Machinima: Like Fan Fiction, but in Reverse

A few days ago I mentioned in a "Bits" post an online project that is animating Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8 comic book series using machinima. I'm sure at least a few people didn't know what I meant by that, and so I decided to expand on what machinima is a little bit. It's an interesting subject that I'm sure my Communications Theory professor would have been fascinated by.

Basically, Machinima is animation accomplished with the use of video games. The name is a merging of the words "machine" and "animation." Rather than expensively rendering their stories, creators tell them with the tools that they have. Some have compared it to a digital version of puppetry. In other words, creators take the pieces of a computer game and rearrange them to tell their own story. You might think this would just result in a recording of someone playing a video game, but that's definitely not the case. Complex editing tools are often used, and some games now released come with their own built-in machinima capabilities.

Machinima began as a very small niche with the gaming community, but has become more and more mainstream in the years since. It has adapted to new games as they are released. Wikipedia credits the 1996 piece "Diary of a Camper" as the first Machinima to gain a wide audience. It was created using the game Quake. In 2006, the South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft" featured extended Machinima sections and was credited with bringing the form to a wider audience. Today there is a national Machinima Film Festival and even an Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences.

I (along with plenty of others) was first exposed to Machinima via the popular, and even critically acclaimed (the Director of Lincoln Center supposedly called it "as sophisticated as Samuel Beckett"), webseries, "Red vs. Blue". Created using Halo 2, the game of choice for, well, everybody circa my freshman year of college, the series ran 5 seasons and 100 episodes, from 2003 to 2007, and has since spawned a spin-off. The series is about two sets of soldiers fighting for control of a valley (and each other's "flag"), a standard Halo scenario. The series began as a simple, sitcom-type parody, mostly of video games, but soon evolved into a more general science-fiction comedy that even occasionally took itself seriously. And in its scenario of two sets of soldiers (who often find they have pretty much everything in common) set down for an interminable period of time to fight over a piece of ground nobody wants for reasons neither of them understand, the series manages to send up echoes of everything from Kafka to M*A*S*H. The series almost immediately became a huge online hit and is now available on DVD.

Now, as for the title of this post. Reverse probably isn't the best way of putting it, but let me explain what I mean. In fan fiction, writers use their own materials (i.e., usually prose writing, but there are fan films, as well) to tell more stories about their favorite show, movie, game, book, etc. Machinima creators use the materials of a game to create their own, original story, usually relating only tangentially, if at all, to the actual subject matter of the game. Both are perfectly valid forms of expression, but I find the contrasts interesting. In both cases, they are putting the materials provided by the creators of media to a use that wasn't originally intended by their creators. And the internet has proved the magic bullet that has exponentially accelerated both the spread and cultural acceptance of both forms.