Introduction

In computer and video games, the player resides at the interface of viewer and actor. This position makes possible the playerʼs creative participation in these interactive media, a contribution that cannot be described in terms of the traditional roles of creator or consumer. The player is more than a consumer of what game developers and designers have created, and more than a reader or viewer. A game designer “creates a context to be encountered by a participant, from which meaning emerges” (Salen and Zimmerman 41). In the last decade or so, game players have used computer games as platforms for creating their own games, narratives, texts, and performances. They have reshaped the context of computer play, not simply by creating personal artifacts equivalent to a home movie, doodle, or diary, but by fully exploiting games as a new medium for performance and artistic expression. These efforts on occasion have challenged storytelling technologies such as frame-based animation, and have entered the mainstream through music videos, web-based serial programming, and other popular formats. The performer has pushed forward into the spotlight of game culture.

So, how might game studies reveal players as performers? Learning more about the meanings players attach to play gestures, studying high-level competitive play, understanding what it means to watch others as they play, examining more closely the significance of replays and game movies in game culture, describing the formation of player identities, documenting in-game social dynamics, and tracing the networked virtual communities that thrive around computer games are but a few of many topics that might contribute to better understanding of game performance. This article presents a few ideas about playersʼ active participation in game culture through one mode of visible public performance: machinima and related game movies.

Game-Based Filmmaking and New Game Cultures

Machinima is the making of animated movies in real time through the use of computer game technology. More elaborately, Paul Marino has defined machinima as visual narratives “created by recording events and performances (filmmaking) with artistically created characters moved over time (animation) within an adjustable virtual environment (3D game technology platform or engine)” (3). The word “machinima” (initially, “machinema”) was derived from “machine cinema” (“Machinima”). A more apt derivation might be “machine animation” or “machinimation.”1 Whether we think of machinima as cinema or animation, it means making animated movies in real-time with the software that is used to develop and play computer games. Game developers produce software called “game engines” to manage sophisticated real-time graphics, physics, lighting, camera views, and other facets of their games. Games such as first-person shooters immerse the player in the rapid action of gameplay by drawing and re-drawing the virtual environment as a 3-dimensional space on the screen from the playerʼs point of view. They do this in real time and at high frame-rates as the player “moves” through that space. Early on, machinima-makers learned how to re-deploy this sophisticated software for making movies, relying on their mastery of the games and the software. Beginning as players, they found that they could transform themselves into actors, directors, and even “cameras” to make these animated movies inexpensively on the same personal computers used to frag monsters and friends in Quake (1996) and other games. They recorded their actions, generally in real time, as replay files.2 The next step was learning how to decompile, edit, and recompile these files to change the camera view (known as “recamming”) and edit sequences of gameplay. The finished movies could then be distributed inexpensively via the Internet, either as files that required the game to view them or in encoded media formats such as those with .avi and .mov extensions.

Since the mid-1990s, machinima and other kinds of game movies (speedruns, demo movies, gameplay captures) have produced some of the most creative expressions of player culture. Early machinima projects such as The Rangersʼ Diary of a Camper or Clan Undeadʼs Operation Bayshield launched this “convergence of filmmaking, animation and game development” (Dellario).3 The story of machinimaʼs subsequent development, which I have told in greater detail elsewhere, reveals much about the impact of improvements in computer graphics and game technology generally on game-based performance.4 However, the history of machinima is more than a lesson about the rise of real-time animation techniques. Like the cell phone camera or music remixing, machinima shows how the dissemination of accessible tools—even if they are not necessarily easy-to-use—gives rise to the emergence of unexpected content in a postmodern environment that values playful experiments and throwaway pieces alongside more traditionally startling and original forms of creative expression.5

The availability of technology for producing 3-D animation in real time or for capturing, storing, manipulating, and distributing movies of in-game performance is not a sufficient explanation for the advent of machinima. For a more complete picture, it is necessary to attend to the social nature of game performance. Machinima movies depend on the interest game players have in watching other players. Machinima is created within and for virtual communities of enthusiasts devoted to multiplayer and competitive games. A technical and social infrastructure built around computers, the Internet, and computer games—in fact, the same infrastructure that supports networked multiplayer gaming—accounts for the distribution of these movies. The “participatory” culture of game development, with its blurring of the line between producer and consumer of popular media,6 has grown out of this strong linkage of game technology and virtual communities.

