Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - Posts

Use of (Video) Weapons - Goonfleet

While I'm on the subject of Goonfleet videos, it's interesting to watch the changes in their style and composition.

If you look at a Goonfleet recruitment video from a year ago, it is mainly advertising the game.  The theme is pretty much how shiny Eve-Online is, with lots of pictures of ships, stars and the like.  Production values are not brilliant, and framing in particular tends to be too centred on one ship in space, with the camera rotating around it on one axis.

Gatecamp

One theme that has already started is Goonfleet's eschatological approach to Eve: our presentation of ourselves as a revolutionary force, sometimes destructive, sometimes cleansing.  The use of Johnny Cash's gospel song "When The Man Comes Around", with vivid imagery of the end times, is picked to reinforce this.  Each video continues this theme, whether through snippets and samples of Dr Strangelove, or imagery of thermonuclear explosions.

Join Goonfleet

Move on six months and production values are massively enhanced.  The humour has developed, the digital editing is worlds away from the original.  And as an aside, the size of the ships has got a lot bigger, as Goonfleet pilots get more experienced and richer.  For all the obscurity of the narrative to an outsider, there is a story here: Goonfleet has helped take down the faux-neutral mercantile empire of ISS, who had placed an IPO and invested a fortune in a grand, money-making scheme, discussed by Nate Combs on Terra Nova at the time.  There is an increasing tendency to intermix existing film stock with Eve footage, to use shakeycam and better use of close-ups and off-center placement.  The March video ("Galaxy in Flames") continues, once more, the developing trend of using industrial or darkwave music, imagery of nukes, and increasingly impressive camerawork (look, for instance, at the zoom out at around the 2:20 mark).

Another, fairly unique use of video by Goonfleet is for training videos.  Goonfleet looks after new pilots in a way that almost nobody else does.  Many corporations give their newbies a helping hand, so long as somebody notices their arrival.  But this tends to be done on an ad-hoc basis.  Goonfleet has directors in charge of assiging one of our volunteer mentors to each Newbee [sic], to help them through the difficult first weeks.  They are given free ships and equipment from hangars set aside for the purpose, and assigned to a squad of pilots, rather than simply being one of the four thousand people in the swarm.   I Wish... A pilot who mentions that they are new will be vilified and scorned in chat, accused of being a pubbie spy, and told to get out.  But so long as they laugh and join in, then they will find themselves with donations pouring in from their new squad members: more money than most new pilots will see in months, freely donated.  And almost all do pass this hazing, since the culture of Goonfleet is so cohesive: you need to already be a Something Awful board member with a longish posting history, so applicants are self-selecting to fit in with the overarching ethos of the swarm.

Goonfleet has for some time declared that they want to make 0.0 (high risk, high gain) space available to more pilots rather than the Bob-sponsored elite, and even experimented with the Goon Free Trade Zone as a way of doing this.  The South-Eastern Goonfleet Co-Prosperity Sphere...

Anyway, one upshot of this aim, combined with our support of our own new pilots, is that Goonfleet makes publically available some of our training videos intended for new pilots.  There are few better ways for newbies to pick up the skills described, be  they 0.0 mining, tackling, fleet operations and more (look at the related videos on the right in youtube to see more from Goonfleet Educational Services).

Finally, individual pilots post "fraps" (video captures) of fights and kills on an ad-hoc basis.  To see a single Goonswarm member (James315) slaughtering dozens of Bob members, there is this, "Kill Bobby".  Relatively technically unskilled but well-scripted (if sloooow on the textual passages) use of video for pure, propagandistic narrative.

Bob Titan Down: The Videos

I notice that I've had about five and a bit thousand hits on the destruction of the Bob Titan in Eve Online, just thanks to an atmospheric, but rather lmiited teamspeak recording.

Raising the flag

So, pandering to our MTV-jump-cut-video age, here are some film versions of the same event.

Easiest to access is the YouTube version of Stahlregen's film of the event, which has predictably limited resolution, but a rather nice industrial soundtrack including some Trent Reznor later on, just for Dragon*.  You can find the youtube version here.

If you want a higher resolution version of the same thing, download it from Eve-Files.  This is the version you really want.  This shows off how pretty the game is.  Remember, when watching it, that those red and green and blue dots are all ships controlled by real people (there are a bunch of fighter drones out at smoe points, but those are set up differently on the player's overview), so this is a moderately big fleet action of over three hundred people..  And when the titan (the big, mushroom-headed thing) is surrounded by shimmering blue spheres, those are set up to prevent him getting away.

Rather less stylish, but probably more informative, is this youtube video, which has another version of the teamspeak soundtrack playing over it.  You can hear Sesfan, our glorious Fuhrer, controlling the fleet and calmly ordering the support fleet to scrub attackers off our vital interdictors (the tiny ships needed to hold the titan down while the capital fleet killed it).

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*NiN also turn up on whati think is otherwise one of the weaker GF recruitment videos.  Nice imagery, nice sound, not enough apocalypse.