The Production of Machinima: A Dialogue between Ethnography,Culture and Space

Irrespective of the growing call for the legitimization and commercialization of machinima, as a mode of digital filmmaking using videogame hardware and software, this paper upholds an interest in the emergent play practices of gamers, rather than filmmakers, that embraces not only the curiosity and discovery exhibited within the fluid peripheries of the virtual worlds they inhabit, but also extends to delving into open-source 3D engines of games such as Half Life (Valve). It is this kind of playful exploration that was responsible for the initial emergence of machinima but also, we argue, for its continued and increasingly popular application as a key mode of articulating game fandom and the pleasures of play. Machinima is therefore examined here for its novel contribution to the existing multiple media channels adopted and utilized by participatory cultures that form around specific texts. Communities that are characterised not only by a shared practice (game playing) and heightened levels of appreciation, but also by the execution of creative practices that enunciate and define their specific ‘tastes’ whilst also transforming game texts to serve their alternative interests. Such practices are indicative of a contemporary fan-base that is no longer content with singular media experiences. During the last fifteen years, sporadic academic accounts of fandom have presented compelling arguments for treating fans as more than just avid, loyal consumers of the mass-produced commodities of popular culture, but as audiences that possess active, critical and productive relationships with popular texts. In line with the broader sub-culture of fan communities (see Brooker, 2002) game players also perform a broad range of practices in communication of their fandom, including the more traditional composition of fan-fiction and creation of fan-art, often rooted in a desire to expand fictional worlds and deepen accounts of character motivation and game ecology (see Schott & Burn, 2004, for accounts of fandom practice directly spurred by game texts). In doing so, standalone game-titles, yet to receive a high profile Hollywood adaptation, attain fan-generated cross-modal representation through the remediation of game content within other complimentary media such as film or graphic novels (print media that also offers its readers a heightened sense of spatial dynamics). Such practices serve to further integrate the distinctive aesthetic, physics and possibilities offered by game worlds with other mediums 1 , an increasingly popular strategy amongst more mainstream narratives such as the hypertext, artificial-reality inspired Matrix whose cross-media convergence was transversely played out across live-action, animation and games formats. The affordances connected to different representational media are regularly being exploited to offer audiences‟ different entry points and experiential engagement with the same narrative form. When examining games, the significance usually given to an „authoritative original‟ or „primary‟ text by cultural and media studies appears to be eroding and giving way to what Aumont (1997) has referred to as “stratified time in which we move through different levels simultaneously, present, past(s), future(s)" (129130). For players/fans, time (and space) surrounding this popular media artefact is collapsing allowing its different elements and treatments to casually co-exist. Indeed, a spatial conception of the networks of representations connected to a particular game such as Half Life would only serve to undermine the fluidity of the processes of connection and disconnection that operates in and around the different depictions of its universe and characters across different media. Within creative practice such as player-created machinima (or gamics such as Apostasy) it is possible to locate the presence of multiple interpretations of characters‟ identities, personality, temperament and motivations that do not imply a convergent stability or an end-point of unification, but the normal state of a continual process where moments of convergence are matched by equal moments of divergence. Unlike traditional accounts of fandom and its practices, such as Lewis‟ (1992) early proclamation that;