As I have addressed in previous posts, one of the hurdles that machinima faces as a fledgling art form is the same issues of representation all previous forms of media have had to overcome through their histories. When you look across the vast majority of machinima out there, the creators tend to represent that early gaming demographic that excludes both women and people of color. And as the ubiquity of home computing continues to grow and the gaming population proceeds to explode, we can only hope that this trend of homogeneous representation will be amended. But when we look through the history of any medium, these are simply part of the growing pains that each new medium undergoes. When we examine the trajectories of both Film and Television, they each demonstrate early tendencies to marginalize those who were not part of the dominant group. So while the landscape of machinima still largely encompasses the demographic of the early adopters we continue to see new voices emerge, representing not just different subjectivities but entirely new ways of envisioning what we can do with this ever-growing means of expression. I want to preface today’s Spotlight by saying that I have not chosen Katy Fosk’s Voices simply because she is a woman, but rather because she has created a unique piece here that illustrates some of the more inventive things being done with the “pro” machinima software out there: Moviestorm and iClone.

I would love to try and summarize the overall narrative premise to Fosk’s conceptually abstract film, but any attempt would likely be overly reductive. For me, I found it best to understand it as an experience and not a story in the traditional sense. That is not to say the film is without a story so much as it is an attempt to focus the attention on how the film tries to unfold the inner workings of its nameless male protagonist. The first 3 minutes are without dialog and use an eerily cacophonous arrangement of familiar and unfamiliar sounds that form the soundbed for the entire work. The latter half of the film consists of a series of dreamlike visuals accompanied by the voiceover reading of poem that seems largely influenced by Beat era standards like Kerouac or Ginsberg. The character models were distinctly from the Moviestorm software, now that I have had some time to play with that and grown familiar with it. The overall sets, however, looked uniquely crafted, likely the iClone portion of the piece, using pastels and neon colors. I wonder what motivated Fosk to choose these engines and their configurability over the milieu of a gaming engine. As so many games are designed by men with men in mind as their target audience, it would make sense that their aesthetic would not appeal to the taste’s of women. Perhaps this makes another case for the growing cottage industry of machinima software and its ability to be tailored to the unique visions of machinimators who do not fit into traditional gaming demographics. To check out Katy Fosk’s film, head over to Machiniplex where they do a great job of carving out a space for more alternative machinima. And hopefully we will continue to see new faces that represent the growth of machinima not just technologically but culturally as well.

As discussed last fall, the purchasing of the machinima “documentary” series, Molotov Alva, by Cinemax represented a very important moment both in the history of machinima as well as Second Life. Though a number of machinmators have seen some commercial success from their work, this marks the first real substantive support by a media outlet to invest in machinima as sustainable programming for audiences outside of the gaming world. A number of the detractors felt that much of the hype associated with this piece and it geting picked up by Cinemax was due in large part to the growing buzz around Second Life. As companines continue to invest in this virtual space, hoping that it will be the next MySpace or Facebook, there appears to be future possibilities on the horizon for machinmators willing to tackle what some have considered a problematic platform for making machinima. Regardless, this kind of widespread exposure for machinima can only help to engender a new space within the larger media ecology for machinima to grow. While viewers may simply take it in as animated programming, and at the end of the day all machinima is animated filmmakng, the folks at Cinemax can bear witness to the inexpensive production costs that will eventually be the reason why more media producers will choose this form. So be sure to check out the premiere of the series on May 15 @ 8 pm EST on Cinemax. As for the many who do not subscribe to Cinemax, if you wait till about 8:35 EST, the show is only a half hour, I am sure the internet gods will grant your prayers and it will be on You Tube shortly there after.

For those of you aspiring for your very own Cinemax deal, Machinima.com is holding another contest to try and help promote both machinima in general (as they have done so well over the past years) and the Molotov Alva show in particular. You can check the website for all the details. But some of the highlights include the deadline of May 18 and that you do not have to make your film in Second Life. In fact an array of engines are encouraged to try and demonstrate the broad spectrum that machinima has become to represent. The winner will receive $2000 and 2nd and 3rd pay out as well. So if you were one of the naysayers when you saw the Molotov Alva video, before Cinemax had it yanked down, now is the time to prove your salt and maybe make some cash on the side. I’ll even throw on top of all that a guaranteed review and spot on the Machinima Spotlight.

