Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
16
Machinima in Virtual Worlds
One of the most wonderful things in nature is a glance of the eye; it transcends speech; it is the bodily
symbol of identity.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
16.1 WHAT IS A MACHINIMA?
Machinima (a portmanteau of
machine
and
cinema
) is a video art form derived from screen animation
captures in gaming and virtual world environments. 3D game environments and avatars are created or modi-
ied to create settings and actors for these short “movies.” The Association of Machinima Arts and Sciences
deines it as “animated ilmmaking within a real-time virtual 3-D environment” [1].
Machinima has a long, rich history that evolved from the videos of the 1980s demoscene computer art
and the 1990s games like Stunt Island, Doom, and Quake. “Quake movies” started to appear when scripts
were added to the movies recorded off the screens of this irst-person shooter game. Machinima's popular-
ity continues to grow, and most virtual worlds and games offer a modicum of tools to the user that allow
for the recording of screen action. Machinima has appeared in national television shows like
South Park
,
“Make Love, Not Warcraft,” in 2006; and
CSI: NY
, “Down the Rabbit Hole,” episode 405, 2007, to name a
couple of examples.
Second Life and the Linden Endowment for the Arts continually sponsor several machinima festivals.
They have an entire region dedicated to making machinima called the MOSP (Machinima Open Studio
Project), full of prebuilt locations, soundstages, and sets for public use. The MOSP can be visited at
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/LEA7/129/128/21 and followed at http://machinimasl.blogspot.com/.
It is the brainchild of Chic Aeon, one of Second Life's noted machinimatographers.
16.1.1 T
he
u
ses
of
m
aChinima
From its early uses as a documentation device for “speed runs” through the levels in a irst-person shooter
game, machinima has expanded its usefulness into a broad-range media format.
Figure 16.1 (upper half) shows some screen grabs from a machinima Ann Cudworth (Annabelle Fanshaw
in Second Life) created for a campus tour of the Virtual Center for the Science of Cyberspace.
Machinima has demonstrated its place in the teaching of medical, military, and safety procedures; in archi-
tectural and environmental ly through; as well as 3D concept presentations.
In the lower half of Figure 16.1, you will see some images from “Possibilities,” a machinima about the
display of data in a virtual environment. The machinima was recorded and edited by Ariella Furman (Ariella
Languish in Second Life) at a data-display-driven Art/Sculpture Park built by Annabelle Fanshaw and
Arkowitz Jonson (Ben Lindquist in real life) in 2010.
Machinima has provided a rich source of content and information for scholars and teachers of culture and
media. These are two examples among the many available in this kind of machinima. Frame grabs from three
machinima created by Lori Landay are shown in the top half of Figure 16.2. Lori Landay (L1Aura Loire in
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