Video games serve as reference point and expressive vehicle for a range of media such as films, books, television, comics, or the countless forms of fan art. In contrast to most of these formats, machinima is not only inspired by but intrinsically dependent on an underlying game engine. It embodies and re-interprets game technology and thus allows for a valuable perspective to games as such. Machinima embraces play, narrative, and art while still continuing to hold onto its close bonds to games as media, cultural artifacts, and technology. This essay will develop an argument line from the basic origins of machinima as pure recorded play, to a narrativization through cinematic interpretation, to a “third way” of machinima as a single standing art form that references and utilizes game technology on its own terms. This argument follows some historic order but the main categories are not exclusive of each other. Instead, they describe different aspects of machinima that do coexist in the current community of machinima producers.

Although machinima has found some critical and academic attention, it stubbornly refuses to be simplified and categorized. That is why this discussion also has to touch on a number of questions that clarify the role of machinima as game-based art form: Is there some quality that is at the core of machinima and can only be achieved in that format? Because machinima is a practiced art form, this has to be an ongoing discussion. The goal, thus, is to gradually build up a frame of qualities for machinima that help us to position it as art form. The key references in this essay will nest it in-between the more traditional film and television media and the world of video games. This art form represents narrative as well as associative poetic forms.

Play versus Narrative

In the first half of the 1990s, during the era of Stunt Island, DOOM, and Quake, machinima pieces were recordings of in-game performances of play. Players documented their play sessions in so-called “demos.” Demos are data logs that can be re-played in the very same game they were recorded in and provide a re-staging of the whole play event. They literally re-process an event from the past. Loading and “playing” a demo recording will reproduce the player’s activity as performed inside the game engine at the time of the recording. Due to their complete capture they are often used as play documentation and to detect cheaters in tournaments. Superior players can use them as evidence of their capabilities and others can study tactics to learn and improve their own game. This form of machinima comes from the game and is made solely for the sake of gaming. If one can speak of any narrative or narrative setting, then it has to be that of the given game; if one reads them as art pieces, then they document the artistry of certain gamers.

Indeed, witnessing an outstanding player at work can be a thing of beauty with its own value. Play itself is a cultural activity and witnessing somebody playing Halo on an expert level can deliver a form of aesthetic pleasure not unlike the sensation we get from watching a basketball star performing a slam dunk or a clown doing a trapeze act. In this case, the virtual performance in the game is so extraordinarily good that it is worth to be preserved 1. Players like Chris “NoSkill” Crosby displayed a mastery of DOOM that is so impressive that it was documented for other players. This might have been the original motivation for the birth of this kind of machinima: pure documentation of play. The method of documentation is of utmost importance at this stage. A demo recording is not framed as interpretative documentary but instead provides a full reproduction of the action itself. The camera work is limited, there is neither music nor voice over narration on the soundtrack, the action depicted is, in these early days, mainly the unaltered albeit perfectly executed player performance recreated by the game. Limited as these options might be, they include a game-based revolution in moving image recording. The demo format provides a new, factually neutral recording method of an event in a moving image world. It is a reproduction of the play itself and not of the single image taken from the play.

But even in the earliest days of real-time event recording and playback we can trace a longing of machinima toward more established visual storytelling. The ongoing debate between play and narrativization enters the picture. Stunt Island stands out as one of the earliest games that actively used the concept of real-time action replay and cinematic representation of it in its gameplay. It exemplifies the dream of machinima to be more cinematic and its intertextual undercurrents 2. Stunt Island is based on the 3D engine of a flight simulator and provides a sandbox environment for players to stage virtual stunts between a variety of vehicles. In the first stage of the game, players can stage spectacular virtual stunts. Then, the game allows multiple play-backs of this event during which players select different camera positions and editing points to optimize the event’s dramatic representation. The focus is more on the spectacular than on elaborate narrative, fulfilling an argument brought up against digital imagery before 3. Nevertheless, the game design clearly embraces the camera as an interpreting and narrative device. The outcome is not a game-typical high score but a cinematic short: a stunt scene.

