The Machinima Reader
Henry Lowood and Michael Nitsche
Abstract
Over the last decade, machinima—the use of computer game engines to create movies—has emerged as a vibrant area in digital culture. Machinima as a filmmaking tool grew from the bottom up, driven by enthusiasts who taught themselves to deploy technologies from computer games to create animated films quickly and cheaply. This book provides a critical overview of this rapidly developing field. The contributors include both academics and artist-practitioners. They explore machinima from multiple perspectives, ranging from technical aspects of machinima, from real-time production to machinima as a ... More
Over the last decade, machinima—the use of computer game engines to create movies—has emerged as a vibrant area in digital culture. Machinima as a filmmaking tool grew from the bottom up, driven by enthusiasts who taught themselves to deploy technologies from computer games to create animated films quickly and cheaply. This book provides a critical overview of this rapidly developing field. The contributors include both academics and artist-practitioners. They explore machinima from multiple perspectives, ranging from technical aspects of machinima, from real-time production to machinima as a performative and cinematic medium, while paying close attention to the legal, cultural, and pedagogical contexts for machinima. The book extends critical debates originating within the machinima community to a wider audience and provides a foundation for scholarly work from a variety of disciplines. It charts the emergence of machinima as a game-based cultural production that spans technologies and media, forming new communities of practice on its way to a history, an aesthetic, and a market.
Keywords:
machinima,
computer game engines,
movies,
digital culture,
filmmaking tool,
animated films,
real-time production,
cinematic medium,
cultural production,
communities of practice
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780262015332 |
| Published to MIT Press Scholarship Online: August 2013 |
DOI:10.7551/mitpress/9780262015332.001.0001 |
