The Future of Machinima

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"I wanted to re-use the sound clips from the two [Elite Force] games so that the voice-acting would sound professional," says James on his site. "Writing the script required more or less memorising the contents of several thousand voice-clip files and then rearranging them—or segments of them—into an entirely new plot. In some cases I was able to use the clips verbatim, but in other cases I did a fair amount of audio editing." The process allowed some of the original cast, including Patrick Stewart and Tim Russ, to reprise their roles, and imparts to the voice-acting a calibre that is often absent from machinima.

If much of this 'serious' machinima is hobbled by a lack of awareness about its lacklustre visuals, then it's clear that things are changing as the tools become more sophisticated and more recent engines become readily available.

"The visual quality of machinima is only going to get better," says DeBevoise of the future of machinima. "It's growing rapidly within the gaming community and I think it will soon cross over when we're able to create content that appeals to both gaming and non-gaming communities. A great model for us is how Pixar and Dreamworks Animation have created animated movies that appeal to dual audiences—adults and children."

It's apt to talk of such companies, since, inversely, machinima may well be a great model for professional animation studios—its quite easy to conceive of a company like Pixar one day building realtime, physics-enabled worlds in order to puppet their digital creations, rather than painstakingly animate them. As Burns points out, "machinima concepts have already been used in huge blockbuster movies like The Lord Of The Rings series—check out the Massive engine used for huge battles; they just were not called machinima. Eventually, the theories of machinima will be driving some of the most powerful tools in movie production." It's certainly true that game engines have already been widely used in order to mock up shots; George Lucas famously used the Unreal engine to plan out scenes for the Star Wars prequels.

Yet while Burns predicts that "the spectrum of machinima will continue to expand into other traditional filmmaking, both live action and animation," at what point this would cease to be machinima he is less definitive. Indeed, questions over the genre's future come back to the problem of how far removed from games it can go before it dissolves into the swell of other digital media. It's an issue that portends a split in the genre between users who seek simply to make animations, and those who seek to make animations that specify in some way the world of videogames. As animation packages adopt the essentials of machinimation, live-action puppetry et al, the value of producing animation in a game engine will diminish for this former group.

However, even if the term becomes so dilute as to be meaningless, there will always be machinima in its original, narrowly defined form, because there will always be those who wish to comment upon and satirise videogaming—and there will never be any better way to do that than from within the game itself.

Provided by Next Generation—Interactive Entertainment Today