In the article, “Storyline, Dance/Music, or PVP? Game Movies and Community Players in World of Warcraft” by Henry Lowood, Lowood basically discusses about player-created game movies, “Machinima”. Before reading this article, I honeslty never heard of the term “Machinima”. According to machinima.org, Machinima is “filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies”. It also defines Machinima as the “convergence of filmmaking, animation and game development”. I think it is important to notice the latter part of the definition. Lowood briefly goes over short 10years of Machinima history where it started from FPS and RTS games mainly for the purpose of replays. However, the article mainly uses the game-flimmaking in World of Warcraft to explore the role and history of Machinima.
As Lowood suggests, game-filmmkaing in WoW first started for PvP purpose where “it built the foundation of competitive play as a mode of performance”. By specificailly looking at the pvp of Rogue character, players used the video as the guide to learn new moves and skills that they were unaware of. WoW game moviemakers such as JuniorX, Daddar, and Pals for Life all contributed siginificantly on game-filmmaking in WoW community. JuniorX, the first WoW movie maker, made Dancemovie series that revealed new discovery of new tricks that other players were not familiar with. Daddar’s The Ironforge Bank Robbery also revealed the unknown feature of “terrorist attack” on enemy town. In a way, these movies not only serve as an entertainment, but serve as a guide to a new gameplay.
Tristan Pope’s Not Just Another Love Story is a great example of another dimension of Machinima in WoW. This romantic staged game film was a huge hit and revolution to WoW community. Romeo&Juliet love story of Troll male and Human female featured many player actors and was “masterfully choreographed series of scenes”. In a way, this video was just like real films that involve acting, staging, writing of script, camera positioning, etc. However, the fact that struck me the most was banning of this video due to censorship issue. The Blizzard gave an example of Ken and Barbie at Toys R Us example to shut this movie down. However, this incident reminded me of early era of filmmaking history in 1930s where Hays Code (MPAA) was adopted due to censorship issues. In a way, non-commerical player-created game movies are facing and sharing similar history with filmmaking history. In another words, Machinima has a potential to become a new genre in commercial filmaking industry.
In Korea, there is already a commercialized game video market where there is a televsion channel airing replays/live gameplays of Starcraft, Warcraft III, FPS games, etc. It’s little different from Lowood’s topic of discussion, but South Korea’s Game TV channel is, in fact, an outcome of Machinima culture. The major audience of the game channel are players of the game who wish to learn new skills and other information.
Do you think there is a possiblity and room for Machinima to be commercialized as in Korea now? Do you think there is a possibility that Machinima will replace or become mainstream in film industry?
What a great example: the Hays code was indeed a successful attempt by the film industry to regulate or censor content to improve the perceived morality of filmmaking as a practice. do you think that Blizzard had similar concerns in trying to censor Pope's machinima? What did they have to gain or lose by machinima appearing to be less than wholesome? what kinds of economic factors were involved?
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