Cool on (Massively?) Multiple Levels: This Spartan Life

The repurposing of video games to animate new content (machinima) first came to me in the form of Red vs. Blue. This Spartan Life is an innovative use of the same technique to reinvent the familiar genre of talk show. Billed as "a talk show in space", their interviewee list includes media pioneers like Bob Stein and Marty O'Donnell. Episodes also include DJ OCTOBIT and the Solid Gold Elite Dancers -- the funniest synchronized movement I've seen since the SNL men's synchro swimming skit.

Better yet is the intelligent discussion about the promises and challenges of new media. Here's a typical quote from the Bob Stein episode:

Imagine a company's manifesto written today and fast forward 150 years since it was written. You would have not just the 50-page essay, you'd have the comments of millions of people who would not only say 'yea' or 'nay' about various points, but they'd make links to other arguments etcetera, etcetera -- you know every few years, the authors -- Marks and Engles -- might come around and they might actually look at everything everyone had said and reissue a new version so that after 150 years you have a corpus that's literally millions of pages. So the problem becomes how does an editor make navigating through such a large data space useful?

All this and the Solid Gold Elite Dancers? Awesome.

Tune in and get fragged.


Screencap from thisspartanlife.com