Very briefly at the beginning of the Machinima screening, while the term machinima was being defined, Parkour Civilization by Evbo on Youtube was used as an example. The plot essentially is Evbo exists in a world centered around parkour and wants to work his way up from being a parkour noob to become the top of the parkour world. So of course, I watched the entire two hour parkour civilization Youtube video right after the screening ended.
When I started watching the video, it started in a very stereotypical Minecraft youtuber fashion, with a perpetually excited tone of voice and a seemingly linear storyline of ascension up to being the best in the world, so I was quite sure I already knew where the story was going. But not far into the story, when Evbo is just getting to the beginning of his ascension up the parkour test tower, he misses the first jump and falls out of the world.
I was genuinely so shocked when he fell, at the time I was also working on class assignments and I just stopped and completely focused on the video. This fall of Evbo is seems so small in the grander scheme of the entire rest of the video, but it affected my perception of the entire story because it introduced failure into the story. I’ve watched a lot of Minecraft videos that fall under the label machinima, and typically the plots are simple, clearly pre-planned, and the characters may fail a little but the path of success usually follows my expectations where the characters never fail in a big way. However, this failure right at the beginning of the main part of the story not only upends expectations, but it also introduced another layer of Parkour Civilization, that being parkour prison, forces Evbo to take an alternative method to gain another chance to climb the tower, and leaves room for Evbo to fail again. Although I did still expect Evbo to eventually win overall, I was much less certain about how he would get to that point.
The videos that were screened in full during the bulk of the Machinima event were pretty abstract, so I already expected there to be some kind of commentary on the broader world that we all exist in, but I didn’t find most of them nearly as intriguing as Parkour Civilization. Whether consciously or not, through using the format of a typical Minecraft story video, the specific voice, and video platform, Parkour Civilization surprised the audience, made them pay attention, and think deeper on what they’re watching. That’s definitely what happened to me.
