1.
Introduction
Machinima is a video production technique that uses
real-time graphic engines, such as video games, to generate
moving images. Since its official introduction in 2001 it
has made its way into film festivals, art exhibitions,
commercial film, television, and theater productions. Still,
it remains a largely undefined phenomenon in-between
existing media. The cross-media references are legion and
rarely critical or even consciously applied. Machinima
makers freely sample, combine, and break elements of
traditional media. They “play” their references.
This
essay does not attempt to fixate machinima to any single
definition but to show some of the transmedial and
intertextual references that are at work. In the machinima
community this intertextuality is debated as part of the
discussion about “inside-out” versus
“outside-in” approaches. “Inside-out”
refers to game players using machinima as expression and
recording of their play. “Outside-in” stands for
the use of game engines as tools for traditional animation
and story-telling independently from games.
“Outside-in” productions such as Anna
(Kang 2004) are not recognizable as game-based media but are
stand-alone animation pieces. “Inside-out”
productions like Red vs Blue (Roosterteeth
2004-2007) incorporate the elements of the game engine in
their content. To this day, the debate remains open and
circles around the role of game, play, and presentation in
machinima. This essay will target two main influences: the
moving image (film and television) and theatrical
performance. Basis for both is the dominant source of
machinima: the video game.
2.
Video Game
Machinima has been defined as ‘cinema made from
computer-game visual renderers’ (Hanson 2004:60) or as
film-making using real-time virtual 3D environments (Kelland
et al. 2005) and ‘Filmmaking + Animation + Game
Tech’ (Marino 2004:3). There is still a lot of leeway
in these attempts to define the new format and the community
is struggling with a clear definition as it continues to
evolve. The definition of machinima that informs this essay
most is Katie Salen’s (2002) concept of machinima as a
form of emergent play: ‘part theatre, part film, part
videogame’ (99). Salen lays out the main cornerstones
of the intermediality of the format: born from video games,
machinima applies theatrical techniques to generate the
event, which is presented often in a cinematic way.
According to her, machinima finds itself operating in a
media triangle. How machinima connects the various
references has changed over the format’s history. These
changes themselves illustrate the constant
media-border-crossing that is at the heart of
machinima.
Machinima
pioneers often refer to the hacker- and demoscene, whose
programmers take pride in creating highly elaborate
graphical extravaganzas, often with the most efficient and
lean code (Tasajärvi 2004). They strive for the best
possible visual graphics rendered in real-time by the
smallest code base. To keep the file size small, most
elements are created procedurally. That means that visuals
are created, animated, and rendered during runtime. The same
task applies to video game engines. 3D game engines such as
Doom (Romero et al. 1993), Stunt Island
(Stephens 1992) or Quake (Carmack and Abrash 1996)
rely from their outset on a real-time animation of virtual
spaces and characters. For interested artists, modifying
these games is far easier than coding a classic demo from
the ground up. No wonder that players turned into producers
and started to use game technology for their art. Instead of
coding the rendering algorithms themselves (like the demo
programmers did), players started to use and modify the
available game engines.
Especially
Quake became a wide-spread machinima production
platform because it optimized the recording of events in the
game engine in data logs. These data logs – so-called
“demos” – can be played back in the game
engine to re-live the events in the game world. Originally,
players used demos to record their virtual matches and
distribute these recordings as data files. Often the
recorded events themselves were simple bragging movies or
examples of playing strategies and remained in the gaming
domain. Quake became so dominant as a production
tool that the term “Quake movie” became a
predecessor for “machinima”. But as artists
experimented with other game engines, the reference to a
single game engine became obsolete and the more generic term
“machinima” was coined by Anthony Bailey and Hugh
Hancock in 1998/1999 as a combination of “machine”
and “cinema” (Word Spy
1995-2007).
In
its early days the format lived almost entirely in the game
engine itself. Machinima pieces were available exclusively
as demo files that could be played back only in the very
same game engines they were produced in and only if certain
hard- and software configurations were met. The machinima
community, thus, was limited to experienced video game
players who could master their game engine. But even in the
early days of machinima – 1990-1996 – video game
engines already played with their proximity to film
production and the artistic presentation of the moving
image. A game such as Stunt Island referenced the
world of film production already in its very design:
Stunt Island provides the player with a playground
(a virtual island) where stunts and collisions can be staged
between various game objects. These stunts can be played
back and suitable camera angles can be arranged to show the
stunt in the most effective way. Players do not gain a high
score but a spectacle.