Technically, this trend toward the cinematic was accelerated when machinima developed from the demo recording to the second dominant production form: screen-capture of the game event. Screen-capture allows the recording of whatever happens on a player’s screen when playing the game. Because the machinima artist can treat the recording like a traditional video file, it is much simpler especially to post-produce than in a live demo. On the other hand, the result is limited by whatever single perspective is recorded. The specific qualities of a demo log file, its neutrality and event recording abilities are lost. Consequently, with the step from demo recording to screen-capture, machinima ultimately succumbs to a first degree of cinematic narrative: that of the camera and the single fixed shot it records. This certainly points into filmic traditions but it does not necessarily demand a classic narrative structure.

Chris Brandt’s martial arts ballet Dance Voldo Dance (2005) was performed in the fighting game Soul Calibur. It displays superb mastery of the controls as he utilizes the fighting moves as dance steps in a carefully planned and rehearsed pas des deux of two fighters dancers. Instead of engaging in the game-defined fight, the players of Dance Voldo Dance perform a ballet. Soul Calibur offers no camera control but instead always shows both combatants in a kind of optimized view, following them wherever they rotate or move. Brandt uses this functional in-game camera and combines it with shots from the game’s exhibition mode and intro cinematics in his final edit that is cut to the rhythm of a successful pop song. The result is a MTV-like music video machinima with little narrative but a spectacular re-framing of the game itself in a new context. This kind of visually attractive but non-narrative music video is part of a long tradition in machinima. Machinima music videos often display impressive editing skills and character control that arrange in-game performances to – at times highly elaborate – dance and song presentations. They exemplify the transition from pure game performances to a focus on their audio-visual re-interpretation as visual spectacle. Other pieces can shift the focus from the performance of the individual player to that of the game engine as such.

A machinima about the physics in Halo, like Glass’ Warthog Jump (2002), lacks any story whatsoever. Instead, it is a display of features of the physics engine in the game. This focus can be so pure and game-focused that it tells something about the way the game operates. The performance of the code becomes the topic of the machinima. Countless virtual Rube Goldberg machines have been implemented in various game engines to experiment and display the capabilities and flaws of the underlying physics engines. The results are often documented as machinima pieces that celebrate not any elaborate form of cinematic storytelling but the ingenuity of the physic engine in the underlying game. The camera is mainly functional in the display of the event, no cuts are allowed or the continuity of the flawless execution of the Rube Goldberg machine would be questioned. In order to generate what Bazin termed the ‘density of something real’ 4 the shot has to remain continuous to document the genuity of the setup, the execution of the physical stunt, the marvel of the code at work.

While physics and character animation are still forms of adaptations of real world conditions into virtual environments, other machinima pieces focus on different – less realistic – aspects of their games’ technicalities. Many machinima pieces document glitches and bugs in existent game worlds that, like the Rube Goldberg machinima, mainly document game engine (mis)performances. Others concentrate on a game’s technical bravura. BlackShark’s Project 1K II (2006) is an audio-visual celebration of the underlying game, Trackmania, realized in a way that itself is deeply embedded in the game code. Project 1K II uses the “replay editor” of the racing game Trackmania as it assembles hundreds of replays (the title refers to the number as 1000, or 1K) of the same game level. The total assembly of all game sessions is then shown as combined playback performance. Instead of one single live performance, we see countless “recorded” performances meshed up into on single replay. Not the narrativization of an individual play is of importance but the visual effect of the merger of many sessions. The video does not document a single performance but performing in the game world as such.

We might call it the folk art of machinima – produced by the people, who play the games and see machinima as something that evolves out of their play and the game engine that implemented it. Yet, many successful machinima pieces evolved away from play and game as their core elements and instead moved toward another form: narrative film.

