Understanding Machinima 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 1 31/05/2013 10:22 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 2 31/05/2013 10:22 Understanding Machinima Essays on filmmaking in virtual worlds EDITED BY JENNA NG 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 3 31/05/2013 10:22 Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Jenna Ng, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Understanding machinima : essays on filmmaking in virtual worlds / edited by Jenna Ng. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-0448-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4411-4052-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1.â Machinima films. 2.â Digital cinematography. I.â Ng, Jenna. TR897.74.U53 2013 777--dc23 2013004315 ISBN: e-pdf: 978-1-4411-4962-6 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 4 31/05/2013 10:22 Contents Acknowledgments vii Preface viii Introduction xiii PART ONE Thinking machinima 1 1 Machinima: Cinema in a minor or multitudinous key? 3 William Brown and Matthew Holtmeier 2 Beyond bullet time: Media in the knowable space 23 Chris Burke 3 Be(ing)dazzled: Living in machinima 41 Sheldon Brown 4 Moving digital puppets 63 Michael Nitsche, Ali Mazalek, and Paul Clifton 5 Facing the audience: A dialogic perspective on the hybrid animated film 85 Lisbeth Frølunde 6 Dangerous sim crossings: Framing the Second Life art machinima 109 Sarah Higley 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 5 31/05/2013 10:22 vi CONTENTS PART TWO Using machinima 127 7 The art of games: Machinima and the limits of art games 129 Larissa Hjorth 8 Playing politics: Machinima as live performance and document 147 Joseph DeLappe 9 Virtual lens of exposure: Aesthetics, theory, and ethics of documentary filmmaking in Second Life 167 Sandra Danilovic 10 Call it a vision quest: Machinima in a First Nations context 187 Elizabeth LaPensée and Jason Edward Lewis 11 World of Chaucer: Adaptation, pedagogy, and interdisciplinarity 207 Graham Barwell and Christopher Moore 12 A pedagogy of craft: Teaching Culture Analysis with machinima 227 Jenna Ng and James Barrett Agency, simulation, gamification, machinima: An interview with Isabelle Arvers 245 Jenna Ng Notes on contributors 252 Glossary 258 Index 261 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 6 31/05/2013 10:22 Acknowledgments wish to thank the Leverhulme Trust for their invaluable funding support. I Ialso wish to thank Katie Gallof, my editor at Bloomsbury, for her unending patience with me, and her belief in me and this project; in particular, I am grateful for her assistance and support, buttressed by nothing more than untested conviction, in my idea about the collection’s Quick Response (QR) codes and digital footnotes. I am particularly grateful to Pooky Amsterdam, William Brown, Robert C. MacDougall, and Lisa Swanstrom for their encour- agement and insights. I am also very grateful to Henry Lowood for writing the preface which opens this collection and to Isabelle Arvers for giving the interview which wraps it up. I want to thank Sarah Higley for her incredible generosity in sharing with me so many of her insights, ideas, and enthu- siasm on machinima—I have learnt so much from her, and it has been a joy sharing about machinima across e-mails, conversation, breakfast, and long walks. With respect to the mobile websites, I also thank Scott Svatos for his amazing eye, coding expertise, and absolute reliance. My biggest thanks, however, goes undoubtedly to James Barrett, who was not only an invaluable consultant on all the design, aesthetic, and technical issues surrounding the book’s digital architecture, but also provided immeasurable inspiration, encouragement, and strength throughout this project and beyond. 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 7 31/05/2013 10:22 Preface Henry Lowood achinima is a born-digital, adolescent medium. It is reasonable to affirm Mthat the birth occurred in 1996 with the Rangers’s Quake (1996) movie, Diary of a Camper (1996), which means that the sixteenth birthday occurred this year. Paraphrasing the Stray Cats’ cover for John Hughes’s film of the same name, “sixteen candles” make a lovely occasion for intensifying critical attention to this emerging medium in both retrospective and prognosticative modes. Indeed, the publication of Understanding Machinima adds to the growing scholarly literature on machinima, which includes recent publications such as The Machinima Reader (Lowood and Nitsche 2011) and the special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture (Rojo 2011) devoted to machinima. My own perspective on machinima has been academic, historical, and curatorial. I write about machinima, rather than making a lot of it, with a focus first on