This is interesting. . . . .

The recently introduced game The Movies from Peter Molyneux's Lionhead studios published by Activision has garnered some notice for its use to create a film about the recent French riots.

The WaPo article covers the basics (also covered by the site boing boing a few days earlier) but misses an important problem with machinima made using this program. The update to the boing boing article points out disturbing aspects to Activision's EULA for this game.

I guess a good test case would be to make a machinima using the game attacking, belittling and parodying Activision. The First Amendment doesn't apply but public pressure might work to limit Activision's ability to stifle and bury machinima they find distasteful.

I also wonder if the Washington Post would have covered this if the filmmaker hadn't chosen to focus on as he states, "The main intention of this movie is to bring people to think about what really happened in my country by trying to show the starting point and some causes of these riots,".

I love these 'root causes' type folks. If his machinima had been a 'kill 'em all, and let god sort 'em out' type fantasy about retribution against the property damage (which would be wrong, wrong, wrong in real life needless to say, but as a fantasy?) I don't think it would have gotten the same press, and it might even have been taken off of the Activision controlled website of player made films.