Academy Awards for Machinima

From the neutral data logs, machinima artists readily advanced to narrative structures. In 1996 a group of Quake players, The Rangers, produced Diary of a Camper, by many regarded as the first piece of modern machinima 5. Even though the original Diary of a Camper is still a demo recording, it is, in fact, a document for narrativization. The Rangers used the game engine without any alternation and all action is defined in the given gameplay mechanics of the original game title. However, they played not to the ends of winning. Instead, they staged a pre-planned event inside the game world in a form of emergent play. Their narrative asked of one player to consciously step into a trap and get killed by the “antagonist” of the narrative. Such a suicidal behavior is decisively untypical for proper Quake players but typical for actors following a given script. Like actors, the performers in Diary of a Camper (and the countless machinima pieces that followed) are performers of a self-defined drama not of a pre-designed game situation. Their mastery of the game is displayed in the flawless way it translates a game performance toward a non-gamespecific story. It is not visual spectacle as such, as seen in Dance Voldo, Dance but part of the greater goal of storytelling as players thrive to present this story through their virtual performance in-game.

Machinima produced by game companies also leaned toward the narrative. For example, in Ms Pac Man game producers used in-game cutscenes as rewarding narrative fillers for their games. Short film clips like these explain and contextualize the surrounding gameplay 6. They are often applied like narrative glue between otherwise purely ludic game experiences. Apart from written back stories, machinima and Full Motion Video segments are the most prominent examples for this kind of cinematic “story infusion” today. Debates that draw lines between the ludic and the narrative often used them as one clear demarcation lines between the two 7 8. The cinematic fillers in question are not always machinima but improvements on the side of the game engines have led to a notable increase of real-time rendered machinima cutscenes. They start to blur this once so clear demarcation line. Landmark titles like Yu Suzuki’s Shenmue made machinima sequences a substantial part of the ludic experience. So-called Quick Timer Events promoted in Shenmue carry references to the older concept of interactive film including branching options and decision points with unknown consequences. Despite these anachronistic features, Quick Timer Events developed into a wide-spread technique in many games with a narrative subtext from God of War to Resident Evil 4 and has evolved into a mix between play and cinematic story beats. The combination between the two seemingly opposing modes has become smoother and the transitions blur thanks to machinima techniques.

In the form of real-time cutscenes and Quick Time Events the film scene moved closer to the game; at the same time, screen-capture recording shifted the play recording closer to a linear film sequence. The image by image recording of screen captures and resulting re-interpretation of the play session can become the basis for an – at times highly elaborate – narrative about this session. Generating such a perspective forces the machinima artist to select and arrange the events and thus it often implies a narrative stance.

While the Quick Timer Event puts the “play” back into the filmic scene, play becomes re-framed as story event in screen-recorded machinima. This becomes obvious, for example, in the mixed media productions of commercial gamecasts and game tournament presentations. Technically, gamecasts are a form of live game performances that often combine machinima with video footage of real world action. They are clearly game specific but also mimic traditional TV formats. A gamecast of a typical tournament usually features at least one commentator and over the course of the action it builds up heroes, underdogs, and losers. It presents the action from dramatic angles that ultimately position audiences not as neutral observers but as involved witnesses in the event as an unfolding narrative between established characters. The various developments outlined above leave us in a state of merger between cinematic/ TV narration and play. What started as in-game condition to document play and avoid possible cheating turns into a TVshow that focuses on narrative and dramatic development.

Transformation of play into narrative is one defining element in the editor mode of the machinima-game The Movies. While the original gameplay is an abstracted real-time simulation of a gradually developing Hollywood studio, the editor mode features staging, editing, post production tools, and other options to optimize scenes that can be recorded in the virtual game world. The results depend on the workings of this post-production editor and the player’s mastery of it. It relies much less on the player’s performance of the enacted event itself, which usually consists of pre-defined motion-captured sequences. While this does not automatically imply that all machinima made in The Movies is narrative, it nevertheless indicates a strong bias of the engine design to traditional film-making and channels results more often than not into the dominant format of commercial production, namely narrative film. The game world becomes a stage not for ludic play but expression of storylines, character development, and dramatic structure. It heavily restricts direct access to the performance itself but instead concentrates on the use of the film tool, the editor and the scene pre- and post-production.