From
its outset machinima affiliated itself with this kind of
game technology and cinematic expression which are bound to
produce problematic media combinations. Yet, it is precisely
because of these friction zones between the media at work
that machinima remains so interesting. During that early
period, the growth of the format was driven mainly by a
community of players. Hackers, modders (who modify existing
game engines for customized use), and game artists created
their machinima pieces in tuned game engines, often tweaking
them further to achieve specific effects. Machinima evolved
not as a clearly industry-defined media format but from the
practices of an underground art production that playfully
embraced any media format that offered itself for their
artistic practice. It was created by expert players and
experienced by a limited, yet growing group of aficionados,
all united by the game needed to produce and play back the
“demo”.
When
game developers changed the underlying demo format, this
production technique became more difficult for machinima
producers. The era of the “demo” started its
steady decline at the turn of the century. Instead,
machinima makers started to capture the moving image
directly from the screen. The presentation itself moved into
the foreground. Players transformed the toy-like game
engines into expressive production environments which
ultimately can generate and contain (cinematic) art. At that
point, machinima exemplifies Levinson’s steps of media
development from toy to mirror to art (Levinson 1985). But
this orientation of machinima towards the film format came
with a price: The game engine lost its value as replay
engine and remained only a production tool. Game engines
only rendered the images during production; from then on
these images were recorded directly onto tape or digitally
captured from the screen. The final outcome is a normal
video file that does not depend on the game anymore but can
be viewed in any media player.
The
disappearance of the game engine as playback device
literally cut the technological specifics of machinima in
half. At the same time, it opened up machinima to the
masses. Because machinima became available in standardized
video formats everybody could download and watch it.
Machinima spread beyond the hard-core gaming community and
emerged as a wide-spread form of cultural expression using
video games. Today, machinima is an accepted platform for
artistic expression that uses video games and offers an own
aesthetic and culture.
It
was only a matter of time until the game industry adapted
the approach and simplified machinima production. Games like
The Movies (Molyneux 2005) or The Sims 2
(Bradshaw 2004) include necessary machinima features out of
the box as well as editors for content customization. While
the older engines demand a lot of technical expertise and
player-generated tools, these modern ones are more
accessible. However, they still pose limitations. For
example, neither of these two engines supports
demo-recording.
Machinima
became more popular among viewers and more accessible for
producers but it also lost some of its original powers.
Today the demo-recording scene has almost faded in the
shadow of the screen-capture technique. This is a paradigm
shift from the recording of the event (in a demo) to the
recording of a viewpoint to the event (in a screen capture)
– from a new game-based logging format to the
established production of moving images as successive still
renderings. In the wake of this ongoing shift towards
traditional film production more and more film techniques
find their way into machinima: sound post- or
pre-production, editing of pre-recorded moving images,
post-produced special effects such as compositing or color
correction, and other techniques are now commonplace in many
machinima productions. This illustrates the gradual move of
machinima from game media to television and film media
– it also describes a gradual decline of its original
traits.
In
screen-capture machinima Salen’s triangle of theater,
film, and game is skewed towards the film aspect with a
decline of the game and – as will be discussed –
the live performance part. The following argument will be
that theatrical and performance qualities of machinima are
implied in the game-ness of the form while the visual
traditions of the moving image are more indicators for what
most machinima aspires to be and how it is usually read by
its audience.
3.
Theater
Virtual environments have been discussed as theatrical
stages since the mid-eighties starting with Brenda
Laurel’s unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Laurel 1986) as a
first point of reference. Laurel calls for a dramatized
virtual environment and suggests Aristotelian structure as a
useful concept to drive the generation of the events in the
virtual world. She suggests a story-generating Artificial
Intelligence system with three main tasks: ‘create a
world, make that world interactive, and make the user’s
experience of that world dramatic’ (Laurel 1986:21).
This idea of a dramatized event structure seems to be
generally accepted but her reference to Aristotle does not
go undisputed.
