![]() ![]() Several essays try to analyse its affinities and differences with (and within) gaming and movie worlds, its bounds with fandom and remixing practices should machinima be defined through distinction with other media, or be accepted as a full-hybrid media form? 3 Either way, machinima has become a privileged viewpoint to analyse contemporary mediascape and its evolution an interesting debate emerges from the anthology about the possibility to fully understand it using previous generic critical categories like remediation, culture convergence or intertextuality 4, or (as Jenna Ng claims) if we should give up talking about a «flow of content in the sense of media convergence (Jenkins 2006) but a flow of media and mediation itself. Born from game tools, borrowing movie language and techniques, continuously compromising with gaming, film and fandom culture, easily mistaken for digital animation, still unknown outside the gamer’s niche machinima is certainly difficult to describe and categorise. The first topic is machinima’s hybrid nature. As a result, the reader will easily identify several recurring themes this well-directed dialogue among the authors reveals the complexity of the analysed issues, making for a work that is much more than the sum of the parts. Understanding Machinima manages to keep together contributions with different theoretical perspectives and aims, and to gather them up in a heterogeneous yet dialogic frame. The underlying belief is that, as Jenna Ng suggests, machinima «has become connected with many other tools and media forms so that it is now less a discrete, distinguishable media form than a fluid dialogue of and between media». ![]() This anthology aims to distinguish itself from recent academic researches, analysing mainly the nature of machinima in connection with the universe of cinema, gaming and animation in the eyes of a “convergent” mediascape (Jenkins 2006), regarding machinima as a native-digital medium involving crossbreeding with mediated realities (virtual, augmented, hybrid) and increasingly tied to artistic or political environment. The collection is built around twelve chapters, split into two parts (respectively Thinking and Using machinima), bringing together contributions from researchers, gamers, directors, artists, curators and machinima makers every chapter goes along with digital endnotes, that can be seen from the dedicated webpage thanks to QR codes included in every chapter. It’s been a decade since it has been bought to the academic attention and to an increasing popularity on web broadcasting (mainly thanks to the web-serieS Red vs Blue, to South Park‘s episode Make Love, not Warcraft or to the political short The French Democracy by Alex Chan). Machinima is a recent technology/performance/art/tool etc 1 (conventionally born in 1996 with Quake demos) 2 commonly defined as any kind of video artifact produced through real-time gaming graphic engines: in-game recordings, sandbox modes, hacked version of game engines or game-like professional tools are all valid sources to create machinimas. Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds (Bloomsbury 2013, edited by Jenna Ng) is an intriguing incursion into the world of machinima from a Media Studies point-of-view, trying to address the topic beyond game’s environment, in connection with the evolution of the contemporary mediascape. ![]()
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