One reason for this development might be the imminent success of narrative machinima pieces. While gameplay recordings might be relevant to the community of the specific game, narrative machinima can engage audiences even if they are unfamiliar with the underlying game itself. This kind of machinima transcends the game community as it reaches out to the mainstream audiences used to narrative computer animations. Players still generate a lot of in-game recordings of pure play. Games like Halo 3 provide new tools for these kind of gameplay movies. However, the audiences for this kind of movies are often fragmented and the use of narrative often helps to popularize a machinima as seen for example in the successful Red vs. Blue series. Most prominent machinima that step beyond a single given platform are presented as narratives that have some value in their story-driven content even outside the game. They evolve around carefully constructed stories told in the game engine. What engine is used can become secondary and is decided on accessibility and technical quality. KBS Production’s Bill et John II: Danger Attacks at Dawn (2006) might use a flight simulator almost devoid of any human actors but manages to match superb voice over narration and shot assembly to tell an award winning story. First person shooter games were used for Anachronox: The Movie (2002), which uses a heavily modified Quake II engine; Red vs Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles (2003-2007), which uses the Halo engine; and The Journey (2004), which uses the Unreal engine. All of these pieces tell fundamentally different stories in very different ways. The game engine of World of Warcraft has supported the creation of countless machinima that cover numerous genre, from the epic Edge of Remorse (2006) to the musical comedy of The Ballad of the N00b (2006). It is still possible to notice differences between different production approaches but borderlines often blur and original gameplay might be entirely hidden from sight to make space for other elements of the narrative. The story told and the setting of the game detach.

Machinima tools, like Shortfuze’s Moviestorm, provide for animation techniques that do not use game settings at all but instead resemble virtual studios for staging of any given script. As a result, machinima films often only utilize the game as a staging arena and try to shine in the traditional domains of cinema such as writing, design, directing, cinematography, sound, editing, and post-production. In this case, machinima mimics traditional film productions and competes with their standards – thus it puts itself under the same critical lens. The organization dedicated to the development and promotion of machinima, the Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences (AMAS), plays with that reference and copies a lot of the award categories for their annual Machinima film festival. The outcome, then, is a traditional film as the head of the AMAS, Paul Marino, suggests: “By combining the techniques of filmmaking, animation production and the technology of real-time 3D game engines, Machinima makes for a very cost- and time-efficient way to produce films, with a large amount of creative control.” (machinima.org) This view praises machinima for its differences from traditional CGI production by being cheaper, faster, more accessible. Machinima is seen as a new production technique that delivers results which should be compared to traditional and mostly narrative movies 9. There are remarkable examples of machinima in this tradition that address this challenge. Outstanding machinima pieces like Jacqueline Turnure’s and Peter Rasmussen’s feature-length detective film noir Stolen Life raise the bar in areas such as writing, cinematography, and directing. Martin Falch’s Tales of the Past trilogy (2005-2007) – shot in World of Warcraft – not only roughly doubles in length between episodes but also displays the gradual improvement of the production’s visual, audio, and post production techniques to impressive standards. However, a complete inclusion of machinima into traditional film business and practice is problematic. If one concentrates on these established categories alone, the result would be a good traditional film in the best possible case. In the end, no new elements except the new production cycle are offered. The fact that the film is made using machinima techniques based on video games becomes a mere technological side remark.

Such a neglect of the game’s functionality in the strife for narrative Hollywood formats jeopardizes the specifics of machinima as an own format. As much as traditional quality criteria are necessary to improve the pieces, they also can lead away from the origin of the form that is so much part of the surprising artistic niches that reside in machinima. A third way is needed to capture this creative tension between pure game-related production and sheer copying of commercial cinematic practices. This approach is based on a blending of the two main reference points, film and game. It is in this hybrid form that machinima emancipates itself from the game without directly merging with the cinematic. It is here that a machinima specific media practice might evolve.

