Deus Ex Machinima

Film has wrestled with the issue of reality since the beginning. What's too much reality? What's not enough? What's the value of fantasy versus reality? Television is quickly approaching critical mass with its reality shows, but even there, the question "What's reality?" still exists. Lowood's How They Got Game project turns a cold shoulder on reality, as it were, by making it possibly as far from reality and movies as you can get. And there's a game angle, too.

The game community has used game engines such as Quake, for the purpose of a narrative medium.

For the uninitiated, and that possibly includes many readers, "machinima" has been around for several years, first appearing among Quake clans, whose many, various members were interested in making movies based on their game experiences. Machinima is complicated, but it is most simply defined as real-time, 3D movies in virtual worlds that are built on game engines. The term "machinima" is a hybrid of machine cinema or machine animation, or sometimes it's a combination of both. Those who have watched game cutscenes have seen machinima in action. Now these cutscenes, so to speak, have lives of their own. Machinima has slightly broken away from its game-oriented roots, in terms of the themes presented in the films, but it remains tethered to game mechanics, because game engines power machinima engines.

"The thing about machinima is there are things that are interesting to a general audience, but it does take some explanation to get to them. It's not familiar enough that people immediately see the issues," explains Lowood, who likens the medium to more of a performance-based experience like theater or, in some cases, television instead of traditional movies. "So, if it's just reduced to 'Why is it more interesting to just use real-time animation in a movie than to do it in a frame-based way?,' this discussion usually ends up hung up on the expense of it. That it's cheaper or something like that is not the most interesting discussion. What is much more interesting is the kind of community that is creating machinima [and the fact] that it is something that is accessible to people [and is created] relatively easily." Anyone with a computer can make machinima through a series of stages that, while too involved to describe here, are not actually too difficult. One way to conquer the medium is through Paul Marino's new book on the subject, 3D Game-Based Filmmaking: The Art of Machinima (Paraglyph Publishing, July 2004). Lowood also has more information on machinima in his article, High-Performance Play: The Making of Machinima.

Like the current digital film renaissance, machinima, because it is not expensive, allows a creativity and flexibility that Lowood says "you're certainly not going to see in commercial movies but you might see in certain types of digital video productions, experimental video, and stuff like that."