The Player as Performer

Machinima as “high-performance play” emerged from the inter-relationships of gameplay, technical virtuosity, and storytelling (Lowood). Each of these factors has played a role in defining machinima through new practices of computer game performance. Released in December 1993, id Softwareʼs Doom established competitive multiplayer gaming as the leading-edge genre of PC games, followed in 1996 by Quake. Just as important as improvements in graphics and networking technology, Doom revised notions of authorship by allowing for game modifications, third-party level design, and the creation of independently-developed software tools. The resulting variability of content and participation by players in the creation of new content is precisely what Lev Manovich has called the new “cultural economy” of game design. The first-person shooter has since become the genre of choice for extensive “modding” of game content; beginning with Doomʼs successor, Quake, it has also been the game genre upon which most machinima projects are based. Manovich contrasts modifiable games to the more customarily authored game such as Myst (1994), which he describes as “more similar to a traditional artwork than to a piece of software: something to behold and admire, rather than take apart and modify.” This contrast partly explains why narrative-driven game genres, such as adventure games and role-playing games, have been less popular in the machinima community than first-person shooters.

id Softwareʼs focus on games built for competitive play and the opening up of access to technology and tools for modifying content fostered the creation of active communities of players and coders. id openly encouraged the creation of clans as “organized bands of warriors,” bands that “signal[ed] the next stage in online gaming.”7 Such clans, organized for competitive play, produced most of the pathfinding Quake movies and machinima projects. These included the Rangersʼ Diary of a Camper and Clan Undeadʼs Operation Bayshield, as well as later projects such as the machinima of Clan Phantasm or the masterful Ill Clan. Of course, the community of clans and players also provided an audience for the new medium. Performers crave spectators, and the existence of communities engaged at every level of their work—clans of players, teams of movie-makers, or virtual networks of programmers and tool builders—cannot be underestimated as a factor in high-performance play.

Technology

Quake, as software, was more complex than Doom, but knowledgeable players found it more accessible “under the hood” for modifications or the programming of editing tools. Id supported the creation of a Usenet discussion group devoted to Quake editing, disseminated some Quake source code to encourage level editing and modding, and provided a scripting language, QuakeC, which would prove particularly useful to machinima-makers. A community of coders and modders formed around the sharing of information about Quake editing. Some specialized in the development of tools specifically for the analysis and modification of demo movies and replays.8 As Douglas Thomas has noted in his study of hacker culture, programming feats alone do not a hacker make. Hackers emerged into public view by affiliating with other elite programmers, sharing information and refining skills in groups such as the infamous Legion of Doom and Masters of Deception. Sharing information and text files served “to solidify [these] hackersʼ reputations, illustrating the degree to which they understood the systems they infiltrated” (Thomas 90) The Quake player operated in a different technical realm, yet s/he also sought recognition through community-based “performance of technology” (47-52). Immediately after Quakeʼs release, players formed affiliations in response to the vast improvement of multiplayer connectivity and chat options over Doom. Like hacker gangs dissecting the intricacies of computer networks, these Quake Clans shared techniques of high-performance gaming, both playing and programming. The Ranger Clan provides a telling example. Arguably the most famous clan of all, the Rangersʼ top-notch players contributed visibly to the community that formed around the game. They participated in the first pre-release test of the Quake engine distributed to the Quake community. One member designed the original Capture the Flag mod; another founded one of the major sources of information about Quake development, Blueʼs News; in all, about half of the 25 members or so remained active in game development or went on to work in the game industry (cf. Hancock). With their reputation for stellar performance as players and programmers firmly established, they impressed the Quake community in October 1996—barely a month after the commercial release of the game—with an exploit of another sort: the first machinima movie, Diary of a Camper.

