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This chapter first sets out the book’s main goals, which are to introduce to a broad readership the various debates that have emerged in the machinima community and to provide a primary resource for the critical study of machinima. It then discusses how machinima has emerged as a game-based cultural practice of digital media, followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter introduces the figure unvoice to listen to works where the usual relationship between soundtrack and image track is disturbed and disturbing. As unvoicing breaks the usual synchronization and hierarchy of image over sound, their very relationship becomes audible. The chapter works with the figures of ‘un,’ medianatures, minor aesthetics, and ekphrasis, bringing them into conversation with works ranging from YouTube lip-syncing remixes to artful animations, from machinima to cat videos, from video artworks to installations. It encounters unvoicing in works of portraiture and subtitling. Whether accidental or purposeful, unvoicing thinks the relations of voice, soundtrack and imagetrack anew.

This chapter argues that the three primary methods for making machinima during its brief history—code, capture, and compositing—match up neatly with three ways to document the history of virtual worlds—replay, POV recording, and asset extraction. These linkages are provocative for thinking about what we can do to save and preserve the history of virtual worlds in their early days. They also suggest how we might begin to think about machinima as a documentary medium.

This chapter describes the development of machinima into a film production tool. In 1996, machinima began as an art form that could only be produced and viewed by dedicated gamers, and whose subject matter was of interest only to gamers. Since then, three important developments have taken place. First, the new generation of machinima tools is designed to be used without any understanding of the underlying technology. Second, the gamer community has expanded from a small niche to include almost everyone under the age of twenty-five. And third, the assets provided by both games and machinima tools have broadened to include a wide range of nonviolent content. The combined effect of these three developments is to extend the scope of machinima.

This chapter focuses on how machinima remains limited in its reach towards professional film production. It considers the history of machinima as a series of many possible subhistories, and also as an account of a medium partly responsible for the rise of an attitude toward digital media and creative production born out of the DNA of games. This attitude may be called a gaming attitude—an attitude tied directly to the creative qualities of play. The chapter also explores machinima’s contributions to a larger discourse around gaming as a subversive and participatory literacy, and how the play community’ opened up to the lifestyle of the rest of digital culture.

This chapter examines evolving areas of interface research, such as tangible interfaces and responsive spaces, as they relate to new media and expressive dramatic formats such as digital storytelling and performance. Particular attention is given to research on interfaces for the control of 3D virtual characters and spaces, and how these might inform the emerging art form of machinima. It concludes by presenting novel research on physical puppet controllers for machinima production.

Using performance studies as a starting point, this chapter presents a definition of machinima as a media format: machinima is digital performance that controls procedurally animated moving images. Machinima is part of a larger media movement that grew out of the digital revolution. This revolution does not stop at the home video, the game engine, or the TV screen but instead it is part of a redefinition of the moving image as such. The specific importance of machinima might be that it shines a new and focused light on how the revolution unfolds before our eyes. It offers a preliminary window into the future of customized moving images and provides a haven for the ideal of interactive cinema as long as it supports its own media specifics.

This chapter positions machinima within current discussions of liveness in performance studies. It shows that within the incorporeal species that make up the evolving ecology of machinima exists a continuum of performance conventions that mirrors the conventions of process drama, on the one hand, and those of improvised cinema on the other, with each grade in the range connected to a specific level of liveness. Although all variations ultimately depend on the game engines for their dramatic frame, they occupy different niches, and different communities of practice have developed around them. The machinima performance range includes the following: live puppet machinima operating for a physically present audience, or a virtual audience in a shared game space; demos and “speed runs” working as game engine replay; and “recamming” of demo data files using software to alter game engine replay.

This chapter discusses the role of gestures in the expressive catalog of machinima as moving beyond machinima alone and into our involvement with a computing culture. It proposes two reasons to look at machinima from the vantage point of gestures. On the one hand, gestures and their citability mark the performative space of theater or cinema that is cited by machinima. On the other hand, precisely calibrated in-game gestures remain particularly difficult, even for highly accomplished examples of machinima such as Paul Marino’s I’m Still Seeing Breen (2005).

This chapter describes two broadly defined movements in machinima. The first evolutionary trajectory is that of machinima oriented toward a cinematic ideal, the second is an unguided and almost careless movement toward an individuated, self-sufficient, and ultimately new form language. In looking at these two movements it attempts to identify, with the aid of some specific examples, elements of style that are borrowed and elements that are newly emergent. The analysis focuses on examples of machinima made in World of Warcraft.

