As LAMP were presenting in mid 07 during various machinima and virtual world seminars the film ” Molotov Alva” has finally been transmitted on a national cable network, HBO in the US yesterday. Click here to go to HBO site to see a preview (for a week or so) and here is the official web page of Molotov with the tag ‘Documentaries for the Digital Age’ - stories recorded as if live action, in real time (machinima) in game worlds about those worlds. The significance of this is creating a film that is head-to-head with 35mm feature films but on a next to nothing budget inside what is effectively a 3D social network, Web 3.0 as I call it. The machinima now even has its own IMDB entry.

In January 2007, a man named Molotov Alva, disappeared from his Californian home. Recently, a series of video dispatches by a Traveler of the same name have appeared within a popular online world called Second Life. In these dispatches Molotov Alva encounters everything from Furries to Cyberpunks to Neo-Luddites to Sex Slaves to the King of the Hobos, Orhalla Zander, who becomes Molotovs guide as he searches for the creator of their brave new world.

New World Notes has been following the shows rise to fame even suggesting at one point it had been nominated for the animated short oscar. Their recent item ‘Hobo Superstar‘ suggests this is more than a show made inside a games engine making it legitimately into heritage media but also about a well rounded virtual character/protagonist who could be the first true, dramatic virtual celebrity.

“but the film is dominated by a singular presence: “Hobo King” Orhalla Zander, a pop-eyed cross between Yoda and a homeless poet, who speaks in odd metaverse koans and leads Alva on a hallucinogenic journey to find Second Life’s creator. And while much is known about Douglas Gayeton, an established filmmaker living Northern California, little is known about the real life individual behind an avatar who is now the co-star in the prime time programming of a major cable network. If “Molotov Alva” is the most prominent example so far of machinima crossing into the mainstream, Orhalla Zander is probably the first instance of a virtual celebrity, an idoru (in the William Gibson/Gwyneth Llewelyn sense of the term) crossing into popular awareness. (No, Max Headroom doesn’t count as the first, in my view, because the hipster artificial intelligence was always linked with the real world character from the series, and the actor who played him.) So who is Orhalla Zander beyond his Second Life identity? For now at least, perhaps only HBO’s legal department knows for sure: The company’s lawyers asked Orhalla’s owner to sign a release waiver for appearing in the film. “I understand waivers and they seem quite reasonable and needed,” Zander tells me now. He just can’t recall if his avatar name was on the form. “You know I can’t remember, but lately I’ve been signing my SL name more often on things.”