Flinging Thoughts

As I watched the way Tom Jantol recently introduced one of his latest creations, it got me thinking about a frustration I’ve encountered when trying to explain machinima to interested laymen.

I have more than once been attending some sort of community function or chamber mixer and found myself blabbing on and on about this emerging form of mass story-telling which involves making movies with 3d game technology. For some unknown reason I invariably use the word hacker in the conversation (probably because if I instead used the word modder, I’d have even more explaining to do).

The word just flies from my mouth. I don’t know if it’s because old habits die hard or I’m from a different time, but the scenario goes something like this: I say, “These really smart people hack into the games and produce tools for people to make movies with…” etc., etc. I can’t tell you how many times I get the look. That look in the listeners’ faces that say, He hangs out with hackers; he associates with criminals. I usually have to give them a history lesson about a time when hacker wasn’t considered a four letter word. Most of the time I would be more successful trying to convince a young person that the word gay used to just mean happy.

It’s times like that when I feel old—old enough to remember when the techie community considered hackers to be tinkerers and teachers. Now the word is almost synonymous with burglar and thief. Tom quite deftly exploited that fact as a humorous shocker to tease the viewer into watching his movie. I got a kick out of it; which means I fell for the very thing I lament in this entry. He hooked me.

And that got me thinking. I guess I’ll have to find a new word to describe those folks who like taking things apart and putting them back together again. Maybe tinkerers will suffice.