Movies use MMORPG characters as ‘actors’

For the past few months, New York-based programmer A.J. Loiacono and his buddies have been logging onto the popular online sword-and-sorcery game "World of Warcraft" a little more often than usual.

But they’re not visiting the mythical realm of Azeroth to goof around and fight the game’s virtual dragons like the rest of the game’s 9 million subscribers. They’ve got work to do, you see. They’re making a movie.

Using a high-end Mac to record the action, Loiacono’s buddies log on from their computers and control their game-character avatars to act out scenes from the team’s original script, a sci-fi comedy thing about a guy who travels through time to save his people. The film, still in production, is set for an online-only release next spring