting in long, numbing arguments about hipsters, yuppies, and whether the Lower East Side still has any "edge".

(Thanks to Rachel Sklar for this one!)

I'm working on one of these men's-magazine columns I periodically write on workplace politics, and am on the hunt for possible interview subjects. The subject is pretty funny: It's about what happens when a guy is suddenly appointed head of his department, his team, or his office -- and has to figure out some dramatic move to illustrate that he's now in charge. Firing someone? Boldly changing the flavor of coffee in the communal kitchen? The examples could be small, medium, funny, pathetic, ridiculous, or whatever -- and the guy has to be in his 20s or 30s.

Know anyone who fits the bill and wants to tell me his story? If so, email me and let me know! Anonymity's not a problem if someone has a funny story but doesn't want to get in trouble for telling it -- and the deadline is Friday.

How can you turn a massive, fuel-chewing Hummer into a zero-emissions vehicle? By buying "pollution credits" -- via this wacky new company called TerraPass. The concept works the same way that the "cap and trade" emissions-trading system works between companies and countries: If you pollute more than you're supposed to, you can buy a "credit" from someone who has voluntarily reduced their emissions to a nice green level. Theoretically, this keeps pollution to a regulated, accepted level, and encourages firms to voluntarily buy new superefficient technologies that reduce their emissions, because they can offset those costs by selling pollution credits.

Now TerraPass offers this deal -- for cars. As a story in CNN reports:

The stickers TerraPass sends its customers do nothing to stop pollutants from coming out of a car's tailpipe. Instead, the company offers its customers the chance to reduce pollutants from other sources, like power plants, in an amount equivalent to that produced by their car.

That way, you can drive your car while having no net effect on the amount of pollution in the air, the company says.

Apparently, it only costs $160 to effectively render your Hummer into a zero-emissions vehicle. Which to me is where you can see the fissures in this scheme -- because I'm pretty sure that if you calculated the amount of carbon a Hummer spits out in its lifetime, it'd cost quite a lot more than $160 to remove it from the air. I'm sure the cost will go down as carbon-sequestration technology improves -- and part of the goal of cap-and-trade schemes is to encourage the development and adoption of better sequestration tech, of course, so you could argue that we gotta start somewhere. Taken on its own terms, TerraPass is a pretty clever idea, I'd say.

But they've only sold 620 passes so far -- and most were bought by eco-freaks who already buy super-low-emission cars. As founder Tom Arnold notes: "We fully expected to target SUV drivers with SUV guilt," but "it just doesn't exist."

Recently, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote about how radical Islamic fundamentalists were creating video games to whip up their young into righteous fury. "Video games matter", as Friedman wrote, which is a bang-on point. Video-game companies -- and gaming advocates -- like to defend violent games by saying that "games don't affect behavior", but this is obviously false. They're media, and that's one of the things media does: Influence our behavior.

But what precisely are the Islamic games actually like? What do they teach? The only way to know is to play 'em, and of course none of the pundits who inveighed against them actually did so. So the very cool writer Chris Suellentrop dutifully ordered three games recently discussed in the Washington Post, played them, and described the experience in Slate. It's a hilarious and valuable piece, not least because he discovers that, far from being evidence of al-Qaeda's growing digital sophistication, the games seem to prove that "radical Islam dreams not only of restoring the borders of the Caliphate, but also of freezing gaming technology at the level of the old Nintendo Entertainment System." Heh. (That's a screenshot from Maze of Destiny, one of the Islamic games, above.) Chris' best observation, though, comes here:

The fact that these games are derivative, look primitive, and aren't very fun to play doesn't mean they're not important. But they're also ideologically untroubling. In the Ummah Defense games, the "disbelievers" that must be destroyed are robots, not human soldiers. There's an outside chance that the robots are a metaphor for the Predator drones used by the United States military, but I doubt these games are going for that level of subtlety. It's more likely that the robots are a metaphor for Space Invaders.

If you ignore the titles of the Ummah Defense games and the occasional in-game messages -- "Alhamdulillah, You Destroyed the Command Ship!" -- it's impossible to tell that you're playing an "Islamic game." When I destroyed the third of the four command ships controlling the "Flying Evil Robot Armada" in the first Ummah Defense, I didn't ruminate on whether my real-life allegiance should be with the robots. I just thought, only one more ship to go!

This is, more precisely, the real point about why point-and-shoot action games suck as tools of indoctrination: Their narratives rarely matter. In an action-shooter game, the real narrative -- the one that matters -- isn't the type of uniforms or country you're fighting; it's the the physics. The emotional and cognitive content of the game is just about being physically graceful enough to achieve your goals in fast-moving, fast-changing environment -- a statement that defines everything Half-Life 2 to football.

The problem with Friedman -- and other pundits who don't play games -- is that all they see is what's happening on the screen. And sure, on the screen, you might be fighting Nazis, or contras, or green-blooded aliens, or the Civil War South. But in the gamer's mind, it's all just vectors and motion: After a few hours of playing the game, the external reference points boil away. Talk to chess grandmasters and it's the same thing. They don't look down at the board and think, oh, this is a war-like situation in which a powerful queen is defending a hapless, old, past-his-prime king. They just see abstract forces, the platonic interactions of the game's rule-set. Some masters have told me that they do not even visualize the pieces any more -- just the interactions between then.

