Lazy Guide to Net Culture: Bangers and machinima

Published on Monday 19 June 2006 17:32

THEY told me when I was young that if I spent my time playing computer games I'd never get a job or a meet a nice girl.

They were wrong.

My awareness of things computery has never been anything other than a boon. I got my break in journalism largely down to my ability to tell the difference between an PC and a kettle (I won't be making that mistake again.)

I owe it all to those happy hours - erm, weeks - spent playing Elite when I should have been sniffing glue and vandalising the neighbours.

To this day that technological superiority over other journalists enables me to hold my own in lofty company. Why, just today, I was out power-lunching when a colleague asked me about "machinima".

"Ah yes, a fascinating phenomenon," I mumbled into my ortolan kebab. Then I threw every Web 2.0 buzzword into the conversation to give me a smokescreen while I scurried off to Wikipedia:

Machinima is an example of emergent gameplay, a process of putting game tools to unexpected ends, and of artistic computer game modification. The real-time nature of machinima means that established techniques from traditional film-making can be reapplied in a virtual environment. As a result, production tends to be cheaper and more rapid than in keyframed CGI animation.

This is a classic Wikipedia definition in that it uses lots of words but doesn't actually answer your question. Put simpy, machinima is dubbing sound onto scenes from computer games for dramatic effect. It is most effective with games that allow players to pose figures and control camera angles.

One of the best-known examples is Red vs Blue, a comedy series which uses scenes from the Halo first-person shooter. It sends up the "storylines" behind such games and militaria in general. With its treatment of a pointless war between the Red team and the Blue team it also tells us something about the futility of conflict. If I was really being pretentious here (moi?) I would drop in a reference to Catch 22 at this point…

Another famous piece is the rendition of "The Internet Is For Porn" from the musical Avenue Q, which features characters from the game World of Warcraft (specifically a warlike cow and a troll). While the song is most droll the video simply consists of computer game characters walking around and shrugging, however well executed it might be.

I was more tickled by the elvish equivalent of the Village People singing YMCA. However, while the creators had co-ordinated their /dance commands with almost obsessive accuracy, the lack of a /YMCA option did show up in the lack of any Y, M, C or A arm gestures, which are kinda critical to the whole YMCA thing.

And there's the rub, while machinima does offer the chance to create wonderful portmanteau parodies, it is still limited by the mechanics of the game engines it uses. However, given how far games have evolved since the days of Elite, who knows how sophisticated this can become?