Experimental Reflections

All machinima is experimental to some extent due to the innovative approach to the generation of the moving image. Here, the term “experimental” is used when pieces do not simply use game rendering and animation techniques to create traditional film pieces but instead actively apply machinima to investigate the connection between the two poles of game and film. New possibilities open up where the game element meets the cinematic and manages to avoid classification as either exclusively ludic or Hollywood narrative. The question for this third way should be how machinima pieces include the game-ness and push it in terms of narrative content and cinematic expression. A number of examples will be discussed to explore this third way.

Games can be more than a production vehicle to machinima, even more than a platform for play/ performance. They can be a cultural reference point that co-defines the context of the machinima piece in ways that remain inaccessible to either film or game individually. When the modified G-man, a key character in the Half-Life game world, speaks to the audience using the voice of George W. Bush in Mike Munson’s The Tyrant (2006), then the film can create new references between the 43rd US president and the amoral mastermind of the Half-Life universe. Referencing the background of the game adds to the critical message of the machinima as the virtual game world adds its own story and context. This demonstrates that a new layer, a new critical perspective becomes available when one uses such a game universe effectively through machinima. Munson continues this use of game references on the level of the film’s soundtrack. The Tyrant uses music taken from a video game in the survival horror tradition (Silent Hill) to include another game-based cultural reference, adding to his apocalyptic vision. The film delivers its statement about a real world personality through multiple game cross-references. Thanks to these references, The Tyrant surpasses mesh-up montages of newscasts and speeches. The selection and presentation of in-game material delivers an additional expression to the piece, one that originates in machinima’s game-based format.

Eddo Stern’s Sheik Attack (1999-2000) takes the idea of ideology expressed through the use of certain games further. Like The Tyrant, Sheik Attack is a piece of screencaptured machinima post-produced with added music, subtitles, and carefully timed editing. It re-interprets the historical events of strikes of Israeli special forces against terror-suspect Sheiks in Lebanon. Different aspects of the attacks are presented through the use of different games at different stages of the film. Games seem to be selected based on what the depicted action demands but they also represent certain ways how the game’s functionality incorporates the depicted action. Any action presented in the machinima is also a ideologically framed action in a game that represents a certain philosophy in its underlying design. The initial building of settlements is presented through the real-time-strategy (RTS) game The Settlers III, which allows relatively low levels of enemy engagement compared to other more war-oriented RTS titles. The assassination itself is presented using the Rainbox Six game, which solely concentrates on stealth attacks, gun fights, and enemy annihilation. The selection of these games provide a certain aesthetic but the machinima also inherits certain ideologies and contexts given by the games themselves. For example, Rainbow Six is a game that glorifies international special forces as the original game assembles heroes from all over the (virtual) world in one elite fighting team. Using the game in the chosen context extends the critique and questions the legitimacy of preemptive covert operations not only for Israeli forces but any military unit. The game as cultural artifact, its content, design, and its context become part of the machinima’s expression just like the underlying game technology.

References to the video game as technology can be even more specific and rooted deeper in the functionality of the game engine. The first episode of Kirschners’ Person2184 series, The Photographer (2006), uses the First Person Shooter Unreal Tournament 2004 almost exclusively as a neutral render engine. Kirschner modified the engine and its gameplay to such an extent that the game mechanics are completely hidden. He furthermore changes the art work completely and replaces it with his own so that it is nearly impossible to identify the game engine from simply watching the piece. However, in the style of the earliest machinima producers, Kirschner delivers the machinima as a uMod file that executes in the game engine live at runtime. The Photographer might not look like the Unreal Tournament game it is utilizing but it certainly depends and illustrates the operational qualities of a real-time game engine of demo playback. This opens up interesting possibilities for the real-time rendered machinima image. In one sequence of The Photographer a fragmented cityscape is seen inhabited by video-like cut-outs representing inhabitants of this space. The shot is then combined with a view of floating blood cells as they seemingly stream through a body. The cross-reference is not only a visual but also a technical one as the movement of the characters in the street uses the same algorithm that drives the movement of those blood cells. Both are generated in real-time and this associations, thus, is not only visual but also conditional/ mathematical. Parallels between the body and the city are generated through the functionality of the modified game engine. Because of the live-ness of the demo, this connection is actually performed in real-time by the computer and plays out differently at every interation. The audience looks at a logical connection between different images and performances that is based on encoded behavior and that allows for parallels between these behaviors. The code-based performance of the modified underlying game engine supports the suggested visual and contextual reference and generates new expressive connections.