Before delving into this week’s spotlight, I want to put forth a caveat so that my biases are clear. As I have previously mentioned, I think that we tend to gravitate towards machinima that are created in games we enjoy. Which is why I particularly enjoy films based in Half-Life 2. Having said that, I am a huge God of War fan and would place the series in my top three favorite of all time. I have been a long time fan of Greek mythology and often wish I could have Blades of Chaos chained to my wrists. So that’s out there now. I came across this week’s spotlight doing a search for God of War machinima and followed the hyper link trail that eventually led me to the God of War: Chains of Olympus website. Turns out they have created an interface that allows you to cut clips from the game together, add voice over, subtitles and music to create your own machinima for a contest called Become a God of Machinima. Machinima on the Sony PSP tends to be pretty far and few between because its hard to get much control of the game engine and only recently could you actually output the video for capture. But what is most interesting here is that the folks over at Sony have recognized the growing popularity of machinima and have tapped into the craze by creating this contest, which even as a devout fan I can see as an obvious marketing ploy. Regardless, some of the videos up on the site are quite impressive and I found today’s spotlight choice particularly enjoyable. Simply called God of War–Machinima, this 48 second short does a nice job of showing off the rather impressive graphics of the prequal to the God of War PS 2 series, Chains of Olympus. And the voice acting is very exceptional.

As is often the case in most humorous machinima, the characters are imbued with this existential awareness of themselves as videogame characters. Only this time Kratos, the game’s main character, is voiced by a British actor instead of the raucous TC Carson, and he immediately comments on the fact that he is being appropriated for a machinima film. So in part the film serves as both a promo for God of War and machinima itself as a unique art form. So I think it is well worth giving a look. However, I have to say that the production quality of the voice acting certainly seemed to veer on the professional side. Even to the point that I have to wonder if this particular video was created in-house by Sony and then uploaded as “user created” content, a guerrilla marketing strategy that seems to be growing in popularity as advertisers try and navigate the murky waters of Web 2.0 culture. I will leave it up to you to decide if this is some gem of talent out there on the web or Sony being wily. I think if Kevin Pereria over at AOTS had a chance to assess the film, he would most certainly declare Shenanigans!

Earlier today the folks over at Next-Gen released an analysis of the data they presented yesterday about the top 100 selling games of last year and offered several interesting observations about the future of the industry. One of the less shocking revelations and yet perhaps most depressing was the dominance of licensed titles versus original material. Of course this makes sense. Just like any other form of media, people like what they like and they like it again and again. So repackaging it in a new format is not so much about being unoriginal as it is about being fiscally savvy. I can sadly admit that I was one of the 3.3 M gamers who bought Transformers last summer. And like most, I was positive that it was going to suck. But as long as I got to press the Y button and make Optimus Prime transform with that sound that sits in the top ten sounds of all time for many of the men from my generation (all together now: KOK-CHI-CHA-CHA-CHE) I was willing to drop my $60. And while the game certainly had some fun moments, it was largely disappointing. Of course it is real easy to blame the developer for creating a substandard game, but the problem that most of these games suffer from is the lack of full scale development pipelines that allow for them to make games as amazing as they can. In the case of the Transformers game, developed by TT Games, I want to believe that every person on that development team held those characters and that sound as near and dear as I did, and they wanted to capture that in a gaming experience (and as a side note, TT Games re-envisioning of the Star Wars franchise in Lego form is perhaps one of the most creative and enjoyable licensed properties out there, so licensed properties work sometimes).

The problem with being part of a larger licensed property is the necessity of synergy. Making a great product means very little if the proper marketing window is not hit dead-on to maximize profitability. If you look at some of the most eagerly anticipated games in the past year (GTA IV and Metal Gear Solid 4), both were delayed in attempts to improve upon the game. When dealing with a Hollywood property, that simply is not an option, thus forcing a game out the door before it is ready. And this practice works, as the Next-Gen numbers suggest, because we as the consumers have accepted this as just how it is. We therefore lower our expectations and buy the game anyway, and more often then not, opt not to tell fellow gamers that we have. So as the summer approaches with several massive franchises making both their bow at the box office and at Game Stop (Ironman, The Dark Knight, Speed Racer, Indiana Jones, and The Incredible Hulk just to name a few) history is doomed to repeat itself. Only if we band together and refuse to buy our childhood repackaged in a form that plays on our sense of nostalgia can we hope to see a shift in this practice. And as much as I would like to pretend that I have that sort of will power, I know that the summer of 2009 will present me with that same tortured feeling I experienced last summer. I will be exhilarated while placing my pre-order for the G.I. Joe game and will be crestfallen when I actually play it. Because despite having a story that follows the film scene for scene, controls with muddy gameplay or avatars with horrific collision detection, I will pay $60 to be Snake-Eyes. Yo Joe!

