Wikipedia:Today's featured article/August 25, 2008

Diary of a Camper is a short 1996 American film created by United Ranger Films, then a subdivision of a popular group of players, or clan, known as the Rangers. Made using id Software's 1996 first-person shooter computer game Quake and released over the Internet as a non-interactive game demo file, the video is considered the first example of machinima—the art of using real-time, virtual 3-D environments, often game engines, to create animated films. The story centers on a lone camper, a pejorative for a player who waits in a strategic location instead of seeking active battle, who faces five members of the Rangers clan in a deathmatch, a type of multiplayer game whose goal is to kill as many opponents as possible. Although players had previously recorded segments of gameplay, these were usually deathmatches or speedruns, attempts to complete a map as quickly as possible. Diary of a Camper was the first demo to contain a narrative with (text-based) dialogue, instead of merely showing gameplay. Commentators agree that the work itself is primitive, but acknowledge its importance in establishing video games as a medium for filmmaking. (more...)

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