Brody Condon’s work often either plays with game references or lives inside a game world using and enhancing its technicalities as expressive means. His Karma Physics < Elvis (2004), for example, uses the physics engine implemented in Unreal to bring a flock of floating Elvis figures to a spastic-reactive life. He describes his overall working approach in a 2005 interview with EDGE: ‘I don’t usually make new things, but operate on the level of creative consumption. Think about it: game mods, Legos, sampling and mixing, etc. We don’t really create anything anymore, we just consume creatively. It’s a perfect example of how our culture has changed in the era of late capitalism.’ (Rossignol 2005) The same qualities are often used to describe machinima pieces as forms of game-based remixing and found art that re-use game assets and code (Lowood 2005). Condon’s “self-playing computer games” Resurrection (2007) or defaultproperties (2006) are typical borderline case where art installation and machinima/ game art overlap. Condon reproduces historic paintings in a realtime rendered world and adds short animation sequences to them. Machinima techniques help to bring the painting to a digital game-based life. Like his Karma Physics < Elvis piece, each single piece of these self-running game animations runs on a customized computer. The pieces cannot be reproduced properly on TV or in a cinema but are hardwired machinima that need to be performed live by specialized machines. The resulting machinima comments not only on the historic paintings but also on art practices and (re)production. They re-frame the existing art practices (and their results) in the digital culture of sampling and mixing of the live performed moving image. This reframing only works through machinima-like technology.

The final example reaches even deeper into the game technology, namely into graphic card and render algorithms. Julian Oliver created a kind of live drawing program based on the Quake III: Arena engine. His ioq3aPaint (2007) works by breaking the established way that 3D render engines generate their imagery, more precisely: by using a re-draw glitch in the game engines in Quake III. 3D engines try to re-write the screen image as often as possible per second, replacing the last frame with the new one to generate the illusion of a moving image. ioq3aPaint experiments with this process. It does not properly “clean up” the screen between frames but instead overwrites it, allowing all moving objects to drag their textures across the screen in their movements. The result is a smudging blur of moving colors and textures that are generated as virtual characters move through abstracted game worlds. The characters themselves are operating like AI-driven paintbrushes at work inside the 3D game level. Their movements result in a growing painting on the 2D canvas of the screen. The images are truly “moving” and constantly morphing into new shapes due to the underlying game engine. The piece is an example for a game-based non-narrative machinima recording that uses the very logic of the render engine and the AI behavior of the characters in it. It poses this question through the game, its bot behavior, its texturing, and rendering. Viewers gain a new window with surprising perspectives into the generative art that operates at the heart of these machinima examples.

Moving Targets

The third way of machinima as experimental reflection, as was outlined in the examples above, comes to life only in the combination of the established visual traditions with the specific conditions of the game. It asks the artist to open up a technological and contextual gap that can become part of the piece itself. This offers a crucial backbone for machinima as art form. In one way or the other any new media form should be able to ask new questions or pose old questions in a new way. The examples of machinima as experimental reflection provide this as they open up new artistic territory. They let the game affect the machinima piece in terms of content as well as technical performance and demonstrate a way to provide a machinima-specific critical frame. Because this frame is not anymore fully contained inside the game or the cinematic, this “category” of self-aware and self-reflective machinima stands out as relevant artistic realization. It also indicates a gradual maturing process of machinima.

