Current situation, first draft

This first draft of my current situation section consists of a condensed version of my original introduction and literature review. I'll be revising and updating it when I receive three new books of video game and media theory.

Current situation

For almost thirty years, the concept of a computer-generated entertainment system has captured the imagination of writers, researchers, and countless children and adults who demanded more interactivity in their play. Beginning with the first AI-driven game, Pong, and the two-dimensional adventure game Super Mario Brothers, and evolving into the life-like graphics of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Assassin’s Creed, these games have stirred the imagination of gamers and researchers alike. Playing and beating the latest game became a driving force for children through the 1980’s and 90’s.
Building upon those accomplishments, early gamers realized that their game consoles could be connected to a video recorder in order to produce simple movies of their conquests. Gamers eventually built upon this concept to produce full movies of their gaming excursions.(Lowood, 2007) Shortly after gameplay videos began circulating, gamers realized their games could also be used to produce simple computer-generated animated short films. This foretold the beginning of what would come to be known as “machinima.” Recently, more advanced machinima projects have entered some areas of mainstream entertainment. By replacing the soundtrack and using game characters as actors to tell their story, wildly popular television shows such as South Park and CSI: New York included video game-generated content in their 2007-08 seasons. Radio and television news programs have also reported on commercially successful machinima projects, such as Red vs. Blue, a comedy series solely utilizing the Microsoft console games Halo and Halo 2. (Chong, 2008) Despite the increasing popularity of machinima projects, the academic community has spent very little time examining the various creative and rhetorical aspects machinima projects entail. As the following literature review and subsequent theoretical constructs will reveal, there is a significant gap between what scholarly research has been conducted and where popular media is progressing. Given that there has been so much attention paid to machinima in popular media, it should follow that scholarly attention be paid to this burgeoning form of media. To that end, this thesis will examine machinima projects as participation within a discourse community by remediating existing intellectual property for new ends.
While so little scholarly research has been conducted regarding machinima as a whole, there has been a fairly large body of research into the parts and components that comprise the whole. These parts include the video games that are used, available software tools, and copyright concerns. Additionally, artists have taken to using tools similar to those used by machinima creators to remediate video games for their own artistic goals.
Henry Lowood’s article “High-Performance Play: The Making of Machinima” lends the most directly pertinent information to the scholarly examination of machinima projects. He begins by calling video games the “art form of the digital age.” (Lowood, 2007) Lowood explains that machinima projects combine gameplay communities, subversion, and gameplay performance into a single art form. Much of the introduction material from this proposal comes from Lowood’s historical analysis into the development of the first generation of machinima. He places a heavy emphasis on the fact that, since machinima is produced entirely using open-source or commercially produced computer software, movies made from video games reduce the cost concerns inherent in making movies. When producing a machinima, even in the earliest days of graphics-intensive video games, gameplay is the key. (Lowood, 2007) id Software, a pioneer in early game development, embraced the game communities which emerged around their flagship games, Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, allowing gamers access to level design tools and early gameplay display capture software. The graphics and gameplay were top quality, but id Software took a step further and opened the source code of their games to gaming communities. This, Lowood insists, gave gamers the opportunity to improve id Software’s creations and maintain a vested interest in the game. Gamers were able to build new levels of the game, apply new “skins” to enemy characters, and even build entirely new games (Lowood, 2007). When id Software released the successor to DOOM, titled Quake, game developer John Carmack described it as “the coolest thing anyone has ever seen…” (Lowood, 2007). Again, id Software made all the development tools available to the gamer community, including a dynamic rotating camera tool. While DOOM only supported first-person camera views, Quake offered a third-person perspective that could be manipulated to view the action from different angles. This tool helped to build the first true user-generated, story-driven machinima movie, entitled Diary of a Camper. (Lowood, 2007) This first machinima, Lowood explains, demonstrated what could be done using the kind of tools that were originally reserved for game developers. Subsequent examples of machinima projects offer variations on this basic theme. This essay demonstrates the kinds of creative opportunities available to talented gamers with a desire to remediate traditional media into something wholly new.
However, Lowood does not examine the creative and rhetorical choices project developers make. Jim Andrews examines the remediation of games into artwork in his essay, “Videogames as Literary Devices.” In this essay, Andrews provides several examples of artists incorporating video games into their larger projects. For example, one piece called Pac Mondrian, which combines the classic video game Pac-Man with a Piet Mondrian painting, Broadway Boogie Woogie, uses the game engine as a metaphor for running through the very real streets of New York City. (Andrews, 2007; Hennessy et al, 2004) This kind of remediation is very similar to the production of machinima in that it re-imagines the game in a different context. Similar projects Andrews describes further demonstrate this kind of mash-up as works of art using new media. Hennessy’s explanation of Mondrian’s original work, which combines the emotions he felt when first experiencing the rhythms of New York jazz music with the city layout of the area surrounding Broadway, also demonstrates how different kinds of media can be combined to create altogether new artwork. (Hennessy et al, 2004)
Narrative machinima being the norm, there are art projects which take a much more abstract approach to remediating video games. Rebecca Cannon’s article “Meltdown” touches on certain key aspects of remediating video games for rhetorical means. While her work focuses on artistic modification of game engines, such as the work of the anti-war gamer community Velvet Strike, she also addresses a non-playable encounter called 9/11 Survivor. This user-created gamelplay modification was designed to depict the plight of a survivor of the World Trade Center attack of 11 September, 2001. This piece of user generated content, built using the Unreal Tournament 2003 engine, follows a businessman in one of the towers contemplating what had just happened before jumping to his death. The player has no control over the action whatsoever. The only control the viewer, now relegated to an observer stance, maintains is to change the camera angle around the central character. (Cannon, 2007) Technologically, this mod emulates the earliest gameplay videos Lowood described, where the videos had to be played using game engine itself, as opposed to watching a streamed video. However, the makers of the mod, unlike the pioneers of machinima described earlier, were pilloried by the public and castigated in mass media. Cannon explains that the modders were simply using their preferred medium to express their level of concern. It should also be noted that 9/11 Survivor was created as a class project, indicating some of the teaching possibilities of machinima in a pedagogical setting. (Cannon, 2007)
Cannon’s article comes closest to a true rhetorical analysis of machinima. She examines artistic mods in light of the arguments their creators are trying to make. However, she does not apply traditional rhetorical theory to these projects. Her analytical approach is primarily artistic, and while she does address the artists’ original interests in using video games as media for building arguments, she focuses primarily on the technical and artistic aspects, not rhetorical or literary constructs.
In light of this limited body of research, it becomes clear that a gap exists in the field of rhetoric. Machinima projects have received focused attention from artistic inquiries, technical researchers, and members of the academic community at all levels. A rhetorical analysis of several machinima projects would at least partially fill the gap in the research.