Exactly which theatrical model should be applied has been
the point of many debates. Suggestions range from
Aristotelian (Laurel 1993), to non-immersive (Frasca 2001),
neo-Aristotelian (Mateas 2002), and spatial (Jenkins 2004).
However, even the most prominent critics of Laurel’s
theory accept that there is a ‘performative
aspect‘ (Aarseth 1997:21) to playing a game.
At the same time, performance studies started to address the
notion of a virtual performer (e.g. Burrill 2005) and
practical experiments were conducted in the area of virtual
theater. Digital worlds have been home to forms of
improvisation (Perlin and Goldberg 1996, Hayes-Roth et al.
1994), virtual television shows (Benford et al. 2002), or
various mixed-media performances (for an overview see e.g.
Dixon 2007) as well as many other forms of virtual
performances. Specifically for machinima, the theater aspect
grows from the way events are generated in the game engine
on the one hand and the way events are played back in the
demo file on the other. The following paragraphs will look
at these aspects that are typical for machinima and that
reference theatrical qualities.
3.1.
Players are performers
There are significant differences between playing a game and
performing for a machinima piece. Games are often defined
using a ‘quantifiable outcome’ (Juul 2005, Salen
and Zimmerman 2003) whereby the outcome is provided by the
world of the game. Action is often driven by a set goal that
should be achieved within the borderlines of the game.
To
reach this goal the player has to perform certain actions
based on specific rules. Because machinima often uses the
limited range of (inter)actions available in a video game,
it is also often limited to the game’s available action
repertoire. But the aforementioned shift from ‘playing
the game’ to ‘playing a machinima
performance’ exemplifies how this limited range can be
re-applied in new ways. The play is not aimed at a closed
circle in the specific game setting but at future viewers.
Machinima actors do not improve their high score but play
the game as a performance for an audience (see also Lowood
2005) who is the final addressee. With that in mind,
machinima actors apply the available repertoire in ingenious
new ways.
What
might be a failure in the sense of the game can be a
successful dramatic expression for the machinima piece; what
might be a cheat or bug that threatens the game’s
consistency or technical stability can be the very topic of
a piece. Game-ness can often become a focus of machinima in
the form of critical commenting (see e.g. Bot
[Palmer 2004]) or self-reflection (see e.g.
‘Red vs Blue’ [Rooster Teeth
2003-2007]). Machinima does not simply draw
technological assistance from games but its content often
expresses game topics, design, experience, and
technology.
The
machinima talk show This Spartan Life, hosted and
produced by Chris Burke (2005) and available as free
downloads on the web, lives in this in-between area between
playing the game and performing a show. Chris Burke, a.k.a.
“Damian Lacedaemion”, invites guests to join him
online in the world of the popular shooting game
Halo. Inside these open game environments he
conducts interviews as a visual chat between two avatars
strolling through the game space. But while he, his guest,
and his virtual camera operators, who record the event, use
the game space as a virtual show stage, others continue to
log on to the same world to play the game proper. The
surrounding game world still operates as a functional game
space, where virtual heroes kill each other. And because
they are unaware of the ongoing interview situation, these
players might attack the show’s host or even the guest.
The game is interwoven with the concept and the setting of
the show. Occasionally, even Burke and his guests fall back
into the expected game behavior: at one moment they might be
talking about digital activism and art production – the
next they are shooting at each other’s avatars. The
borderline between “doing an interview” and
“playing the game” is extremely thin and This
Spartan Life gains a lot of its innovative momentum
from playing along this media borderline.
More
in the tradition of established TV talk shows, the ILL
Clan’s work (On the Campaign Trail with Larry
& Lenny Lumberjack [ILL Clan, 2003] and
Tra5hTa1k with IlLWill [ILL Clan, 2005-])
is a good example of improvisation in a specially prepared
game world. Tra5hTa1k with ILLWill is a live talk
show staged in a virtual TV studio custom-made for this
purpose. What it lacks in unpredictable game features
compared to This Spartan Life it balances with the
improvisation acting skills of its performers, who perform
their pieces as theater shows with participating live
audiences and on real theater stages. This form of machinima
blends the real with the physical performance: virtual and
physical stages interconnect.
3.2.