Last week Activision released a new map back for its widely successful shooter Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. As both a fan of the shooters in general and the COD franchise in particular, I thought I would explore what sort of machinima was being made with this rather powerful engine. Machinima.com recently held a trailer contest in conjunction with Activision as a promotional effort leading up to this release. The game has been out since last November and has found both critical and commercial success, so the release of a new map pack is an attempt to ride out one of the gaming success stories of 2007. Unfortunately most of the trailers felt exactly like you would expect trailers designed to hype a game: like marketing. And that is no disrespect to the machnimators who created the wining trailers. If anything, they demonstrated a media savvy sense of giving Activision what they were looking for. But unfortunately that looks a little more like marketing than filmmaking in this instance. I instead opted to choose another film shot in the gritty world of modern combat that does an excellent job of capturing the unbelievable images Infinity Ward’s new engine has produced. The series is called Retaliation and this is the first of what I hope will be many episodes by a machinimator named Connery Kappeler.

The general premise of the first episode, as the title suggests, is a US Marine response to a terrorist car-bombing of a military base in Credenhill, UK in 2004. And I am curious if future episodes continue off this same event or build off other attacks that the same squadron responds to. Needless to say, this is far from new territory in terms of narratives set in the genre of modern war films. However, what stands out most about the piece is the way it builds tension through sweeping camera movement, excellent sound design and stripped-down dialog. Overall the piece has a very heavily influenced Tony Scott feel with frenetic camera movement accompanied by the larger than life score from the actual game (a practice I would love to see more machinimators implement rather than subbing in movie scores). Also, the images themselves seemed to be slightly desaturated with the addition of a bloom effect that gives that same hyper-stylized look of much of Scott’s work. But what I enjoyed most about the piece is that it really attempts to tell the story through the camera, and I feel filmmaking is at its best when it does this. All too often machinimators, particularly those who use shooters or military based games, try and recapture the magic of Red vs. Blue. They give us two characters within a serious wartime milieu waxing existential about the absurdity of their plight and try to make it funny, a tradition that has roots as far back as the plays of Beckett or more recently M.A.S.H. for you non-theater fans. And as enjoyable as that can be when it is done well, it most often is just a watered-down rehashing of what Rooster Teeth has already perfected. But Kappeler avoids that trap and goes entirely the other way by giving what is a very gripping dramatic scenario that is about far more than explosions and gun fights. I look forward to future episodes and you should too.

Yesterday marked the first day to submit your Second Life machinima as part of Koinup’s promotional contest to both provide another outlet for films based in Linden Lab’s growing online community as well as draw machinimators into their social networking site dedicated solely to user-created content. If you are unfamiliar with Koinup, it attempts to merge Machinima.com with Facebook to provide this online venue for those who share the interest of using their games to create their own content. Though the site offers the option of subscribing to a specific “world” such as SL, WOW, or The Sims to name a few, the content seems to largely come from Second Life. And given the fact that both WOW and The Sims both have rich sites dedicated to machinima made in these games, it makes sense to target the more nascent SL machinima community. The contest specifically seeks machinima music videos and requires that entries use a selection from a list of artist who have provided their music for the contest so as to avoid the usual IP issues that arise when machinimators opt to use mainstream music that they do not possess the rights to. The contest runs until April 29th and winners will be announced on May 6th. Two winners will be selected by judges while a third will be selected by the Koinup community.

As an online phenomenon, machinima has always existed among a virtual community so it is no far stretch to see it now at the center of its own social networking site. As for the future success of Koinup as a destination for machinimators to commune and share their interests, only time will tell. Ever since Rupert Murdoch decided to buy MySpace and Facebook expanded its user-base beyond university students, everyone has been trying to capture lightning in a bottle with the next great social networking site. And as far as specific niche sites dedicated to very specific interests, there has yet to emerge a great example of how this can become successful. Because at the end of the day, social network sites are only about community in theory. Primarily they are about monetizing online traffic, as both MySpace and Facebook have demonstrated. Online forums where people shared common interests go back to the early days of IRC discussions and the WELL. In fact, the very cornerstone of the Net rests upon the creation of spaces to provide public forum for interests of every sort. From sites like Machinima.com and Machinima Premiere, machinimators and fans of machinima have had places online to develop rich virtual communities. So while I applaud the Italian-based Koinup site and their efforts to further unify disparate machinima interests and create another outlet for machinima to be shared and discussed, I can’t but help point out that developing a social networking site for machinima is more about marketing and Google Ads than it is about the culture surrounding this growing phenomenon.