It is important to realize that the here outlined three strands are not exclusive of each other. One can find all three outlined categories – recorded play, narrative film, and experimental reflection – at work in the machinima community today. They often overlap and inform each other and at times a single piece can include them all at different stages. Machinima is still a moving target that keeps on re-inventing itself, often in parallel to improvements of game engines. As such, the suggested experimental hybrid of game and traditional film is likewise constantly adjusting to the new possibilities and remains in fluxus. It is not an end to the means of machinima but a realization of its power; more a question then an answer. No other format can provide for this kind of moving images and if a new expressive technique allows us to generate new references, then this ability should inform our criticism, analysis, and research of this technique. This does not exclude ludic or narrative elements but it shifts more emphasis on that experimental exploration of the area in-between these trodded paths and in-between different technologies.

Machinima can (and is understood to be) a lot of different things but there are some precious few things that only machinima can be and for which it provides the only available platform. The here mentioned hybrid examples are among them: unique, surprising, and machinima at heart that unlock new critical perspectives.

Footnotes:

1. Henry Lowood, “High-Performance Play: The Making of Machinima,” in Videogames and Art, eds. Grethe Mitchell and Andy Clarke. (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2007), 59-80.
2. Michael Nitsche, “Claiming Its Space: Machinima,” dichtungdigital, no. 37 (2007) http://www.brown.edu/Research/ dichtung-digital/2007/nitsche.htm.
3. Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture, Surface Play, and Spectacle in New Media Genres. (London: New York: Routledge, 2000).
4. Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? trans. by Hugh Gray. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 84.
5. Paul Marino, 3d Game-Based Filmmaking: The Art of Machinima. (Scottsdale, AZ: Paraglyph Press, 2004).
6. Rune Klevjer, “In Defense of Cutscenes,” in Computer Games and Digital Cultures 2002 Conference Proceedings, ed. Frans Mäyrä. (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2002), 191-202.
7. Rune Klevjer.
8. Clive Thompson, “Oughtta Stay Out of Pictures,” Slate (January 27, 2005). http://www.slate.com/Default. aspx?id=2112744. (March 30, 2008).
9. Hugh Hancock and Johnnie Ingram, Machinima for Dummies. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing Inc., 2007).

References:

Bazin, Andre. What Is Cinema? trans. by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture, Surface Play, and Spectacle in New Media Genres. New York: Routledge, 2000.
Hancock, Hugh, and Johnnie Ingram. Machinima for Dummies. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing Inc., 2007.
Kelland, Matt, Dave Morris, and Dave Llyod. Machinima. Boston, MA: Thomson, 2005.
Klevjer, Rune. “In Defense of Cutscenes,” in Computer Games and Digital Cultures 2002 Conference Proceedings. Ed. Frans Mäyrä. Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2002. 191-202.
Lowood, Henry. “High-Performance Play: The Making of Machinima,” in Videogames and Art. Ed. Grethe Mitchell and Andy Clarke. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2007. 59-80.
———. “Real-Time Performance: Machinima and Game Studies,” The Journal of the International Digital Media & Arts Association, no. 1 (2005): 10-18.
Marino, Paul. 3d Game-Based Filmmaking: The Art of Machinima. Scottsdale, AZ: Paraglyph Press, 2004.
Nitsche, Michael. “Claiming Its Space: Machinima.” dichtungdigital, no. 37 (2007). http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtungdigital/ 2007/nitsche.htm.
———. “Film Live: An Excursion into Machinima,” in Developing Interactive Content: Sagas Sagasnet Reader. Ed. Brunhild Bushoff. Munich: High Text, 2005. 210-43.
Rossignol, Jim. “Art and Games,” EDGE Magazine, 2005. 143.
Thompson, Clive. “Oughtta Stay Out of Pictures.” Slate (January 27, 2005) <http://www.slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2112744> (accessed March 30, 2008).