Action video-games are actually quite similar. A while ago for Slate, I wrote about how Japanese gamers were big fans of the WWII title Medal of Honor: Rising Sun, in which they player takes the role of American forces invading Japan. At first, this struck me as weird, because after all, the kids playing the game were, in essence, joyfully and repeatedly killing virtual representations of their fathers and grandfathers. But that's not how they saw it at all. It was just "a good war game", or even more generically, a good game: A bucket of well-designed rules and goals, artfully arranged so as to make success teasingly difficult but not impossible. Like all gamers, they interact with action games on their ludological level -- not their narrative and symbolic level.

And that's why action games don't work very well as tools of nationalistic indoctrination. They teach excellent eye-hand co-ordination and strategic movement, and they can sometimes be good at desensitizing you so you'll shoot to kill as a lizard-brain instinct -- a nontrivial proposition, which is precisely why the police and military use them with recruits. And you could say that action games have a strong ideological content, insofar as they suggest that killing lots of people is totally okay and wickedly fun.

But when it comes to promoting specific national ideologies? Action video-games are useless. Their narratives simply do not matter; they are not the reason people play them or enjoy them.

(Thanks to Paul Boutin for this one!)

Dig this: A new study has found that sexy or violent pictures can render you temporarily "blinded"-- and unable to register any new images for several tenths of a second. The scientists sat a bunch of people down and asked them to identify a particular target image, as a bunch of pictures rapidly flashed by. Most people had no problem spotting the target image -- except when it had been preceded directly by a highly erotic or violent picture. Why? As David Zald, one of the researchers, told the New Scientist:

"We think there is essentially a bottleneck for information processing and if a certain type of stimulus captures attention, it can jam up the bottleneck so subsequent information can't get through," Zald explains. "It appears to happen involuntarily. The stimulus captures attention and once allocated to that particular stimulus, no other stimuli can get through."

This has some intriguing policy implications for highway control. If these guys are right, huge roadside billboards of sexy hotties might actually cause accidents: When you're zooming along at 60 miles an hour, being blinded for even a fraction of second could get somebody killed. And man, would it ever suck to get killed because of a Hooters billboard.

Interestingly, the scientists also found that some people are more susceptible to this effect than others. People who had low "harm avoidance" instincts -- i.e. Xtreme sports freaks -- didn't get shorted out as much as more-nervous types. Maybe it's because their brains are accustomed to ignoring freaky stimuli? Anyway, what I'd be interested to see is what the longitudinal effects of the consumption of porn and violent entertainment have on this "blindness". If you've spent years downloading nekkid pictures from the Internet or watching splatter flicks, is your brain more -- or less -- likely to be shorted out by suggestive images?

Back during 9/11, New York's phone system was crippled, so I had only sporadic access to the Internet; I could get online for a few minutes, but would often get bumped off. To quickly let my Canadian friends know I was alive, I sent an email to one well-connected friend in Toronto and asked him to forward to everyone I knew up there. These days, texting is an even faster way to let loved ones know you haven't been killed in a recent terrorist attack. But it has the same one-to-many problem: In a crisis, it's too laborious to to send message to dozens of people.

Thus was born the idea for textOK, a new service in Britain that works like this: You sign up at the textOK web site and input a big list of every phone number you'd like to contact in an emergency. When the next car bomb goes off in downtown London, you just send an SMS to textOK's number -- 60999 -- and the service will bulk-blast a message to your posse telling them you're still alive. It costs 25p, which apparently will be donated to charity.

Perhaps most intriguingly, textOK argues that their service has positive network effects:

Keeps the phone network alive -- lots of people sending 1 text message through us instead of making phone calls will drastically reduce the amount of network traffic.

(Thanks to Engadget for this one!)

One of my favorite Onion stories is "Study Reveals: Babies Are Stupid", in which scientists give intelligence tests to 3,500 babies and conclude that the infants are "so stupid, it's not even funny." It's a neat parody of the inherent strangeness of the infant mind: When it comes to tiny children, the quirks of their uninformed behavior can seem either dumb as hell -- or cognitively intriguing.

As an example of the latter, Judy S. DeLoache has published a totally fascinating piece in Scientific American discussing her research into children's ability to engage in "symbolic thinking". She started out by noticing that many infants younger than one year frequently assume a realistic color picture of an object is the object: In experiments, she's found that infants will try to pick up a photographic object, or even try to stick their feet into a photograph of a shoe. Obviously, the kids can't tell a picture from reality; they cannot separate the symbol of an object from the thing itself.

But things got really interesting in the next phase of DeLoache's work. She brought a bunch of 18-to-30-month-old kids into a room where they could play with a set of toys: an indoor slide, a child-size chair and a car they could ride in. Then she took the children out for a break, and while they were out of the room, replaced the toys with identical, minature versions. When the kids came back in ...

... they attempted with apparent seriousness to perform the same actions with the miniature items that they had with the large ones. Some sat down on the little chair: they walked up to it, turned around, bent their knees and lowered themselves onto it. Some simply perched on top, others sat down so hard that the chair skittered out from under them ... A few kids tried to get into the tiny car. Just as they had done with the large version, they opened the door and attempted -- often with remarkable persistence -- to force a foot inside. One little girl went so far as to take off her shoe in the apparent hope that her foot would then fit!