This chapter examines the ways that machinima captures and presents the reality of games and virtual worlds. It begins by looking at how film theory has engaged with the problem of realism. It then situates this theory relative to machinima, whose “reality”is presumably distinct from the reality of cinematic film. The outcome of this exploration is to propose three stances that machinimators can take vis-à-vis the relationship between machinima and their host games. Next, the chapter offers close readings of three machinima films from the Halo universe to apply and explore the critical ideas developed here. Finally, it identifies some new difficulties and suggests additional refinements to this understanding of machinimatic realism.

This chapter addresses the question of whether machinima can be understood as art. The discussions cover machinima as technique; machinima as convention; machinima as emotional affordance; art as epiphany; and interstitial media as procedural subversion. Machinima, despite being an uneasy offspring of computer games, can have elements of authorial control and embodied expression. But this does not mean that machinima is art. Machinima can also be viewed as an interpretively amorphous vehicle that questions and challenges our understanding of what is static, dynamic, alive, sentient, responsive, or automated, and what is not.

This chapter examines how media education can leverage one game to support its twin goals of cultivating media production and analysis competencies. It begins by reviewing how twenty-first-century media literacy has been defined and framed. Next, it demonstrates how the process of machinima making is strongly compatible with constructivist learning theory. Finally, it argues that The Sims is a game primed for educational application because it easily doubles as a virtual film school, providing a clear framework and workflow for students wanting to learn both production-related skills, such as screen aesthetics and editing, and analytic skills, such as media criticism and narrative strategies.

This chapter discusses media literacy in greater detail, touching on its impact and necessity in video game cultures, and particularly the modding scene. Machinima and modding are special cases of the use of digital games. When turned into a machinima film or a mod, games are diverted from their original purpose—the player no longer follows the developer’s carefully prefabricated gameplay structures. Instead, she empowers herself to transform the game, to play creatively with its underlying structures, rules, and mimetic elements. It is exactly through this principle of deconstructing and rearranging the basic elements of video games that machinima and modding qualify as means for enhancing computer game literacy. The chapter differentiates and exemplifies several ways in which these practices are suited for enhancing the basic elements or skills of computer game literacy.

This chapter examines the issue of gender as it plays out in machinima. Drawing on the historical examples of amateur radio and the personal computer, it illustrates a historical trajectory that shows how access to new technologies gets determined in large part by the gender inscriptions imposed by the dominant culture. It shows that the history of machinima follows in the same vein as other twentieth-century technologies, lacking any strong presence of women in its development. Despite the efforts of women to overcome the status quo, men have maintained hierarchies of power through technology.

This chapter examines the dialog that exists between creative exchanges of fans and players that emanate from ethnographic practices in game spaces. Fans of Half-Life 2 have constructed a body of work that reveals the spatial pleasures that initially arise from “everyday” experiences in gameplay but are elucidated in the cartographic practice of machinima production, through the mapping of particular actions that reflect particular desires and pleasures enclosed within the representational spaces of Half-Life. By examining a particular group of machinima producers, such as Half-Life fans, the chapter uncovers the practices that shape their particular modes of filmic expression.

Hugh Hancock, the author of Machinima for Dummies, defines machinima as a technique used to produce films inside virtual realities. Machinima is a new cinematographic genre that combines the notions of cinema, machine, and animation and which represents an encounter between a film and a game, with gamers turning into film directors. In machinima, voices appear as the human side of the virtual game environment and become game modifications, transforming the original game function and creating a new set of meanings to the virtual reality initially imagined by game developers. This chapter explores voice as a game modification in machinima, and how machinima is linked to video and computer games. It also considers voice recording and editing in machinima, how voice is related to image, how theater and improvization influence machinima performance, and natural voice versus special effects in machinima.

This chapter explores the concept of Machinima, a 3-dimensional computer graphics rendering engine that was used mostly in the digital gaming sector and computer-animated films. The author shows how the unanticipated user interacts with the computer games by referring to the Machinima concept as the new visual media environment. The previous development and current scenario, along with the innovation, invention, modification, and commercial uses of this new concept, take the discussion further in the next parts of the chapter. In the final part of the chapter, the author focuses on the barriers, legal aspects, and copyright issues of Machinima, which affect the social and cultural changes in the gaming environment.