Last week I came across this machinima film posted on YouTube by Skatedawg27 thanks to Paul Marino over at Thinking Machinima. Entitled Virginia Tech Massacre, the piece uses the new Halo 3 engine to dramatically retell the events of last spring’s terrible tragedy. My first impulse was to add it to the Machinima Spotlight section, which I have been trying to better maintain these days after a long hiatus, but I found myself having very mixed feelings about the film. As most of you know, I have been pushing and advocating for more politically and socially minded machinima since I began this site. In fact, most of my recent academic work reflects this desire to see the boundaries of the medium we all hold dear to expand beyond in-game jokes and Red vs Blue knockoffs. So rather than spotlight the film and review it, I thought I would offer a few thoughts about it and invite my readers to share their views on the film. There are already some interesting dialogs taking place in the blogosphere about it, but I thought it important to get a sense of what many of you think.I want to first dismiss any arguments that seek to claim that using a videogame to deal with or address a serious issue such as this as is a trivialization of the event. That is not to say a person can’t use a videogame to trivialize a tragedy, but the mere choice of medium should not immediately relegate the form of expression to topics that are light in nature. In this particular instance, the machinimator had nothing but the fullest intentions of being respectful as indicated by the disclaimer at the end of the film: “This Video was created for Educational Purposes only and is not, by any means, to insult the Virgina Tech Massacre.” So I want to first say that Skatedawg27’s attempts to be respectful should be acknowledged. The film’s form takes the shape of music video montage, using the Halo characters to recreate some of the violent scenes, cutting it together with some inserts that give some of the statistics about the shooting. The most shocking part comes at the end where a lengthy section of the Cho video that he sent to NBC is played as part of the film’s conclusion. I found the clip disturbing the first time I saw it on television and found it equally haunting in this context. And it is perhaps the use of the clip that gave me such mixed feelings about the piece. Juxtaposing it with the dramatic reenactment set in the abstract world of Halo seems to remove the violence from the raw place that news coverage tends to situate these sorts of events. But then to thrust it from that abstract place (which seems to diminish the violence in a number of ways) into that chilling declaration/justification that Cho gives leaves me with a sense ambiguity that does not allow me to easily digest this piece.

Skatedawg27 claims that this is for “educational purposes,” but I wonder how valid that is given the vast exposure of this as a media event. I am curious as to how many people know absolutely nothing about this event that this film would provide them with a frame of reference on what happened. Dismissing the educational purpose of the film, what are we then left with? I recently wrote a book chapter entitled “Saving Worlds with Videogame Activism” for the upcoming Handbook of Research on Effective Gaming in Education where I examined specific uses of videogame technology for either political or social commentaries. One of the case studies I used was the much talked about Super Columbine Massacre RPG created by Danny Ledonne in which the player takes on the role of Harris and Klebold. The other case study I used addressed Alex Chan’s The French Democracy machinima piece on the 2005 race riots that took place in the suburbs of Paris. In both of these examples, the authors of each of these texts took very pointed stances on the issue they were dealing with. In the case of Ledonne, he challenged the typical impulse to vilify Harris and Klebold and the media that “influenced” them to do what they did. For Chan, he felt the news media coverage of the riots simply depicted the rioters as animals with no real reason to be upset, so he told the tale of daily racism that still boils under the surface in these banlieues. The unfortunate aspect of Virginia Tech Massacre is that it does not specifically point me as a viewer into a reflective space on the particular issue. In many ways, its attempts to be respectful leave it without any particular message to take away other than “this was such a horrible thing.” But even as a memoriam piece, it does not specifically acknowledge any personal or individual loss. With Cho as the only person identified, other than than Prof. Lucinda Roy who shared concerns about Cho’s violent tendencies, the film lacks the personal connection to the lost ones that tend to be a necessary element of a memoriam video.