This research has enormous implications for any field where adults have to interact with children. For example, consider the way social workers, while interviewing a child about possible sexual abuse, will ask a child to point to a doll to show how and where they were touched. The problem, DeLoache argues, is that many young children won't have the ability to symbolically map their body onto a doll's body; and in fact, controlled studies have found that children make fewer errors when simply describing verbally what happened to them -- since they don't need to manipulate symbols to do so.

Education's another big area. When teachers try to show kids subtraction or addition, they typically use objects -- like coins, sticks, whatever -- to represent quantities. But DeLoache suspects many children cannot easily yet separate the symbolic nature of numbers -- the "threeness" of a trio of apples, for example -- from the actual objects themselves. In an even more mindblowing experiment, she taught two groups of six-and-seven-year-old kids to do subtraction problems that involve borrowing, a rather sophisticated concept. One group of kids was taught using pencil and paper; the other was taught using blocks. Both groups learned the concept, but the kids with blocks took three times longer. Why? Because learning the concept with pencil and paper requires the kids to immediately interact with abstract symbolic concepts. The kids working with blocks, paradoxically, had to do more mental work -- since they had to separate the concept of numbers from the blocks they were working with.

That's delightfully counterintuitive. We normally assume that teaching math using these sort of visual aids makes things easier, not harder. If DeLoache's work holds up under scrutiny, it ought to have a massive impact on preschool and primary-school education.

(Thanks to Arts and Letters Daily for this one!)

Anyone who's a serious space buff -- like me -- has spent the last decade getting increasingly depressed about the Space Shuttle, which is now such a howlingly useless waste of government money that it seems like something dreamed up by North Korea. Now Maciej Ceglowski has written "A Rocket to Nowhere," a definitive indictment of the Shuttle program, as well as an excellent primer on how its design came to be, and why it makes so little sense. As you'd probably expect, military and congressional politics are to blame, but the devil's in the details, and they're quite interesting. As Ceglowski concludes:

In the thirty years since the last Moon flight, we have succeeded in creating a perfectly self-contained manned space program, in which the Shuttle goes up to save the Space Station (undermanned, incomplete, breaking down, filled with garbage, and dropping at a hundred meters per day), and the Space Station offers the Shuttle a mission and a destination. The Columbia accident has added a beautiful finishing symmetry -- the Shuttle is now required to fly to the ISS, which will serve as an inspection station for the fragile thermal tiles, and a lifeboat in case something goes seriously wrong.

This closed cycle is so perfect that the last NASA administrator even cancelled the only mission in which there was a compelling need for a manned space flight -- the Hubble telescope repair and upgrade -- on the grounds that it would be too dangerous to fly the Shuttle away from the ISS, thereby detaching the program from its last connection to reason and leaving it free to float off into its current absurdist theater of backflips, gap fillers, Canadarms and heroic expeditions to the bottom of the spacecraft.

I couldn't say it better. The Shuttle has become like a Potemkin space program, built purely for the purpose of appearing to exist. I need a stiff drink just thinking about it.

(Thanks to Jason Kottke for this one!)

I always figured that old photos look old because they're, uh, old -- i.e. they've spent a couple of decades mouldering in Aunt Ida's attic, and they've faded and creep-ified with age. But the blogger over at Smallest Photo recently got his hands on a fully-functioning Autographic Kodak Junior Model A from around 1914. He took a bunch of pictures with it, and sure enough, they too look as metallically eerie and ghostlike as if they'd been lost in archives for a century. That picture above is of the graveyard at St. Mary's Church in Wimbledon; he's got a few others at his site. Of the camera, he notes:

One particularly interesting feature is that there's a small door in the back which houses a metal stylus. By opening a small window that opened onto the back of the film paper as it moved through the camera and applying pressure with the stylus, you could compress the emulsion on the film. This allowed you to record a text image of your choice giving you the opportunity of naming each particular frame.This medium fomat camera takes 120 film. Speeds 25, 50, T, B.f stops 4 - 64.

A built-in f/x device! Anyway, I don't know why I should have been so surprised by these pictures; it's obvious that different media have different aesthetics. (My personal fave is the Fisher Price Pixelvision camera, which shoots images of such low-fi black-and-white weirdness that Michael Almereyda used it to shoot a vampire's-eye view of the world in his horror flick Nadja.) Though we tend to think that today's 9-bazillion-megapixel cameras are capturing reality with increasing precision, I wonder what sort of aesthetic bias we'll find it when, fifty years hence, we haul out the vacation shots we took this summer.

(Thanks to Jason Kottke for this one!)

This is pretty amusing: A few years ago, Eric Raymond -- open-source hacker and essayist par excellence -- wrote "Sex Tips For Geeks: The Art of the Pickup". My favorite part of the essay begins when he offers his central tip on acquiring confidence: "Fake it."

I realize that this goes against all the standard advice you get from the usual well-meaning people, who will begin and end with "be yourself". If yourself is chronically inept with attractive women, this advice sucks. You need to learn method acting. At that party, watch guys who are chatting up women effectively. Imitate them. Don't worry too hard about replicating their mental states or understanding why they do what they do; if you do their moves understanding will happen naturally over time. Play the role of confident person until you become it.

In one sense, the essay is as irreparably dorky as you might imagine, with its insistence that the cardinal rule in dating is that "women can smell fear". So I immediately wrote this off as yet another attempt by geeks to cope with the social chaos of everyday life by rigidly systematizing it. How typically nerdy!

