Love stories are as old as human relations, but it's not often you come across one about online dating set in an RPG video game universe and animated using pixel art. That's the premise behind filmmaker Emily Carmichael's short film RPG OKC.As well as being an amusing nod to pixelated fantasy games of the past via our real world present, it also features a heartfelt story—it doesn't matter that it's between a soldier, Paul, and a cat-girl, Paquine. According to Short of the Week, the characters and backgrounds are drawn in Photoshop and then animated in Flash, and Carmichael wanted to create a setting which was "strange yet strangely familiar."
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The result is a land full of humorous characters and situations, transposing our real world interactions and online habits onto the world of RPG video games. We see the couple talk about Facebook (Paquine is friend's with an acorn who posts pictures of his kids) and talk about the mundanities of their daily lives which are juxtaposed with the magical realm of an RPG ("What did you do today?" "Not much. I got brunch. I did some errands. And looked out at the Sea of Nothing for awhile.").This, combined with the way the film uses game mechanics to tell the story, like the speech boxes to deliver the dialogue, is what makes it so much fun.
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