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Telefragging Monster Movies
Sometimes, the player-as-producer paradigm takes the modification of a game so far that the invented activity no longer resembles the play of the game at all. Such is the case with machinima, a player-as-producer open culture phenomenon we first mentioned in Games as Narrative Play that evolved out of first-person shooter games. FPS games such as Quake and DOOM were some of the first to offer an open source editor to players, which allowed them to design and program their own maps (environments), skins (character avatars), weapons, and tools for game play. This pioneering approach, a direct outgrowth of open source software culture, offered players unprecedented power to modify game play by altering the forms and spaces of interaction. DOOM set the standard for open culture digital gaming, but its high-resolution prodigy, Quake, took everything to a higher level. Players (or groups of players known as clans) wrote Quake code modifications and posted them online for other enthusiasts to download and use. Almost instantly, an economy of Quake cultural production was born. This economy pushed the edge of technical innovation, fueled as it was by hardcore gamers' desire to explore the absolute limits of the technology. How far could the code be pushed before the system was transformed? Witness the birth of the Quake movie. Almost as soon as Quake was released in 1996, gamers began to try and play through its levels as fast as possible and to share recordings of their feats with others, competing to beat each others' times.This type of competition, known as speedrunning, was established in the early days of DOOM,a game that like Quake gave players the ability to record and save their game play. Although these demos were clearly a form of retelling play, they soon took on a very different role. Like The Sims Family Album feature, players began to use the recording function to tell stories. Rather than creating narratives in a graphic novel form, as with The Sims, FPS players embraced the real-time editing capabilities of the robust 3D game engines upon which their games were based. It was only a matter of time before someone made the leap to film. According to Quake lore, in August 1996, a clan known as The Rangers conceived the idea to record a demo that would exploit the built-in moviemaking capabilities of the game's software. Rather than restrict their demo recording to play within the game, The Rangers would use Quake as a filmmaking tool. This decision transformed the game space into a virtual movie set, complete with lights, camera, and action—lots of action. The Rangers used their characters as virtual actors and recorded their movements on a deathmatch map; typed text messages represented speech. As short and simple as their first effort appears to us today, "Diary of a Camper" established the filmic genre machinima, which has spawned hundreds of movies to date. Creatively responding to the affordances of the game system, Quake players not only transformed the play of the game, but took an open source model and applied it to the production of new forms of culture.
Part theater, part film, part computer game, machinima represents the kind of wild exchanges that result from thoroughly transformative play. The cultural play of machinima crosses formal, experiential, and contextual levels, as players playfully repurpose the original structures of the game. The formal structure of the game code gave shape to a new form of storytelling, born from the culture of the first-person shooter.
Scourge Done Slick, 1998 | Quake Done Quick
Father Frags Best, 1999 | Phil Rice aka Overman
Stylized forms of both public and private expression, Quake movies embody alternative trajectories for creative output. Players in the culture of machinima may assume a range of roles: map builders, coders, skinners, actors, model makers—or perhaps a distributor for the completed films. Web sites such as machinima.com, the Quake Movie Library, Planetquake's Cineplex, and Zarathustra Studios support movie production by offering tools, tutorials, movie reviews, and most important of all, free downloads of the movies themselves.
Devil's Covenant, 1998 | Clan Phantasm
Anachronox, 2001 | Jake Hughes, Director
Quake movies and other forms of machinima offer a unique space of culturally transformative play: machinima producers deconstruct the game in order to play with it. Instead of accepting the rules, they challenge and modify them. This creative practice is a form of rule-breaking, one occurring at the deep level of code. By bending and modifying the game's formal structure, players affect their experience with the game by remolding its play into something that only barely resembles its former shape.