But then it occurred to me that of all fields of human endeavour, dating is the one most crowded with desperate how-to manuals and Skinnerian throughput analyses of emotional states, all in the service of cowherding a partner into desired behavior. Women had The Rules, which counselled women to conceal their real personality and pretend to be undemanding, while also remaining paradoxically inaccessible. Meanwhile, men have the byzantine techniques -- including the infamous "neg hit" -- outlined in Neil Strauss' upcoming The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. When it comes to mating, it seems, everyone's a hacker. When did we turn into a nation of social engineers?

(Thanks to F!lter for this one!)

A few months ago, the New York Times Magazine asked me to write a story about machinima -- the use of video-game systems to produce animated movies. The story came out last weekend, and I've put a copy online below; you can also read it on the Times web site!

The Xbox Auteurs
by Clive Thompson

Like many young hipsters in Austin, Tex., Michael Burns wanted to make it big in some creative field -- perhaps writing comedy scripts in Hollywood. Instead, he wound up in a dead-end job, managing a call center. To kill time, he made friends with a group of equally clever and bored young men at the company where he worked, and they'd sit around talking about their shared passion: video games. Their favorite title was Halo, a best-selling Xbox game in which players control armor-clad soldiers as they wander through gorgeous coastal forests and grim military bunkers and fight an army of lizardlike aliens. Burns and his gang especially loved the "team versus team" mode, which is like a digital version of paint ball: instead of fighting aliens, players hook their Xboxes to the Internet, then log on together in a single game, at which point they assemble into two teams -- red-armored soldiers versus blue-armored ones. Instead of shooting aliens, they try to slaughter one another, using grenades, machine guns and death rays. On evenings and weekends, Burns and his friends would cluster around their TV's until the wee hours of the morning, gleefully blowing one another to pieces.

"Halo is like crack," Burns recalls thinking. "I could play it until I die."

Whenever a friend discovered a particularly cool stunt inside Halo -- for example, obliterating an enemy with a new type of grenade toss -- Burns would record a video of the stunt for posterity. (His friend would perform the move after Burns had run a video cord from his TV to his computer, so he could save it onto his hard drive.) Then he'd post the video on a Web site to show other gamers how the trick was done. To make the videos funnier, sometimes Burns would pull out a microphone and record a comedic voice-over, using video-editing software to make it appear as if the helmeted soldier himself were doing the talking.

Then one day he realized that the videos he was making were essentially computer-animated movies, almost like miniature emulations of "Finding Nemo" or "The Incredibles." He was using the game to function like a personal Pixar studio. He wondered: Could he use it to create an actual movie or TV series?

Burns's group decided to give it a shot. They gathered around the Xbox at Burns's apartment, manipulating their soldiers like tiny virtual actors, bobbing their heads to look as if they were deep in conversation. Burns wrote sharp, sardonic scripts for them to perform. He created a comedy series called "Red vs. Blue," a sort of sci-fi version of "M*A*S*H." In "Red vs. Blue," the soldiers rarely do any fighting; they just stand around insulting one another and musing over the absurdities of war, sounding less like patriotic warriors than like bored, clever video-store clerks. The first 10-minute episode opened with a scene set in Halo's bleakest desert canyon. Two red soldiers stood on their base, peering at two blue soldiers far off in the distance, and traded quips that sounded almost like a slacker disquisition on Iraq:

Red Soldier: "Why are we out here? Far as I can tell, it's just a box canyon in the middle of nowhere, with no way in or out. And the only reason we set up a red base here is because they have a blue base there. And the only reason they have a blue base over there is because we have a red base here."

When they were done, they posted the episode on their Web site (surreptitiously hosted on computers at work). They figured maybe a few hundred people would see it and get a chuckle or two.

Instead, "Red vs. Blue" became an instant runaway hit on geek blogs, and within a single day, 20,000 people stampeded to the Web site to download the file. The avalanche of traffic crashed the company server. "My boss came into the office and was like, 'What the hell is going on?'" Burns recalls. "I looked over at the server, and it was going blink, blink, blink."

Thrilled, Burns and his crew quickly cranked out another video, then another. They kept up a weekly production schedule, and after a few months, "Red vs. Blue" had, like some dystopian version of "Friends," become a piece of appointment viewing. Nearly a million people were downloading each episode every Friday, writing mash notes to the creators and asking if they could buy a DVD of the collected episodes. Mainstream media picked up on the phenomenon. The Village Voice described it as "'Clerks' meets 'Star Wars,'" and the BBC called it "riotously funny" and said it was "reminiscent of the anarchic energy of 'South Park.'" Burns realized something strange was going on. He and his crew had created a hit comedy show -- entirely inside a video game.

VIDEO GAMES HAVE NOT ENJOYED good publicity lately. Hillary Clinton has been denouncing the violence in titles like Grand Theft Auto, which was yanked out of many stores last month amid news that players had unlocked sex scenes hidden inside. Yet when they're not bemoaning the virtual bloodshed, cultural pundits grudgingly admit that today's games have become impressively cinematic. It's not merely that the graphics are so good: the camera angles inside the games borrow literally from the visual language of film. When you're playing Halo and look up at the sun, you'll see a little "lens flare," as if you were viewing the whole experience through the eyepiece of a 16-millimeter Arriflex. By using the game to actually make cinema, Burns and his crew flipped a switch that neatly closed a self-referential media loop: movies begat games that begat movies.

