Strangerhood and the Virtues of Contraints
A while back, I referenced the trailer to Strangerhood (site currently Slashdotted), the new project from the creators of the exceptional Red vs. Blue. As Slashdot reports, the first 5-minute episode built entirely in The Sims 2 is up (I used this Bittorrent link).
Maybe my expectations were set too high, but I’m kind of disappointed. The show starts with the same existential conundrum that started off Red vs. Blue, but isn’t nearly as funny. In my experience, you get better art when your work is constrained. These constraints may be based in form, tools, time or cost. This might explain why some small budget films are exceptional (say, Celebration or Clerks), and why haiku is such a challenging poetic structure. In the case of Red vs. Blue, the creator’s tools were limited to what you could animate inside Halo. The story and character’s originality and charm are largely a result of those limits. Because The Sims 2 is so much more versatile as a ‘palette’, I wonder if the results will be less convincing.