So due to the fact that this film does not definitively take a position or establish itself as trying to accomplish any of the these specific goals, I am afraid that it rings a little hollow for me. I am not saying that people should not check the film out. They should, and I would love to hear what they took away from it. The problem I have is that the film does try to go beyond what typical machinima tends to do; however, I am not sure the execution manifests into something we can point to and say “see, machinima can be serious. It can address important issues.” I could be totally wrong on this one, which is why I want to throw it back on you the readers. Let me know what you think.

I’m back! My apologies for the rather lengthy hiatus. I have been doing a lot of traveling for various conferences and have been actively pursuing a faculty position on the academic job market.  But things have settled down and I want to get back to both writing (as well as playing videogames). Part of the traveling I did recently took me to Leicester in the U.K. for the very first machinima film festival in Europe. Spanning three days, the festival was a great testament to the growing community surrounding machinima.  I even had an opportunity to chat with Bernie Burns about the success of Rooster Teeth and the Red vs Blue series. There were so many entries this year that truly pushed the boundaries of what machinimators are now capable of doing. I highly recommend checking them all out if you get a chance. A complete list of the nominations is available at the festival website.   At least be sure to check out the winners which are available on Machinima.com. The film that ran away with the most wins, including best picture and best direction, was the feature length film by Nanoflix (an Australian production house) entitled Stolen Life.  It’s a great film and I would love to spotlight it, but it is only available as DVD and I like to keep this space for machinima readily available for the readers. Therefore, I chose to spotlight the film that one best story: The Snow Witch

Based on an original Japanese ghost story, Michelle Pettit-Mee’s The Snow Witch represents one the most dramatic transformations of the The Sims 2 engine to create a machinima film.  Aside from a few of the canned and overly-dramatic animations that are a telltale sign of the Sims, the piece creates scenes and settings that seem as far removed from the game as I have ever seen. Since the story is primarily told through narration, Michelle was able to avoid the lip-syncing issues that comes with the Sims.  Rather than give anything away, I’ll just say that the story unfurls in a traditional folk tale pace with an interesting twist at the end. But it is the mis-en-scene of the piece as well as the great sound design that really made it stand out from so many of the films I had a chance to see at the festival. More important the film is one of the only entries made by a woman, which is an aspect of the machinima community that often goes overlooked.  Like so many other media forms before, machinima has had a slow adoption rate of women both making films and getting them seen.  Sites like Sims99 and Sim-movies have made tremendous strides providing places for Sims-based machinima which has the largest collective of female machinimators than any other engine.  So I was more than pleased to see Michelle’s piece not only nominated, but win.  Hopefully we will see more and more women like Michelle getting their work out there (for more from Michelle checkout her site Britannica Dreams).  Machinima may have been born of the hyper-masculinized world of shooters, but it has steadily evolved into something considerably more complex.  As the increase of women gamers indicates more and more women finding comfort in virtual spaces, we can only hope this will translate into the realm of machinima. The Snow Witch marks an important step in that direction.

I know it’s been a little while since my last post. I was in Tokyo the past week both for the Tokyo Game Show, and I also presented a paper on Videogame Activism at the University of Tokyo for DiGRA. A few comments on TGS: Drake’s Fortune lived up to the hype generated from this year’s E3. Having had a chance to play it, I can attest that its a title that will make me finally happy that I own a PS3. It’s a beautiful game that plays like a Tomb Raider meets Gears of War. I also finally got to play Assassin’s Creed (on the Xbox360) and was very impressed. It’s a stealth action game, but has a unique context sensitive gaming mechanic that opens a number of possible playing styles. In addition the city is massive and fully explorable. On the other end of the gaming spectrum, DiGRA is the largest international gathering of gaming researchers that meet every two years to share in their work. I had the opportunity to meet a number of the people I have been citing for the past years in my own work and hear their new research.