And Burns and his crew aren't alone. Video-game aficionados have been creating "machinima" -- an ungainly term mixing "machine" and "cinema" and pronounced ma-SHEEN-i-ma -- since the late 90's. "Red vs. Blue" is the first to break out of the underground, and now corporations like Volvo are hiring machinima artists to make short promotional films, while MTV, Spike TV and the Independent Film Channel are running comedy shorts and music videos produced inside games. By last spring, Burns and his friends were making so much money from "Red vs. Blue" that they left their jobs and founded Rooster Teeth Productions. Now they produce machinima full time.

It may be the most unlikely form of indie filmmaking yet -- and one of the most weirdly democratic. "It's like 'The Blair Witch Project' all over again, except you don't even need a camera," says Julie Kanarowski, a product manager with Electronic Arts, the nation's largest video-game publisher. "You don't even need actors."

Back in college, Burns and another Rooster Teeth founder, Matt Hullum, wrote and produced a traditional live-action indie movie. It cost $9,000, required a full year to make and was seen by virtually no one. By contrast, the four Xboxes needed to make "Red vs. Blue" cost a mere $600. Each 10-minute episode requires a single day to perform and edit and is viewed by hordes of feverish video-game fans the planet over.

More than just a cheap way to make an animated movie, machinima allows game players to comment directly on the pop culture they so devotedly consume. Much like "fan fiction" (homespun tales featuring popular TV characters) or "mash-ups" (music fans blending two songs to create a new hybrid), machinima is a fan-created art form. It's what you get when gamers stop blasting aliens for a second and start messing with the narrative.

And God knows, there's plenty to mess with. These days, the worlds inside games are so huge and open-ended that gamers can roam anywhere they wish. Indeed, players often abandon the official goal of the game -- save the princess; vanquish the eldritch forces of evil -- in favor of merely using the virtual environment as a gigantic jungle gym. In one popular piece of Halo machinima, "Warthog Jump," a player cunningly used the game to conduct a series of dazzling physics experiments. He placed grenades in precise locations beneath jeeps and troops, such that when the targets blew sky-high, they pinwheeled through the air in precise formations, like synchronized divers. Another gamer recorded a machinima movie that poked subversive fun at Grand Theft Auto. Instead of playing as a dangerous, cop-killing gangster, the player pretended he was a naive Canadian tourist -- putting down his gun, dressing in tacky clothes and simply wandering around the game's downtown environment for hours, admiring the scenery.

SO WHAT'S IT LIKE to actually shoot a movie inside a game? In June, I visited the Rooster Teeth offices in Buda, Tex., a tiny Austin suburb, to observe Burns and his group as they produced a scene of "Red vs. Blue." Burns, a tall, burly 32-year-old, sat in front of two huge flat-panel screens, preparing the editing software. Nearby were the two Rooster Teeth producers who would be acting on-screen: Geoff Ramsey, a scraggly-bearded 30-year-old whose arms are completely covered in tattoos of fish and skulls, and Gustavo Sorola, a gangly 27-year-old who sprawled in a beanbag chair and peered through his thick architect glasses at the day's e-mail. They were fan letters, Sorola told me, that pour in from teenagers who are as enthusiastic as they are incoherent. "The way kids write these days," he said with a grimace. "It's like someone threw up on the keyboard."

In the script they were acting out that day, a pair of "Red vs. Blue" soldiers engaged in one of their typically pointless existential arguments, bickering over whether it's possible to kill someone with a toy replica of a real weapon. The Rooster Teeth crew recorded the voice-overs earlier in the day; now they were going to create the animation for the scene.

Burns picked up a controller and booted up Halo on an Xbox. He would act as the camera: whatever his character saw would be recorded, from his point of view. Then Sorola and Ramsey logged into the game, teleporting in as an orange-suited and a red-suited soldier. Burns posed them near a massive concrete bunker and frowned as he scrutinized the view on the computer screen. "Hmmmm," he muttered. "We need something to frame you guys -- some sort of prop." He ran his character over to a nearby alien hovercraft, jumped in and parked it next to the actors. "Sweet!" he said. "I like it!"

In a "Red vs. Blue" shoot, the actors all must follow one important rule: Be careful not to accidentally kill another actor. "Sometimes you'll drop your controller and it unintentionally launches a grenade. It takes, like, 20 minutes for the blood splatters to dry up," Ramsey said. "Totally ruins the scene."

Finally, Burns was ready to go. He shouted, "Action!" and the voice-overs began playing over loudspeakers. Sorola and Ramsey acted in time with the dialogue. Acting, in this context, was weirdly minimalist. They mashed the controller joysticks with their thumbs, bobbing the soldiers' heads back and forth roughly in time with important words in each line. "It's puppetry, basically," Ramsey said, as he jiggled his controller. Of all the "Red vs. Blue" crew members, Ramsey is renowned for his dexterity with an Xbox. When a scene calls for more than five actors onstage, he'll put another controller on the ground and manipulate it with his right foot, allowing him to perform as two characters simultaneously.

As I watched, I was reminded of what initially cracked me up so much about "Red vs. Blue": the idea that faceless, anonymous soldiers in a video game have interior lives. It's a "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" conceit; "Red vs. Blue" is what the game characters talk about when we're not around to play with them. As it turns out, they're a bunch of neurotics straight out of "Seinfeld." One recruit reveals that he chain-smokes inside his airtight armor; a sergeant tells a soldier his battle instructions are to "scream like a woman." And, in a sardonic gloss on the game's endless carnage, none of the soldiers have the vaguest clue why they're fighting.

