On the i-Anya blog, Angela Thomas writes that Second Life has spawned a mini Western filmed in the Second Life world, called Bells and Spurs. It’s always fun to watch movies that people make of game world events. My husband, Ken, an avid player of World of Warcraft, has shown me quite a few movies made by World of Warcraft players. World of Warcrafters often make elaborate short movies, many of them set to music, like music videos. Most of them show guilds’ victories in challenging instances like Blackwing Lair. The action is nearly always synchronized to the beat of a song, which must take some work on the part of the movie-makers. Some of them are even more sophisticated, like one I saw last year that spliced together a variety of cuts to create a storyline about love, death and the resurrection of the beloved. This one was set to several songs, and it included flashbacks and cuts to a variety of different scenes. It only adds to the amusement and entertainment factor to imagine all the trouble somebody took to make one of these amateur movies. In the case of the Second Life western, this factor is diminished (at least for me) by the knowledge that Linden Labs had a hand in the making of the movie. I wonder why that is?