Damian Lacedaemion isn't your everyday talk show host. He's a cyborg. With a gun. The talk show's host gives a look at what happens when virtual content crosses over to become mainstream entertainment.Talk shows are usually relaxing programs set in comfortable, air-conditioned television studios, where the guests recline in plush habiliments under the reverent gaze of a live studio audience.
They're not usually hosted by a 7-foot-tall cyborg in a spacesuit, and set on an alien world where other cyborgs run rampant and try to shoot the guests.
But "This Spartan Life" is exactly that: a 30-minute talk show set and filmed entirely within Microsoft's extremely popular MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) for the Xbox, "Halo 2."
The show is produced by a four-person crew of media professionals and distributed online via the show's Web site.
In its few months of existence, "This Spartan Life" has attracted a small but devoted group of fans ranging from squeaky-voiced teenage gamers to media artists, video game producers, cultural critics, everyday comedy fans and even the Xbox production team itself.
Though the show's set is virtual, the guests and entertainment are real. Thus far, "This Spartan Life" has interviewed artist and filmmaker Peggy Awash and interactive guru Bob Stein.
The show also features original 8-bit music from Bit Shifter, Bubblyfish, Nullsleep and Glomag.
Even more entertaining: Since the show is filmed in-game, the host and interviewees sometimes come under attack from Halo players playing the "real" game.
Microsoft signs a film deal for the Halo video game. Click here to read more.
The result is that viewers of the show are at once struck by both the absurdity of appropriating the personas of 7-foot-tall gun-wielding cyborgs, and the power of a fully realized virtual world.
MMOG platforms have been used for "secondary intent" content production before—the Second Life gaming platform was developed for that reason, for example, and there is a large online market for selling virtual gold and objects for real-world compensation.
But "This Spartan Life" is one of the few examples of in-game content production that may demonstrate the long-term viability of exporting virtual entertainment into the real world.
To learn more about the show, its creators, and the future of in-game content production, Publish.com visited the Manhattan studios of "This Spartan Life."
Chris Burke, 46, is the real-life person behind the host of the talk show, Damian Lacedaemion.
Burke refers to what he does with Halo as machinima, or cinema filmed inside a game engine.
The genre has many popular practitioners, including Red vs. Blue (which also uses Halo), Grunts, and The Ill Clan.
Doom 3 vs. Halo 2. Click here to read more.
Burke opened the door to his 12th floor studio, which he also uses for his full-time audio production job.
In one corner, beside a couch and coffee table, were four Xbox consoles networked via Ethernet cables to an Ethernet hub.
The studio also held a soundproof booth and several computers, which Burke uses for his real-life audio production jobs.
He answered a few questions while he was setting up for his next "This Spartan Life" segment.
So, how many people are involved in making the show, and how do you do it?
"There's four of us. I produce it and there's another guy [John Dylan Keith] who helps write it, and then there are two people who are 'cameras' in the game [Terry Golob and Michele Darling] … It's hard work, takes a lot of time. I was up until 5:20 this morning editing a segment. Then I woke up around 11, took one look at it, and I was like…no."
How exactly do you film it?
"We've got four Xboxes here, and they're networked via LiveConnect, all through four Ethernet cables and an Ethernet hub. You see each Xbox has a name, Damian and camera 1, and this one is camera 2 although the label's fallen off. There's a kind-of hack that allows a player to be a camera in the game. But very little of this has to do with hardware or software hacking. Ninety-nine percent of it is just the game itself. … I put the guests in the sound booth. I use that for my real job, so why not use it for this? Except, next week when we interview [Xbox sound engineer] Marty O'Donnell, he won't be here and we'll record him over the headset. So I guess it's going to be kind of ironic, you know, that the sound engineer is going to have the worst sound."
Next Page: The future of in-game entertainment.
What was your original intent with this talk show?
"Originally, we didn't know what it was. We started out with one idea at rhizome.org. It was just going to be a hobby, something neat to do in an online game. We were just going to interview people in media arts, people like Lev Manovich and Bob Stein and Peggy Awash. So the rhizome community was our original audience. But as we got into it, we realized it was more than just a parody of a talk show, it was really an actual talk show."
One thing that makes This Spartan Life so funny is that you're doing it inside an extremely violent video game. Why?
"It is extremely violent. Part of that makes me uncomfortable, but at the same time it's so over the top. There's just no getting around it, so you might as well comment on it, preferably in an intelligent manner … To me, the most attractive moment of this is when you're in the virtual space and you begin to confuse it with the real world."
Microsoft pushes real-time collaboration. Click here to read more.
What would you call this form of content production?
"It's a mix of reality TV, a variety show, a game show … It's a sort of new breed of independent media, although you have to realize it's already got one foot in a very big corporate culture … Things like this, any new media really, they either come from the really really grassroots level or they're part of a very big corporate culture. But there's a certain democratic aspect to machinima, because with a really low expenditure you can do some impressive stuff."
Back in the '70s and '80s, indie media proselytizers like Michael Shamberg would go around to college campuses and the like, hawking portable video cameras, saying this is the future of independent media, everyone will be able to make their own television shows. With that history as context, what do you see as the future of in-game content production?
"It's a wide-open future, and I think there are basically two parallel futures in it. One, this kind of machinima, is tied to actual games and the gaming companies turn it into a kind of promotion for the game itself. Like in the game, God of War I think it's called, they could use this thing called 'Pimp Your Weapon' to advertise or something. Of course, part of what makes what we're doing so interesting is that we're taking a platform and doing things with it that we're not supposed to do. There's a second future, which I think is a bigger future for machinima, using the open source game engines like the SDK engine, and producing content that doesn't use trademarked material, like skins and characters. I think there's more of a future for that, where you don't have to be beholden to a corporate monolith."
If the show gets popular enough, it could be picked up by a channel like techTV. Is that where you're going?
"Well, there's a problem with TV. We'd need a big production crew in order to churn out an episode within a week. … Right now it takes at least a month, sometimes longer. There's only been two shows, and we started in January. But there's a problem with TV: They're just so interested in filling up large chunks of time with shovelware."
Online Media 