Gameplay

Machinima is not just a performance of technological skill, nor is the spectator only interested in watching a story unfold. As important as these two aspects of performance are, machinima is also about skilled exploits of gameplay. Players have competed publicly since the early days of computer games.9 The introduction of Doomʼs new modes (deathmatch, for example) and technologies of networked play intensified multiplayer competition. Doom also provided means and motive for recording game movies. The gameʼs unprecedented success as a platform for competitive play heightened interest in the feats of stellar players, especially as word got out about their prowess in the growing player community. Players took full advantage of the ability to record “demo movies.” As the name implies, these movies demonstrated skills by documenting actual matches recorded as replay files. These demos were distributed and replayed by other players with a copy of the game, who watched often to observe the masters and thus improve their own skills. Demonstrations of skill by admired players such as NoSkill, XoLeRaS, and Smight circulated widely. As BahdKo, a veteran of the Doom demo scene points out, “[u]se of demos for their educational value has been going on since almost the beginning” (Hermann). When individuals and regular teams of players joined together in clans, it was a way for them to establish collective reputations based on superior play. Demo movies put their exploits on display. After Doom, intense multiplayer competition, documentation of gameplay through demo movies, and watching others play were inextricably linked. Spectatorship and the desire to share skills were the cornerstones of the creation of a player community eager to create and distribute gameplay movies. The result was nothing less than the metamorphosis of the player into a performer.

Like the hackersʼ exploits, making movies with game software required a mixture of expertise and subversion. The subversive aspect, what Katie Salen has called “transformative play,” is particularly important for machinima as playful performance. Salen insists that designers cannot fully anticipate “how the rules will play out” as players go beyond the formal structure of a game design.10 Machinima can in part be understood as a replacement of one game structure with another, as the “free movement of play” alters the game from playing to win to playing to make a movie. The Rangers give us one example in their transformation of competitive play into the minimal theatrical play of Diary of a Camper; the simple storyline emphasizes the shift by including specific references to gameplay (the Camper, the headshot) that define the narrative.

Historically, another example of transformative, high-performance play that set the stage for machinima was the transformation of Doom and Quake into speedrunning—completing a game or game level as quickly as possible and documenting record runs via replay movies. This is neither deathmatch competition nor gladiatorial combat like Rocket Arena; rather, it is a single-player show that combines virtual gymnastics, game engine analysis, trickery, expert gameplay, and demo movie chops. In the words of one of the leaders of the “Quake done Quick” team, “speed-running offers another way to compete at Quake” (Bailey). Speedrun projects, particularly those executed by the Quake done Quick team, played an important role in the development of recamming techniques, that is, transforming the first-person view of the game into a floating third-person camera in order to make speedruns more viewable. These projects were thus particularly fruitful as dual performances of programming and transformative play.

Playing the Performer

The third important aspect of high-performance play is ironically the easiest and the most difficult to describe. It is perhaps the aspect that is most commonly associated with “performance,” that is, putting on a show for an audience. It is the movement from the arena of agonistic play to performing as if onstage or on the film screen, from “play is the thing” to “the play is the thing.” And yet, it will hardly do to describe performance as an aspect of play as performance. Machinima as multifaceted high-performance play (technology, gameplay, art/theater) meets the challenge to performance studies issued by performance theorist Jon McKenzie, “one that links the performances of artists and activists with those of workers and executives, as well as computers and missile systems” (Perform or Else). According to McKenzie, performance became the paradigm for the late 20th-century by entangling a multitude of domains in its net: cultural and artistic performance, organizational or financial performance, engineering performance, and sports performance. His own analysis of “hacker trading” in the PairGain hoax (1999) provides a striking example of the close linkage between the technical performance of coding or hacking, the “nomadic power of performance” within computer networks, and the creation of a performance “hoax” based in interactive media (“!nt3rh4ckt!v!ty”). Game-based moviemaking similarly has woven technology, virtual communities, play, and public performance together.

Richard Schechner, in his magisterial introduction to performance studies, segments the performance process into a series of steps, a “time-space sequence.” These steps are collected at the intuitive levels of “proto-performance” (training, rehearsal, etc.), “performance” (warm-up through public performance and related events) and “aftermath” (criticism, archives, memories). This model pertains to live performances (theater, sports, rituals, social interactions), though it can also be applied to recorded media of performance, such as film, by dividing pre-production, production, and post-production activities. Indeed, machinima-makers often think of their projects in these movie-making terms (e.g., Marinoʼs 3D Game-Based Filmmaking). It is instructive to consider the relationship between gameplay and machinima in terms of Schechnerʼs performance process. Demonstration of play skills, and certainly the manipulation of game technology, would appear to be part of the proto-performance of the workshop and rehearsal, but there is an important difference. Schechner argues that “proto-p” is a “pretext” to performance, something hidden from the audience. This privacy of preparation is more than a strategy for hiding craft knowledge, because it also heightens the impact of performance by leaving the impression of hidden powers (Schechner 191-92). Technology and gameplay in machinima and other game movies, far from holding up in a private reserve of proto-p, instead are displayed openly. They are an integral part of the “p” of game-based performance. The player is the performer for a networked community of on-line gamers and meets McKenzieʼs challenge to Performance Studies by openly engaging in multiple aspects of high-performance play. Machinima is only one form of game-based performance, but its significance for game studies lies in showing how game players can open up the performance process to technology and play.