Yet as I discovered, real-life soldiers are among the most ardent fans of "Red vs. Blue." When I walked around the Rooster Teeth office, I found it was festooned with letters, plaques and an enormous American flag, gifts from grateful American troops, many of whom are currently stationed in Iraq. Isn't it a little astonishing, I asked Burns when the crew went out in the baking Texas sun for a break, that actual soldiers are so enamored of a show that portrays troops as inept cowards, leaders as cynical sociopaths and war itself as a supremely meaningless endeavor? Burns laughed, but said the appeal was nothing sinister.

"'Red vs. Blue' is about downtime," he said. "There's very little action, which is precisely the way things are in real life."

"He's right," Ramsey added. He himself spent five years in the army after high school. "We'd just sit around digging ditches and threatening to kill each other all day long," he said. "We were bored out of our minds."

PERHAPS THE MOST UNUSUAL THING about machinima is that none of its creators are in jail. After all, they're gleefully plundering intellectual property at a time when the copyright wars have become particularly vicious. Yet video-game companies have been upbeat -- even exuberant -- about the legions of teenagers and artists pillaging their games. This is particularly bewildering in the case of "Red vs. Blue," because Halo is made by Bungie, a subsidiary of Microsoft, a company no stranger to using a courtroom to defend its goods. What the heck is going on?

As it turns out, people at Bungie love "Red vs. Blue." "We thought it was kind of brilliant," says Brian Jarrard, the Bungie staff member who manages interactions with fans. "There are people out there who would never have heard about Halo without 'Red vs. Blue.' It's getting an audience outside the hardcore gaming crowd."

Sure, Rooster Teeth ripped off Microsoft's intellectual property. But Microsoft got something in return: "Red vs. Blue" gave the game a whiff of countercultural coolness, the sort of grass-roots street cred that major corporations desperately crave but can never manufacture. After talking with Rooster Teeth, Microsoft agreed, remarkably, to let them use the game without paying any licensing fees at all. In fact, the company later hired Rooster Teeth to produce "Red vs. Blue" videos to play as advertisements in game stores. Microsoft has been so strangely solicitous that when it was developing the sequel to Halo last year, the designers actually inserted a special command -- a joystick button that makes a soldier lower his weapon -- designed solely to make it easier for Rooster Teeth to do dialogue.

"If you're playing the game, there's no reason to lower your weapon at all," Burns explained. "They put that in literally just so we can shoot machinima."

Other game companies have gone even further. Many now include editing software with their games, specifically to encourage fans to shoot movies. When Valve software released its hit game Half-Life 2 last year, it included "Faceposer" software so that machinima creators could tweak the facial expressions of characters. When the Sims 2 -- a sequel to the top-selling game of all time -- came out last year, its publisher, Electronic Arts, set up a Web site so that fans could upload their Sims 2 movies to show to the world. (About 8,000 people so far have done so.)

Still, it's one thing for gamers to produce a jokey comedy or a music video. Can machinima actually produce a work of art -- something with serious emotional depth? A few people have tried. In China, a visual artist named Feng Mengbo used the first-person-shooter game Quake III to produce Q4U, in which the screen is filled with multiple versions of himself, killing one another. Players' relationships with constant, blood-splattering violence is a common subject in game art. Last year, the 31-year-old artist Brody Condon produced an unsettling film that consisted of nothing but shots of himself committing suicide inside 50 different video games.

"I try to come to terms with what taking your life means in these games," Condon says. "I'm trying to understand, spiritually, your relationship with an avatar on the screen."

But even machinima's biggest fans admit that the vast majority of machinima is pretty amateurish. "It's like if some friends of mine all broke into a movie set, and we all got to use all the cameras and special-effects equipment," says Carl Goodman, director of digital media at the American Museum of the Moving Image, which began to hold an annual machinima festival two years ago. "We wouldn't quite know how to use it, but we'd make some pretty interesting stuff."

Yet as Goodman points out, there's a competing proposition. Machinima does not always strive to emulate "realistic," artistic movies. On the contrary, it is often explicitly devoted to celebrating the aesthetics of games -- the animations and in-jokes, the precise physics. Most machinima is probably meaningless to people who don't play games, much as ESPN is opaque to anyone who doesn't watch sports. But for those who do play Halo, it was genuinely thrilling to see something like "Warthog Jump," with its meticulously synchronized explosions.

The Rooster Teeth crew has its own hilariously stringent rule for making machinima: no cheating. When they shoot "Red vs. Blue," they do not use any special effects that are not organically included in the game; everything you see in an episode of "Red vs. Blue" could in theory have taken place during an actual game of Halo, played by a fan in his bedroom. It's a charmingly purist attitude, a sci-fi version of the "Dogma" school of indie film, which argues that movies are best when cinematic trickery is kept to a minimum.

ONE EVENING IN NEW YORK, I visited with Ethan Vogt as he and his machinima team shot a car-chase scene for a Volvo promo. Vogt and two producers sat at computers, logged into a multiplayer game; each producer controlled a car racing through crowded city streets, while Vogt controlled a free-floating "camera" that followed behind, recording the visuals. The vehicles -- an enormous 1972 Chevy Impala and a Volvo V50 -- screamed along at about 60 miles an hour, fishtailing through corners while plowing into mailboxes, lampposts and, occasionally, clots of pedestrians. The lead car burst into flames. "That's great," Vogt said. "That's great."