Processing live – performing live
Live performance and game can also connect on the replay
stage in the form of the “demo”. The discussion of
“live-ness” has stretched the term into other
media before. Auslander (2000), for example, argues that
television replaces live performance as it aims to
‘recreate the theatrical experience for the home viewer
through televisual discourse’ (Auslander 2000:30). But
re-processing a demo recording in the game engine pushes
this live-ness and the discourse even further. The
player-audience encounters the event rendered in real-time
as an ever-new performance happening on their individual
machine in front of them.
As
previously outlined, a demo data log preserves the events of
the in-game performance and can re-create these actions
later in the same game engine. The replay of a
demo-recording effectively renders the events live again in
the game system. The action as well as the event space are
generated again in real time but in absence of the original
human performers. That is why every demo-playback is a
unique real-time event creation. Playbacks can differ from
each other depending on the machine’s hardware and
software. For example, the resolution of the piece depends
on the settings of the game engine, the frame rate on the
power of the graphic card, and the collision control on the
processor. In other words: one can download the demo file of
the seminal Quake machinima piece Diary of a
Camper (van Sickler 1996), run it inside the
Quake engine, and receive a new – and in some
ways a first – staging of the event as it was
originally created by the Rangers Clan in 1996.
Because
the event is re-created again certain interactive options
open up. The demo recreates the event situation and usually
locks the action itself but the visualizing camera can
remain flexible and the “viewer” as well as the
local game engine can take control of the camera and shape
the visualization at will. Not unlike large-scale happenings
that allow audiences to enter the performance space and
engage in the event, demos can offer viewers a level of
interactivity through visual exploration.
Virtual
performance and demo-recording position machinima in a dual
proximity to theater. Intermediality, here, is at work in
production as well as replay and heavily infused with
game-specific traits that add a unique edge.
4.
Film
Machinima can be understood in reference to existing film
genres but it can mix these references with a new
game-related perspective. This game-reference can vary
depending on the kind of game engines used to create the
machinima. To avoid confusion all examples used here will
focus on machinima made in the same game, namely World
of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment 2004). This narrows
down the game-related range and allows for a valid
comparison between different machinima. World of
Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online gaming
phenomenon that was launched in 2004 and provides its
millions of players access to a pre-constructed, consistent
virtual world, where they can go on virtual quests,
socialize, explore, and interact with other players and the
“world”. Although the setting is clearly
“otherworldly” and inspired by fantasy and
folklore literature, when these interactions are recorded in
the form of machinima we can trace various film conventions
in the machinima result.
4.1.
Stepping into genre
One day in the game space of World of Warcraft,
Daddar, a skilled player, sets out to kill the virtual
guards of the Ironforge Bank, a prominent location in the
game world. His raid could be interpreted as a typical
in-game action as it follows basic interaction principles of
World of Warcraft and does not alter the location
or the actor. But Daddar records his actions, edits
highlights together, and releases them as the machinima
A Day at the Ironforge Bank a.k.a. Ironforge
Bankers (2005). This recording will serve as a first
guide to trace film genres in machinima.
The
piece is placed in the earlier tradition of the machinima
bragging movie and the whole event is aimed at a future
audience. Daddar wants to gain the recognition of his
community (it was a male avatar). The machinima piece is the
goal of his actions, not a successful bank heist. Like early
theater recordings the camerawork is very limited and
confined to the immensely restricted in-game camera controls
of World of Warcraft. In addition, the only
post-production in A Day at the Ironforge Bank is
in the editing and the addition of an underlying, largely
unrelated music soundtrack. Still, Daddar’s actions and
his machinima fit a certain cinematic representation form.
The
tale of a lonely outlaw successfully fighting the odds has
its own tradition in outlaw Western movies. A bank robbery,
a stealth attack, a desperate stand-off against numerically
superior forces, a defeat, a stubborn death-defying return,
and a fierce and bloody battle leading to an escape on
horseback into the great wide open – all the elements
that define A Day at the Ironforge Bank – can
also be found in classic outlaw films. And like the outlaw
(anti)heroes of the new Hollywood of the nineteen-sixties to
seventies that grew from a counterculture opposing the
established system (King 2000), Daddar’s fame is based
on an attack on the establishment: a bank controlled by the
game system and its game company. It is situated in a
virtual location that is by definition hostile to his kind,
guarded by computer-controlled characters that cannot really
be defeated. His actions might be useless in a gaming sense
but match the established genre-standards.