Summing Up

The importance of machinima for game studies is that it exemplifies the three-fold, interlocking nature of high-performance play: as performance of technical exploits, as performance of game skills, and as public performance for an audience. Each of these aspects is intimately connected with the creation of on-line communities around competitive play, the remediation of familiar narrative media (film, music videos, animation) in gameplay, the appeal of extroverted play11—playing for others to see—in virtual spaces, and many other topics that game research will encounter as it focuses more intensively on the unlimited creativity of players.

The history of machinima illustrates a number of themes in the appropriation of game technology to create a new narrative, even artistic medium. I would identify these as technologies of modification, subversion, and community-developed content. id Softwareʼs decision to embrace and extend the player communityʼs role in creating new Doom levels set the stage for the unprecedented degree to which it opened up access to the game engine inside Quake. Not only did providing an editor and scripting language stimulate modification and extension of the game, it encouraged the development of tools for unforeseen purposes, such as the editing of demo movies and, eventually, the making of animated movies using real-time techniques of gameplay as performance. While these modifications were sanctioned by id, they were also subversive. Salenʼs notion of transformative play applies to the underlying technology of computer games as well as to game design. Technology became a field of play, but not just in order to play the game of optimizing game performance; less than a year after Quakeʼs release, game software was used—playfully—as a technology for making movies. As speedrunning became a new game form within the structure of play provided by Quake, machinima-makers subverted the game system altogether, turning it into a performance technology. Machinima meant narrative or experimental movie-making, not competition. Just as important, machinima benefited from the strong social network spawned by multiplayer gaming. Knowledge of the capabilities built into Quake and access to independently-developed tools disseminated rapidly in the virtual community of Quake players. The clans and project members deploying this knowledge added to it in every one of the early machinima projects, in turn publicizing a body of work that consisted of movies, software tools, and techniques. Exploits of high-performance gameplay, programming, and storytelling were not isolated achievements or acts of creativity; performers crave spectators, and the existence of a gaming community engaged at every level of their work—clans of players, teams of movie-makers, or virtual networks of programmers and tool builders—cannot be underestimated as a factor in high-performance play. When a computer game is released today, it is as much a set of design tools as a finished game design. PC game developers routinely release their development tools for experimentation and play, that is, they encourage gamers to play with technology, animation, stories, graphics and movies just as much as they encourage play with the games themselves. Developers are putting impressive editing and cinematic tools in the hands of the player community, encouraging everything from the creation of new game levels to surprising forays into artistic and performative experimentation such as machinima. Yet, players and their communities still find ways to play that the developers never suspected were possible.

Endnotes:

1. “Machinimation” is, in fact, the name of Fountainhead Software’s machinima software tool.
2. More recently, game movies have often been made from screen capture, rather than replay files, especially machinima based on console games (Red vs. Blue) and massively-multiplayer games (Tristan Pope).
3. Dellario is Ill Bixby of the machinima team known as the Ill Clan.
4. On the history of machinima, see Lowood. An outgrowth of this investigation of machinima’s history is the newly launched Machinima Archive, hosted by the Internet Archive, which can found at http://www.archive.org/movies/collection.php?collection=machinima.
5. I am indebted for this line of thinking to Galen Davis of the Stanford How They Got Game Project. On camera phones and the emergence of new content, see Okabe and Ito, as well as Justin Hall’s work on weblogging and camera phones in The Feature.
6. Cf. Jenkins and Sotamaa.
7. See the Internet Archive’s capture of id Software’s website <http://www.idsoftware.com>, dated of Dec. 20, 1996 at <http://www.idsoftware.com/clans/index.html>.
8. Uwe Girlich, author of LMPC (Little Movie Processing Centre), and Anthony Bailey, author of the Remaic (“remake”) recamming program, were among the most well-known.
9. On the Spacewar! Olympics of the early 1970s, see Steward Brand.
10. To learn more about transformative or emergent play, see Salen and Zimmerman’s “Games as Open Culture,” in Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play: 537-53.
11. I am indebted to Jane McGonigal for the notion of “extroverted play.

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