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. [Joystick]

Recently, I found myself taking interest in independent film production. The latest medium of production takes a most unlikely form, and a production process more “weirdly democratic” than anything I have ever seen. Have I finally put down the joystick in exchange for a more socially-accepted, culturally-rooted medium of entertainment? Not a chance. In fact, the joystick itself is what led me to this wonderful new form of animation. The “machinima” movement in independent film production involves the use of video-gaming systems as the tool for creating animated movies. Rather than trying to achieve the goals of the game, the player uses the characters and the game enviorment to play out premeditated scenarios. The game play is recorded to a digital video format, and then voiceovers are then added – consistent with the physical actions of each character – to provide for the audio portion of the animation. Fellow WIRED columnist Jason Silverman’s recently wrote an article on the enormous growth of the movement – in production and popularity – since it first took shape in the early 90s. Silverman’s article promotes the idea that machinima is “finally growing up,” in that it’s evolving from “self-indulgent, sophomoric” animated clips into “more sophisticated, nuanced storytelling.” To develop his case, Silverman notes the establishment of the “Machinima Film Festival” and the “Mackies,” held at the Museum of Moving Pictures in Queens early last month. I actually wrote a piece for the New York Times a few months back, so naturally I was curious what Silverman had to say. When I come across an article pertaining to a subject I’ve recently had published, I tend to critique the writing and writer’s central ideas to get a better sense of the quality of my own work. This is especially true when the article is written by a co-worker and friend!! Anyways, Silverman mentions Tom Palmer’s “Bot,” a machinima film developed using the first-person shoot RPG titled “Unreal Tournament.” While the intended plot of the game entails a mecha warrior’s *violent* struggle for victory, Palmer directs the avatar toward the opposite direction to “craft the story of a warrior who forsakes violence and embarks on an existential quest.” This is a classic example of machinima general tendency to lead the game’s characters in the direction opposite that of the intended goals. This is the beauty and creativity of machinima. The gamer, who normally interacts with an action game on a ludological level - as intended – shifts their attention to the game’s narrative and symbolic elements. The gamer isn’t playing the game, but rather “altering” the narrative into an entirely different context. It’s a transformation from game play with accordance to physics, where one strives the reach the goals of the avatar based on ability, to playing for the sake of creation. Another best-picture nominee, Freidrich Kirschner used the same game to create “The Journey.” Very different from Palmer’s “Bot,” Kirschner instead focused on the game’s visual-style in order to create what Silverman describes as a “museum-ready piece of art animation, with shadowy, Giocometti-like figures floating through a Dali-esque landscape.” By creating film from the given elements of a video game, machinima’s ability to transform violence into art widens the spectrum of emotional impact that a game exerts on a gamer. Played in accordance to physics, it’s all just vectors and motion; the cognitive and emotional content of the game revolves around achieving ones goals in a fun, fast-paced environment. By ignoring the intended physical goals of a game in favor of the narrative and symbolic features, the degree of emotional impact changes. Unlike static media, video games attempt to create a sense of play, engineering a “new breed” of emotion that movies and novels cannot provide. Machinima transforms a game more into the likes of more traditional static media, such as movies, novels, music, etc. In “Videogames: The Impact of Emotion,” market researcher Huge Bowen conducted a poll of gamers on the emotional impact of video games; all agreed that movies, novels, and music, all had greater emotional impact than video games, respectively. By shifting games to a static medium, the potential emotional impact is increased, as are the nature of these emotions.

The controversial aspect of machinima, which Silverman details in the latter half of his article, relates to copyright infringement resulting from releasing a machinima work to the public without the consent of the game’s manufacturer. He notes that “as the films become commercially viable, machinima filmmakers are going to butt up against copyright laws.” While there has been much hype in the media lately about how advances in technology have increased copyright infringement and piracy, game makers have shown very little resistance to the machinima movement. Thus far, these companies overlook the notion copyright infringement, finding value in the machinima movement as means of gaining free publicity. Many game makers have even embraced upon the idea, some even incorporating machinima capabilities within the games provided set of tools. Among them are Valve Software’s “Half-Life 2,” and Electronic Arts’ “Sims 2”. Electronic Art’s was so intrigued by the concept that they hired my buddies over at “Rooster Teeth Productions” – the creators of the Red vs. Blue (Halo) series – to create a reality-TV parody called “The Strangehood,” using the Sims 2 gaming environment. While the concept of promotional machinima was a revolutionary, it didn’t take off like the Red vs. Blue series did. Why? According to Rooster Teeth founders Michael Burns and Matt Hullum, (not “Matt Mullen” – an apparent typo in Silverman’s article) attributed the relative failure of The Strangehood to difficulty controlling the Sims 2 characters with ease and precision, at least in respect to that allowed in Halo. The ability to produce machinima does depend significantly on the game, and the extent of control the player has over the avatar(s). As mentioned in Silverman’s article, graphic designer Friedrich Kirschner chose the RPG “Unreal Tournament” to produce “The Journey” specifically because the game allowed for the creative control that Kirschner desired. While Microsoft has not yet incorporated recording abilities into Halo, its programmers did add a command to the latest version that allows the player to lower their weapon to prevent “accidental shooting,” making it easier for the production of machinima in the Halo environment.

While I can only hope that the machinima movement continues to grow without any obstruction, I fear that copyright laws will eventually become an obstacle for machinima producers. Eventually, just as the “Grand Theft Auto” sex-scene cheat created great controversy, someone will likely cross the line, and abuse the creative control that machinima allows. As far as these laws go, and any other attempts at digital rights management, I feel that any laws implemented to prevent us from being able to sort and mix the vast, ever-expanding digital world around us is just plain ridiculous, as this ability had created a new, super cool way of thinking, necessary in today’s world of rapid technological growth.