Today’s spotlight comes out of one of those sessions. For those not familiar with the work of Douglas Thomas of USC, I highly recommend you check out his Hacker Culture. It is easily the most comprehensive look into the history and culture of hacking. During a panel on game design to effect social change, Thomas showed Javier’s Cantina Crawl XII as an example of what he called civic engagement that gamers often participate in as part of larger gaming communities. In this particular instance, a group of players in Star Wars Galaxies take issue with Sony’s mishandling of their concerns about the entertainer profession within the game that allow for live dancing performances in the cantinas. Set to the music of Linkin Park, the film follows in suit with the previous 11 cantina crawls as performance dance pieces set to music. However, this one differs in its use of the lower third to detail in chronological order the particulars of the protest. While many may find this form of protest or civic engagement as laughable considering it all takes place within the context of a game, it is important to note that it may be too easy to write this off as gamers being overly involved in a game. Instead, this sort of action demonstrates that communities formed within MMORPGs take similar shape to those formed in the “real” world. Therefore, issues that concern that community can function as a mobilizing force that results in protest videos like this. In this instance a group of gamers reacted to the developers overlooking the community impacts of changing the entertainers profession through several patches and they responded in a collaborative effort. So the upshot of all of this is not so much that games provide some catalyst to becoming politically motivated (though that is also possible) but instead show that these virtual spaces hold a level of significance for the citizens that reside within them that they will stand up against a corporation like Sony to protect those interests. I applaud Javier’s effort here both for providing a great example of live performance set in a MMORPG as well as using machinima as means of political expression.

Say what you will about the Wiley Press series of For Dummies books; that they are a reflection upon a fast-food culture that equates seeking knowledge to perusing the candy counter at a late night convenience store, or they embody the dissolution of our once famed Protestant work ethic into a penchant for shortcuts. Nonetheless, in this current age of information aggregation where a singular source no longer holds the same clout it once did, such a model of knowledge building can no longer be written off as lazy. It may still be too soon to say this is the smart way to learn, but we can certainly agree that it is likely the most efficient way to learn something. And given that machinima as an “area of study” (perhaps one day we’ll say discipline) exists primarily in pockets of wisdom spread across the web, a Machinima For Dummies book seems more than justified. Enter Hugh Hancock and Johnnie Ingram.

Those more familiar with machinima know Hugh has been a fixture on the scene since the early days, and most of you in-the-know have likely heard the story of how he misspelled machinima with the i instead of the e (machinema) as Anthony Bailey had first intended. If you haven’t heard it, it’s detailed in the book with that distinctive self-deprecating humor that Hugh is known for. Having played important roles in machinima’s history from his work at Machinima.com to the establishing of Strange Company, there are few who could be said to have more expertise in machinima (I should note that both Paul Marino’s book as well as Morris, Kellend & Lloyd’s book are important early editions to the rather non-existent body of machinima literature, so check them out as well). The co-author Johnnie Ingram made a name for himself as a site editor for Machinima.com and served as assistant director to Hugh on Strange Company’s feature length machinima film BloodSpell.

As with the challenge of reducing any complex subject into a single volume, Machinima For Dummies takes on a rather formidable task of being comprehensive. Coupled with the fact that it primarily discusses technologies that evolve not just annually anymore but even monthly, the prospect of providing up-to-date information in a printed form like this almost seems impossible to do with any authority. Wiley, however, tried to overcome this by minimizing the time from inception to publication to less than ten months. In addition, Hancock and Ingram set up a Machinima For Dummies blog to use as a space to provide updates to information in the book. Also, the blog details the writing process of the book so it is worth checking out.

The book is broken up into 22 chapters and seems to follow the template of other For Dummies books, a strategy Wiley has implemented to maintain a brand consistency. With Part I covering the surface of machinima, from what it is to its history as well as discussing the several techniques for creating machinima that will be covered in the book. This structure lends itself well to functioning as an informational resource to a wide array of machinima experiences. Novices will appreciate this rudimentary section while seasoned vets are encouraged to skip ahead to the more complex chapters. The tone throughout this section, as is the case throughout the entire book, is one of a conversational humor. Let there be no question that Hancock and Ingram take the art of machinima very seriously. However, they make it a point not to take themselves too seriously as “experts” on machinima. While some may find this sort of intrusive narration, marked by self-deprecating humor and geeky jokes, as distracting, I found it made the read more enjoyable.