Though it shares with independent filmmaking a do-it-yourself aesthetic, machinima inverts the central tradition of indie film: smallness. With their skimpy budgets, indie directors tend to set movies in kitchens or living rooms -- and focus instead on providing quality acting and scripts. Machinima, in contrast, often has horribly cheesy acting and ham-fisted, purple-prose stories -- but they're set in outer space. Want massive shootouts? Howling mob scenes? Roman gladiatorial armies clashing by night? No problem. It is the rare form of amateur film in which the directors aspire to be not Wes Anderson but George Lucas.

Indeed, with video games played on computers, it is now possible to build an entire world from scratch. The core of any video game is its game engine, the software that knows how to render 3-D objects and how to realistically represent the physics of how they move, bounce or collide. But the actual objects inside the game -- the people, the cars, the guns, even the buildings -- can be altered, tweaked or replaced by modifications, or "mods." Mods do not require any deep programming skills; indeed, almost any teenager with a passing acquaintance in graphic-design software can "re-skin" a character in a game to make it look like himself, for instance. (Xbox and PlayStation games, in comparison, are much harder to mod, because the consoles are locked boxes, designed to prevent players from tampering with the games.)

I was able to see modding in action one night when I visited the ILL Clan, a pioneering machinima group. Their headquarters are the kitchen table in the cramped one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment of Frank Dellario; a lanky, hyperkinetic 42-year-old, he sat on a rickety folding chair, pecking at a keyboard. The table was littered with four computer screens and laptops, the remnants of take-out sushi and a hopelessly tangled morass of computer cords and joysticks; a huge wide-screen TV lurked behind them for viewing their work. On the night I visited, they were using a game engine called Torque to shoot a short heist movie for Audi, in which two thugs beat up a concert violinist and make off with an antique violin in a van.

To quickly create a gritty-looking city, Dellario and his colleague -- ILL Clan's co-founder, Matt Dominianni -- hired a local artist to build a generic-looking urban intersection inside the game. To customize it, Dominianni went onto Google, found snapshots of a few seedy stores (an adult bookstore, a tattoo parlor and a furniture outlet) and digitally pasted them onto the front of the buildings. Then they went to a site called Turbo-Squid, a sort of Amazon for virtual in-game items, and for $45 bought a van that could be plunked down inside the game. When I arrived, they were browsing the site and contemplating buying a few women. "My God, look at this one," Dellario marveled, as he clicked open a picture of an eerily realistic 3-D brunette named Masha. "I'm going to marry this woman. They've finally broken through to total reality."

Dellario put the van into the correct location in the scene, then logged into the game to figure out the camera angle for this shot. He frowned. It didn't look right. The lighting was all off, with shadows falling in the wrong places.

Dominianni figured out the problem: "The sun is supposed to be at high noon. It's in the wrong place."

"Oh, yeah," Dellario said. "Let me move it." He pulled up a menu, clicked on the "sun" command, and dragged it across the sky.

Now they were finally ready to shoot. Dellario realized they needed an extra pair of hands to manipulate one of the thugs. "Want to act in this scene?" Dellario asked, and he handed me a joystick.

I sat down at one of the computers and took control of "Thug1," a brown-haired man in a golf shirt and brown pants, carrying the stolen violin. Dominianni was playing "Thug2." Our characters were supposed to look around to make sure the coast is clear, then jump in the truck and race off. Dellario gave me my motivation: "It's like you hear a suspicious noise. You're nervous." I used the joystick to practice moving my virtual character, craning its neck -- my neck? -- back and forth. I have played plenty of video games, but this felt awfully odd. Usually when I am inside a game, I'm just worried about staying alive while the bullets whiz past my ears. I've never had to emote.

While Dellario and Dominianni fiddled with the camera angle, I grew impatient and wandered around, exploring the virtual set. I peered in a few shop windows -- they were strikingly photorealistic, even up close. Then I walked down an alley and suddenly arrived at the end of the set. It was like a tiny Western town in the desert: once you got beyond the few clustered buildings, there was nothing there -- just a vast, enormous plain, utterly empty and stretching off infinitely into the distance.

THIS SPRING, ELECTRONIC ARTS DECIDED to promote the Sims 2 by hiring Rooster Teeth to create a machinima show using the game. Called "The Strangerhood," it would be freely available online. "The Strangerhood" is a parody of reality TV: a group of people wake up one day to discover that they are living in new houses, and they can't remember who they are or how they got there. In the Sims 2, the animated people are impressively Pixar-like and expressive, making "The Strangerhood" even more like a mainstream animated show than "Red vs. Blue"; you could almost imagine watching it on Saturday morning.

The problem is, the Sims 2 has turned out to be incredibly difficult to shoot with. When the Rooster Teeth gang uses Halo for machinima, the characters are mere puppets and can be posed any way the creators want. But in the Sims 2, the little virtual characters have artificial intelligence and free will. When you're playing, you do not control all the action: the fun is in putting your Sims in interesting social situations, then standing back and watching what they'll do. When Rooster Teeth's Matt Hullum builds a virtual set and puts the "Strangerhood" characters in place for a shoot, he's never quite sure what will happen. To shoot a scene in which two men wake up in bed together, Hullum had to spend hours playing with the two characters -- who are nominally heterosexual -- forcing them into repeated conversations until they eventually became such good friends they were willing to share a bed. Shooting machinima with Sims is thus maddeningly like using actual, human stars: they're stubborn; they stage hissy fits and stomp off to their trailers.