Even
before the rise of the sixties counterculture Warshow argued
that ‘the gangster is the “no” to that great
American “yes”’, a figure who ‘has put
himself in a position where everybody wants to kill him and
eventually somebody will’ (Warshow 2001:106).
Daddar’s game character is part of the rogue class and
furthermore a member of the “undead” race. His
character appearance and background is as much a gangster as
one can be in the game of World of Warcraft. Like
Warshow implies, this gangster figure has to be tragic.
Ultimately, Daddar’s efforts are futile: the virtual
bank cannot be defeated. The Rogue cannot destroy the very
game system that generated him in the first place and no
matter how many guards and accountants this anti-hero might
fight, due to the set-up of the game the bank treasures
remain beyond his reach and the killed accountants will
respawn automatically. The bank always wins.
Even
the final exclamation mark of the tragic anti-hero accepting
a dramatic death in the face of the impossible odds is not
available. The game prevents characters from dying
permanently and provides a form of instant re-birth in the
case of a virtual death. Unlike the heroes in Arthur
Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (USA 1967), George Roy
Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid (USA 1969) or Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild
Bunch (USA 1969), Daddar cannot go down in a glorious
last stand because even the gangsters are protected from
death in World of Warcraft. The system always wins
but the player can never really lose either because he is
automatically re-born and his character’s death is soon
forgotten. This creates a new form of tragic heroism based
entirely on the features of the game world.
Because
they make so much sense in the connection of game and
gangster movies Daddar’s actions remain a significant
social comment – a comment that visually and
conceptually follows outlaw myths as established in cinema
and other media. In this tradition, the piece ends
adequately with the “money shot” of the outlaw
riding on his horse into the open wilderness.
4.2.
Gaming conventions caught on tape
A Day at the Ironforge Bank is a good example of an
early World of Warcraft movie that consists almost
entirely of edited yet otherwise unaltered gameplay captured
on video. Adding custom-made material to the game world is
very difficult due to the technical nature of the World
of Warcraft game system. This imposes a lot of
limitations on machinima production in this particular game
engine. For example, it prevents any demo-recording,
complicates complex camera work, and forbids in-game
editing. Machinima artists using this game, thus, had to
find other ways to circumvent the limitations and improve
the range of available expression (e.g. they use the in-game
model-viewer as a kind of green-screen studio). As World
of Warcraft movies grew more complex, their creators
also started to include more effects in post-production.
Jason Choi’s acclaimed World of Warcraft film
Edge of Remorse (2006) uses post-produced color
effects throughout, image compositing, as well as a lot of
other audio-visual enhancements. It succeeds in delivering a
stand-alone piece of computer animation that happens to be
produced in a real-time engine. Its content and depicted
actions do not reference the original game setting or tasks
anymore. Edge of Remorse still uses the game’s
assets but not its rule system or functionality. For
example, it excludes the ever-present graphical user
interface needed to play the game effectively and uses a
widescreen aspect ratio to mimic traditions of other film
epics. Here, machinima leaves its gaming roots behind and
turns into a technical production method only.
The
aforementioned double-effect of playing and performing is
also part of the Leeroy Jenkins (2005) film, which
brought the online persona Leeroy Jenkins to sudden fame.
The machinima was also created in the World of
Warcraft game world but its legend spread into other
online worlds and communities as well – a sign for
cross-referencing also within the gaming community. The film
itself is about a disastrous attack on a monster base
located in an area of the game world called Upper Blackrock
Spire. It starts with a group of player avatars assembling
in front of the monsters’ cave and preparing for a
controlled attack. All turns into utter chaos when one
player, Leeroy Jenkins, dashes for a surprising and
seemingly spontaneous charge into the cave. The other
players follow to rescue their overly enthusiastic comrade
but the whole group dies miserably in the attempt. The
Leeroy film uses audio dialogue between different
players that adds depth and personality and is the source
for most of the comic effect. The voices are not re-recorded
but left in the lower sound quality of the original
performance, adding to the impression of viewing a real
gaming event. The piece also shows the typical World of
Warcraft interface: mouse cursor, and other
game-typical icons, menus, and information. Because all
these insignia of the play are clearly visible and because
the event is a continuous performance bar any
post-production, the film might appear to the untrained eye
as a kind of documentary of serious gameplay.