its history as a found technology developed almost entirely by its users (players and artists). Second, I have tried to identify the qualities of digital games and their players that create media for player expression. Players have made machinima alongside related activities such as high-performance play and participation in player cultures. A common element of these activities that has consistently fascinated me is that players find ways to extend a library of narrative elements of games and exploit technologies worked out of games to produce all kinds of game-based media artifacts, of which replays and machinima works are only two examples. This combination of technical mastery, high-level play, and performance is what I have called high-performance play in my writing about the early history of machinima. These activities—whether consciously or not—imply noteworthy modes of media capture, production, and preservation. It was thus almost the proverbial “no-brainer” to supplement my writing with curatorial activities such as the Machinima Archive and the Archiving Virtual Worlds collection, or the creation of “Game Capture: Archives of Multiplayer Game Worlds” for the Game-On exhibition at the Australian Center for the Moving Image in 2008. Put another way, I felt it was my duty to archivally capture activities based on gameplay capture. 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 8 31/05/2013 10:22 PREFACE ix I bring up these various activities to highlight one of the reasons why machinima is important. By virtue of its very nature, machinima compels attention to techniques of preservation of an interactive, performance-based digital medium. Why? The reason is that machinima is itself a “capture- based” medium. Whether made by players working from the inside out or by artists working from the outside in, the practice of machinima-making has been heavily dependent on the deployment, discovery, or creation of assets found in a game or virtual world, involving or followed by processes of extraction, capture, modification, compositing, editing, and encoding that result in the creation of a new media object. Perhaps it is just me, but this relationship of machinima-making to the stuff found and things done in a virtual space offers new ways of thinking about historical, archival, and preservation work pertaining to these same virtual environments and what people do in them. The methods of machinima, ranging from demo and replay production to P.O.V. video capture and then to asset capture and editing, can all be repurposed with the intention of documenting virtual and game worlds. This potential is evidenced by projects such as Phil “Overman” Rice’s Thresh v. Billox demos; Douglas Gayeton’s Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator (originally titled My Second Life: The video diaries of Molotov Alva (2007)); Bernhard “Draxtor Despres” Drax’s reportage journalism in Second Life; or the Nogg-aholics’ efforts to document and preserve inaccessible spaces in World of Warcraft (2004), to name but a few historical examples. Performance theorists and historians have noticed. Gabriella Giannachi, for example, applied techniques inspired by game replays and machinima camera placement to her documentation efforts for Blast Theory’s mixed-reality work, Rider Spoke (2007), at Ars Electronica in 2009. So, it is clear to me that one reason why critical and historical studies of machinima are important is that they provide fertile ideas for other areas of work on new digital media and performance documentation. Of course, there is a provocative side to any questioning of the impor- tance of machinima, and, by implication, the study of it. I suppose that the immediate negative answer to this question is to focus on the limitations of this form of expression—as a niche medium, as insider culture glorifying specific games, as a ragged performance platform, or as a medium deprived of narrative potential by its dependence on game experiences. Even if I accepted these objections—and I do not—there would remain a core possi- bility in machinima that would make the effort to understand it worthwhile. I shall describe this possibility as The Puppet Theater of the 21st Century. I do not mean the puppet theater as a specific entertainment but, rather, a line of thinking that was opened up by Heinrich von Kleist’s magnificent essay, “Über das Marionnettentheater” (1810) and which continues today through 9781441140524_txt_print.indd 9 31/05/2013 10:22 x PREFACE proposals such as Jaron Lanier’s notion of “Homuncular Flexibility” (2006). The basic idea connecting these writings is that machines give us visions of performance that are not just beautiful or even graceful but that are also, and just as importantly, not available to human performers.