The Movies Vs. Machinima - Round 1

Picked up from Machin-X, Andrew links to Tony Walsh over at Clickable Culture posting an interesting response to the recent Wired article on machinima/'The Movies'. One part notes:

Peter Molyneux, creator of The Movies, "won't allow any machinima to appear on The Movies Online that might be perceived as obscene," writes Newitz. "If somebody tries to remake Star Wars and has Han Solo doing something disgusting, that's a problem," he told her. No further investigation here.

Interesting, so does using 'The Movies' put you in a similar legal place as using any other game engine or is there a greater degree of expressive censorship? Does Mr Molyneux hold the standard on what is acceptable human expression or is he just saying he can choose what to post on The Movies Online but you can still go to town on what you produce with the game?

In following a link off the comments of this article to the blog of Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, Chris had an interesting comment after his write-up comparing machinima from 'The Movies' to doing something in say Half Life 2:

What you're describing falls into what I would call the modding category, which requires far more sophistication than simple machinima. The advantage of machinima is tha it lowers the barrier to entry by letting you use pre-built videogame assets rather than building your sets and actor models. Modding strikes me as something else entirely.

This is an interesting view (not one I necessarily support) but is it possible for a game like 'The Movies' to fork machinima growth? Its interesting on how this game is working with a growing culture of new filmmakers. Maybe we will have 'The Sims2' have machinima-off's against 'The Movies' gangs.