Machinima Marches Toward Amusing - A film festival hits New York City this weekend, but do you really want to go? Machinima -- making movies from games -- has been long on hype and short on watchability, but that's starting to change. By Jason Silverman. [Movies & Music]

In the past few years a new festival and type of film making has begun to make itself popular, even though it’s been around since the early 90's. This film style is known as machinima. This style is developed through tools where the source of a video game is molded to create different actions, settings, and backgrounds so that a story can be told. One of the best known films of this genre would be the Red vs. Blue series, which is a collection of shorts adapted from the popular Halo video game engine.

The Machinima Film Festival continues to thrive more and more each year as new games, technologies, and tools come about to open even more doors and possibilities in the art. One of the best picture nominees for this year was called Bot. Taken from Wired News, "Tom Palmer's Bot used the first-person shooter Unreal Tournament to craft the story of a mecha warrior who forsakes violence and embarks on an existential quest." An epic drama enriched with the cunning directing of Tom Palmer mixed with the risqué editing of Tom Palmer, this film is a family pleaser that will be sure not to let you leave without tears in your eyes. So you can see that actual thought is put into the story and it isn't about video games. Actually most people agree that the most exciting and entertaining part of the whole film genre is the process of making the film. Since this is such a serious film genre, i'm excepting the possibility of seeing Ebert the next time I attend the Festival.

One thing that is beginning to bring fear into this genre is the idea that the more commercially available the films become, the more likely copyrights will be infringed. I do understand that using someone else’s video game source engine to create your own content and sell it sounds very illegal, but this genre of film is more or less about the appreciation of the video games as an art themselves. But to switch sides again, I will defend the rights of Sonic and Mario any day of the week if it allows me to continue playing my video games.