Tristan Pope’s Not Just Another Love Story is a love story made in World of Warcraft (so it’s machinima, Animated filmmaking in a realtime game environment) by a theatre student in New York. It’s about a troll and a human who fall in love, and even have sex (sort of) using standard movements. Blizzard complained about the sex scenes, but Pope said it was all Blizzard’s pixels. More interesting than the pornography debate is perhaps the rest of the content, because the story ends in a huge dance party between Alliance and Horde players who dance and use spells to create groovy special effects. Apparently in the beta, Alliance and Horde could talk together through emotes (?), and when that was made impossible lots of players discovered that they could use leet (733t, using punctuation and letters) in emotes to communicate with the opposite faction. That was removed in patch 1.3, and so the credits of Pope’s movie say “you can take away our leet” (I think is what it said) “but you can’t take away the LOVE!” The movie is amazing, it must have taken so much work, with dozens of player characters and effects and so on. The cooperation between Horde and Alliance players involved in making it is pretty awesome.

The place to go to get World of Warcraft machinima is Warcraftmovies.com.