However,
any experienced player notices that the event is not a
tragic documentary but a staged comic action. Instead of a
documentary of annoying and hazardous gameplay, Leeroy
Jenkins is a recorded virtual performance that plays
with the game’s conventions. In fact, it draws its
success from this intertextuality between game and film
because a lot of the film’s humor can only be
understood if the viewer knows about the gameplay including
proper in-game behavior, social structures of gaming groups,
and game setting. The Leeroy incident became so famous that
it grew into a part of the World of Warcraft
history and entered the cultural circle that forms around
this game environment precisely because it deals with
in-game topics in an innovative and – as will be argued
– also in a cinematic way. The film has been downloaded
more than a million times from Warcraftmovies.com,
a main web site for World of Warcraft machinima
alone and it is a good example for the interrelation of game
and cinematic interpretation in the forming of a virtual
world’s identity and culture.
In
terms of cinematic references, Leeroy Jenkins can
be traced back to classic slapstick films and vaudeville
performances. It includes headless races through enemy
pitfalls, obvious miscommunication, and irresponsible
spontaneous behavior driven by amazing incompetence and
hubris. Leeroy behaves like an anarchic cartoon character;
his companions are the seemingly more responsible
counterparts and representants of “reason”. From
this outset the stage is set for a comedy snowballing from
logical planning to chaotic mayhem. The piece picks up speed
until its disastrous ending much like a classic screwball
comedy. This is remarkable as the camera remains tied to the
in-game restrictions of the World of Warcraft game.
There is, for example, no cut or any underlying music in
Leeroy Jenkins, which supports the audio-visual
style of a continuous in-game “fake documentary”.
At the same time, it re-positions the film in the
neighborhood of traditional one-reelers that conserved
vaudeville acts in a single shot.
Like
A Day at the Ironforge Bank, the Leeroy
Jenkins Film is a far cry from classics such
as the Marx Brother’s Duck Soup (Leo McCary,
USA 1933) or the mastery of Keaton or Chaplin but it points
in those directions to create the necessary intertextual
references or at least the underlying associations. Their
cross-media operation is key to understanding how they
operate. One has to know about the artistic traditions of
film and game to fully grasp these machinima
pieces. The Leeroy incident does not work like a text-based
story or a single screen-grab just as a Keaton stunt does
not work in a single image or a short story. Both need to be
performed and recorded to remain accessible. The impact of
game-ness on the performance and replay methods in machinima
adds a new point of reference. The cinematic tropes
machinima quotes might be universal but their specific
realization is highly adapted to the world of video games.
Ultimately,
all the mentioned machinima operate in the context of
narrative cinema. Edge of Remorse, A Day at the
Ironforge Bank, and Leeroy Jenkins all tell
stories and tell them in cinematic ways but with varying
levels of game references. Their intertextual variations
exemplify the range of machinima within a single game engine
as it connects to theater as well as film genres, playing
with these references throughout.
5.
Conclusion
Machinima lives in a space in-between: between film and live
performance, game and theater, code and physical action,
staging and game play. The balance is held by the specifics
and the technology of the video game that supports live
event generation and recording on the one hand, and the
construction of the moving image with its cinematic
traditions on the other. It is in this triangle of
intermedial references that machinima is on a constant move.
Is machinima an expression of the game or a game-enabled
cinematic technique? There is no single answer to that,
which is why machinima remains an exciting and rather
flexible field with a lot of creative opportunities. This
field can inform other media crossovers such as interactive
television or virtual theater. Because machinima is still
driven by the player community, it is also a good indicator
of what is possible in terms of larger audience
acceptance.
The
players, audiences, and producers of machinima grow with
expanding media literacy. Their new generation can make the
transitions between playing, performing, and watching an
event without considering them as breaks of any existent
textual format. Their media literacy seamlessly connects
between ludic game actions, narrative film, and dramatic
live staging. Machinima stands out as a prime means of
expression of such intermediality and as a good playground
for more experimentation.
References
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Espen J. (1997). Cybertext: perspectives on ergodic
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BENFORD,
Steve, FRASER, Mike, REYNARD, Gail, KOLEVA, Boriana and
DROZD, Adam (2002). Staging and evaluating public
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