The Future of Machinima

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An advantage of purloining a game engine is that, if you're just going to be using the props and models the game already provides, many interactions will already be available at the press of a button—meaning that manipulation of a character becomes a matter of play—of puppetry rather than animation. The accessibility of creative tools is part of a revolution, to use DeBevoise's term, which continues to run riot across all digital media. Although based on beautiful and egalitarian notions, the proliferation of user-generated content unfortunately throws up one fundamental problem—99 per cent of what is produced, whether it be for Wikipedia or YouTube, be it web 2.0 or game 3.0, is really pretty awful.

Machinima is certainly no exception to this. A quick perusal of the efforts posted at Machinima.com show many to be witless and clumsy. And this particular genre is handicapped more than most by the very accessibility that makes it so popular—because hand in hand with that comes the inherent restrictions on visual quality imposed by the game engine in which it is filmed. Even some of the best machinima, when placed in objective comparison with animation produced in professional packages, come across as poor imitations.

This is not to say there is no skill involved in putting together a good piece of machinima—just that those pieces are rare. Indeed, in order to be successful, machinimakers face a greater challenge than many auteurs in that their work needs to excel in other areas in order to mitigate the aesthetic limitations.

"We always need to get back to the foundation of story and writing," says DeBevoise. "It starts there. You could laugh at something because it was well written, irrespective of the game engine used or final technical execution.

"I think the quality of work is getting better by the day. Not only are the films more complex but the writing and general filmmaking has increased in quality. This will continue as more traditional filmmakers—writers, directors, and so on—use machinima to incubate new ideas and express their creativity."

This gradual advancement of the genre's sophistication is no doubt aided by the manner in which the tools have themselves developed, becoming saleable features of a game when once they were afterthoughts or hacks. Halo 3 has much advertised its support for machinima, for example, and even the games without proprietary tools have been well-serviced by the machinima community's enthusiastic developers.

In fact, with the increasing convergence of games and tools, as seen with titles such as Second Life and The Movies, which enshrine content creation as part of their fundamental workings, perhaps machinima is progressively moving away from its original descriptors. If machinima was at one stage films created within a game, then we have to ask how much a game can become like a 3D animation package before machinima's association with games becomes irrelevant. Surely it would be more in the spirit of the original machinimakers to suggest that it requires a subversion of the game's mechanics—that the film is produced by a means other than that which is intended as part of the game.

"I think that machinima begins the moment a player stops interfacing with a virtual world in the context of a game," says Burns, when probed for a definition of the genre. "A videogame is simply an amazing piece of technology that displays a virtual space in realtime. The 'game' is the set of rules you are given to interact with that world. The moment you choose to stop interacting with that place by the rules—and to start exploring the world on your own terms—then the game has ended and machinima has begun."

It's perhaps because of the fact that most machinima takes place in game engines not specifically intended to produce films that the results lend themselves to satire.