'The Leet World' – When Machinima Stops Being Polite and Starts Getting Real

I’ve never been an active gamer. Sure, I mastered the unstoppable pass in Tecmo Bowl, but that was some time ago.

Video game technology has advanced exponentially over the years into the uncanny valley, using state of the art graphics and adult storytelling to create worlds of vivid imagination. In fact, the medium has become so advanced it has sprouted a sub-medium, dubbed machinima, in which to tell stories unrelated to the game’s intended plot.

The Leet World is one of those stories.

Produced by Smooth Few Films, The Leet World is an episodic comedy that uses characters originally created by the makers of videos games Half Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source. The premise is that four terrorists, and four counter-strike terrorists, are picked to live in a house, to find out what happens when terrorists and counter-strike terrorists stop being polite and start getting real.

Still, the problem with Leet World is not the concept. Scripted gamer fiction as a medium would seem to be a natural progression in online storytelling, but it deserves stories, and in this case comedy, on a higher level than frat boy jokes. Just because we’re watching a video game doesn’t mean we want to hear, what sounds like to me, unedited audio of guys talking in the living room of Alpha Beta‘s frat house. When did gamers get to be such jocks?

There are eight characters on the show: all of them use the word “bro” with an “a” at the end; most of them wear ski masks; a couple of them have physical disabilities; and a few of them speak like lower or higher pitched versions of Frank the Tank

For instance, Chet the counter-terrorist talks like Dane Cook, while Ellis the terrorist talks like Dane Cook with a fish in his mouth. There is a character called Cortez who is either blind or wears shades that impair his vision. He has a lisp that denotes a Spanish accent. Another character named Montrose has a lisp that denotes a slightly more effeminate Cleveland from Family Guy.

The movement of the characters on Leet World have the stilted motion we come to expect from video game animation, limiting the comedic possibilities. So at the end of the day, it’s really just animated characters talking to one another. In some cases, that can even be awesome, but Leet World falls short of the high machnima standards set by its predecessors. There are just too many jokes that miss the mark – jokes about bong hits, pounding brews, and teh gay – to justify it as little more than a genre curiosity with a clever premise. You’ll find more entertainment just by turning on your Xbox.

Check it out at SmoothFewFilms.com.