"We'll do three or four takes of a scene, and one of the Sims will start getting tired and want to go to sleep," Hullum said. "It's just like being on a real set. You're screaming: 'Quick, quick, get the shot! We're losing light!'"

Hullum showed me a typical "Strangerhood" scene. He put Nikki, a young ponytailed brunette in a baseball cap, in the kitchen to interact with Wade, a slacker who looked eerily like a digital Owen Wilson. (To give Wade a mellow, San Francisco vibe, Hullum programmed him to move at a pace 50 percent slower than the other characters.) Hullum pointed to Nikki's "mood" bar; it was low, which meant she was in a bad mood and wouldn't want to talk. "When they're bored, you have to lock them in a room alone for a few hours until they start to crave conversation," Hullum said. He tried anyway, prodding Wade to approach her and talk about food, one of Nikki's favorite subjects. It worked. The two became engrossed in a conversation, laughing and gesticulating wildly. "See, this footage would be great if we were shooting a scene where these guys are maybe gossiping," Hullum mused, as he zoomed the camera in to frame a close-up on Wade. Then Nikki started to yawn. "Oh, damn. See -- she's getting bored. Oh, no, she's walking away," Hullum said, as the little virtual Nikki wandered out of the room. "Damn. You see what we have to deal with?"

The audience for "The Strangerhood" has not exploded the way "Red vs. Blue" did. The project is a gamble: its creators hope it will break out of machinima's geeky subculture and vault into the mainstream.

Though in a way, Hullum said, the mainstream isn't always a fun place to be, either. Before he returned to Austin to work on "Red vs. Blue," he spent six miserable years in Hollywood working on second-rate teen movies with big budgets, like "Scooby-Doo" and "The Faculty."

"So now to come to this, where we have total creative control of our own stuff, it's amazing," Hullum said, as he watched Nikki walk out of the house in search of a more interesting conversation. "I just pray we can keep this going. Because if we can't, I'm in big trouble."

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the magazine.

I'm getting my one week of vacation this summer, so there'll be no postings until this coming weekend. Please do not adjust your blog.

I'm getting my one week of vacation this summer, so there'll be no postings until this coming weekend. Please do not adjust your blog.

If you're ever in a rush, and you're taking an elevator and don't want to be forced to stop for other people, try this intriguing elevator hack. Apparently it's possible to totally 0wnz0r the machine, as TheDamnBlog.com reports:

The designers of some elevators include a hidden feature that is very handy if you're in a hurry or it's a busy time in the building (like check-out time in a hotel). While some elevators require a key, others can be put into "Express" mode by pressing the "Door Close" and "Floor" buttons at the same time. This sweeps the car to the floor of your choice and avoids stops at any other floor.

This reminds of Colson Whitehead's superb novel The Intuitionist, which is about elevator repairpeople, and contains reams of amazing trivia about elevators. There's an excerpt here on Salon.

(Thanks to Gizmodo for this one!)

Back in those go-go 90s, Internet Service Providers loved using the iconography of race-car spedometers to illustrate the mindblowing joy you'd experience while surfing on their screamin' 56K dial-up connections. Now Speakeasy, the hipster left-coast ISP, has created a fun little Flash spedometer that measures precisely how fast your download and upload speeds are. Test your ISP and make sure you're actually getting the bandwidth you're paying for! Or, as Joe suggests:

Speakeasy is also useful when you're staying somewhere, like a hotel, advertising such and such high–speed internet: test it, then print out the results and bring them down to the front desk and demand a rate reduction for false advertising.

Might be amusing with the right manager.

Heh.

(Thanks to the Book of Joe for this one!)

Does chewing gum improve your memory? Apparently so, according to a new study by three British scientists published in the latest issue of the journal Apetite. The researchers had 75 adults perform twenty minutes' worth of memory and attention tests. One third of the participants chewed gum during the tests; one third "mimicked chewing movements", and the remaining third did not chew at all. The gum-chewers scored 24 per cent higher on word-recall tests performed immediately, and 36 per cent higher when the tests were performed later. As the New Scientist reports:

There are three main potential explanations, says Scholey. In March 2000, Japanese researchers showed that brain activity in the hippocampus, an area important for memory, increases while people chew -- but it is not clear why.

Recent research has also found that insulin receptors in the hippocampus may be involved in memory. "Insulin mops up glucose in the bloodstream and chewing causes the release of insulin, because the body is expecting food. If insulin receptors in the brain are involved in memory, we may have an insulin-mediated mechanism explaining our findings -- but that is very, very speculative," Scholey says.

But there could be a simpler answer. "One interesting thing we saw in our study was that chewing increased heart rate. Anything that improves delivery of things like oxygen in the brain, such as an increased heart rate, is a potential cognitive enhancer to some degree," he says.

Interestingly, gum-chewing did nothing to improve "memory-linked reaction times", a key indicator of attention; so while chomping on some Juicy Fruit can bolster your recall, it won't help you keep fresh if you're spaced out. Nonetheless, gum companies like Wrigley have long touted the mental-enhancement effects of chewing -- even boasting on its web site about how the US army has distributed gum to troops since World War I.