Part II of the book tackles the core of the introduction material, spanning from basic filmmaking tutorials to easily the most comprehensive cataloging of game engines being used today to create machinima. Because there are so many engines now being used, the coverage of each engine is not really possible (as there are nearly 20 the book mentions). Therefore, the authors choose to highlight some of the more established engines being used. The Sims 2 engine receives the most coverage (3 chapters) due to the fact that in addition to being the greatest selling game of all time, it also represents the engine that is most widely used. With mechanisms built into the game’s design that make machinima easy to do, The Sims engine offers the ideal entryway into making machinima. Fans of this game will find a tremendous amount of information on how to start making their own films. Other areas covered in this part include scriptwriting, basic editing techniques, as well as strategies for distributing your films online. One of the engines that does not get covered is the Second Life engine that has grown exponentially in popularity mainly due to the investment of corporate America into this persistent online community, buying up virtual real estate and setting up their shops. As a piece of open software, SL marks a significant moment in both gaming technology and machinima, so it will likely rub several people the wrong way by excluding it from the engines covered. The recent Molotav Alva deal with HBO will likely only exacerbate this omission for fans of the SL universe. Linden Lab’s presence at the past few Machinima Festivals demonstrate that they are committed to enabling the machinima community in any way possible; however, when choosing to create a comprehensive text that has at least some depth to it in sections, omissions are an inevitability. Perhaps the unstable frame rates that are so common in SL and the fact that most in world items require actual real world dollars to develop and design were too much of a hurdle to overcome for the authors, and they made a decision to not include it as part of the book. Just like the Major League All-Star game, someone is bound to get snubbed.

Part III offers more advance approaches to making machinima that provides something for the novice to work towards or the seasoned vet to delve right in once they buy the book. The two engines covered here (World of Warcraft and Medieval II: Total War) are more complex and offer a whole new host of concerns, but the authors do an excellent job of providing examples as well as resources on the accompanying DVD that allows for you to start your own machinima as soon as you get the book home. Again, the challenge of a book like this is the lack of space to cover everything. As a devout fan of Half-Life 2 based machinima, I was disappointed not to see a chapter here covering the work being done with Garry’s Mod. Part of the problem is that the most recent iteration of G-Mod only recently came out and was beyond the scope of the time frame set for writing the book. Not to mention the fact that a book dedicated entirely to making machinima with that engine, given its complexity, could easily cover some 300 pages (could someone please write that book). In addition, this part offers a chapter covering the all important aspect of sound in machinima (Phil “Overman” Rice served as technical reviewer to the book and his talents in sound design shine through particularly in this chapter). This section also includes a chapter covering the legal issues facing machinima. The waters continue to be muddied as to the issues of intellectual property rights and machinima; however, this chapter touches upon some of the more pertinent concerns. Not to mention that the ongoing debates around both the Microsoft and Blizzard rules have been getting a lot of coverage over at the book’s blog.

Part IV surveys the growing area of Pro Machinima and offers a great in depth look into one of the latest pieces of software designed specifically for making machinima. I probably found this section of the book most intriguing as I had only recently heard about the Moviestorm software. My first response to the development of softwares specifically for making machinima is one of cautious concern. So much of the cultural significance that machinima offers is that it is rooted in so many rich fan cultural traditions of appropriation. The early recamming done in games like DOOM and Quake stand as watershed moments where consumers became producers in rather profound ways. Making machinima more available to people is absolutely something I want to endorse; however, I fear the professionalization of the software could actually work against democratizing the medium even further. Moviestorm is a free download and comes on the book’s DVD. But as a software like this develops and becomes even more powerful, how much longer will it be free? And once it reaches a Photoshop status, will machinima exist in the same way it did in its fledgling stages? Only time will tell, but it is something to be wary of. That concern aside, these chapters offer some great insight into really getting under the hood of a game’s engine as well as what it takes to start your own production company. As for the Moviestorm software, just take a look at Morning Run Amok to see what you can achieve with this powerful engine.

The last part of the book follows the typical “Parts of Ten” that finishes all the For Dummies books. Here the authors provide a list of machinima films that you “must see,” some of which are on the DVD as well. Along with some crucial mistakes not to make whiling making your film, they provide the most common online resources for information on the many aspects of machinima as well as sites dedicated to specific engines like Sims99 and WarcraftMovies.

If you have absolutely no idea what machinima is, this book offers a great starting point to a rather complicated art form. If you’ve been making machinima for years, it offers a great resource book that will likely touch upon some engines you may not be aware of as well as techniques for maximizing the potential of the ones you are using. Is the book absolutely perfect in its coverage of machinima, no. No book could do that, which speaks not to any sort of inadequacies on the part of the authors so much as the vastness of the field and richness of technologies being used. So while some omissions may seem like a mistake to those who have affinities for the excluded engines, the merit of this book as an important contribution to the machinima community should not be dismissed. Hancock and Ingram have done machinima a great service in providing the most comprehensive resource available to date. And while the inevitable Monday morning quarterbacking will take place in the forums about the Second Life snubbing and the lack of Garry’s Mod coverage, the book as a whole remains an impressive effort and will serve as a resource for machinimators for years to come.