Robert Jones, in “From Shooting Monsters to Shooting Movies,” describes machinima as the manipulation of video game engines and characters by players in the service of creating “short animated films within the game’s 3D virtual environment”(end note 1). Machinima is a hybrid form of uncertain aesthetics, a genre-cocktail of video game (or the case of our project, Second Life, a virtual environment that isn’t a video game, strictly speaking, and yet bears too much resemblance to the form to be categorized as completely distinct) and animated film. Machinima has a necessary relationship with video games, based on its genealogy and common practice, but it might also be considered to have a certain adversarial relationship to gaming qua gaming, characterized by the growing tendency to harness machinima in the service of narrative and drama rather than gameplay per se. While machinima evolved from demos and re-plays (methods of preserving the action of gameplay for later reflection), it is increasingly common for machinima products to borrow form from the games in which they’re “filmed” but suggest content that is un- or marginally related to the conventional goals of gameplay—see, for example, the Red vs. Blue series, a comedic work that might bear as much resemblance to the comedy series Seinfeld as it does to Halo, the game in which it was produced.

As a developing form displaying plastic and mutable aesthetics, machinima has something in common with reality television—especially with MTV’s The Hills, a genre-conflating hybrid of reality television and soap opera. Most of the text we used for the dialogue in the project comes from transcripts of the show, described by its parent network as “scripted reality.” It follows a group of young, beautiful, wealthy, white residents of Los Angeles as they go about their daily lives, and ostensibly offers access not to a representation or a fiction, but to actuality: the actual lives of Lauren Conrad and the shows’ other stars. What makes The Hills interesting to include here is the mixed signals it delivers to viewers: the show’s unscripted dialogue connotes its status as reality television rather than representative fiction, but the rehearsed-seeming nature of its scenes stands in contrast to usual reality television fare. While all reality television content attempts to strike a balance between its obviously produced and constructed nature and a gesture toward authenticity grounded by the promised actuality of the events it depicts, this delicate situation is perhaps even more precarious in The Hills, which broadcasts its constructed nature by relying on plainly rehearsed and very beautiful camerawork. Though there are occasional exceptions, overall The Hills is beautifully lit, tightly framed, and uses a more classical mode of editing than most other reality television products, which often work with, and around, available light and unpredictable subjects. Instead, The Hills regularly employs a shot-reverse shot editing pattern, which involves repeatedly switching between opposing vantage points. This practice is antithetical to reality television’s reputation as unrehearsed, since the shot-reverse shot pattern necessarily involves multiple takes of the same action to ensure that both points of view can be covered without recording the presence of an opposing camera. Here, the camera does not work around the subject; the subject works around the camera.

The show also invites genre confusion by eschewing most of the usual hallmarks of reality TV. There is no game or other imposed structure used to incite dramatic content; no one-on-one interviews or confessional moments that occur between the performer and the camera; in fact, never does anyone on The Hills mention that he or she participates in a reality television series. To be plain, The Hills sounds like reality TV but looks like a glossy prime-time soap.

This kind of genre-confusion links The Hills with machinima: just as early machinima could not have passed for a well-produced cartoon ala Red vs. Blue; early reality television would never have risked its claim to authenticity by using reverse camera angles and the re-shoots that they imply. In fact, much contemporary machinima fails to resemble its earliest forms in a way that echoes The Hills’ noticeable difference from earlier reality television: newer products are less straightforward, harder to categorize than their forbears, and they may value different aesthetics. Too, the relationships between gamer and avatar that are in play during gaming and recalled by machinima are exciting and various, invoking an uncertainty similar to the status of the stars of The Hills, who are difficult to classify as . . . actors? performers? “just” people? As the avatar acting as a surrogate for the gamer (or machinimator) is something more than a puppet but something less than the agent who controls play, stars of The Hills are something less than actors but more than victims of surveillance. Avatar use recalls the complex relationships between personality/persona, identity/role, actuality/authenticity that attend performance in The Hills.

Machinima, then, is a form well-suited to exploring the issues that resonate between The Hills and Second Life—both sites of contested authenticity, where what exactly gets to claim the ontology of “the real” is up for grabs. If The Hills is a reality television show that seems more constructed than “real,” Second Life is “life” in which correspondence to actual living, physical bodies is usually assumed but rarely proven—a player can almost never be certain who, or what, is controlling any other avatar. Authenticity is in question here, too; specifically as it relates to the unknowable nature of something like a single, fixed identity but also as it pertains to actions taken inside a space consciously removed from the physical, offline world. Do Second Life actions “count” as real? It’s an imprecise and hackneyed question, but one that might continue to matter to a spouse whose partner becomes involved in a Second Life-based romance, or to a worker whose online actions, costumed as her avatar, result in her dismissal, or anyone for whom online friendships comprise the majority or most satisfying of her social interactions. These issues aren’t specific to Second Life, but Second Life remains a place where the virtual cannot easily be dismissed as unreal (a descriptor which carries with it connotations of triviality and the absence of value).

The collision of virtuality and reality that marks Second Life makes it an ideal site for the making of our machinima. We considered using The Sims, as it is relatively easy to create a controlled environment within that world, and the video capture function works well. However, we decided that recording in the middle of a virtual world shared by other users would add an important dimension to the project, given our interest in The Hills’ extensive management of the “reality” in reality television. In Second Life, unlike in The Sims, the world is full of unaffiliated performers and unrelated content. Second Life also allows for almost infinite camera angles and a wide varied of pre-programmed avatar gestures.

To record the video, we used CaptureMe, a free video screen capture program capable of capturing only 60 seconds of continuous video, a limitation which ensured that we would be cutting between short takes of the action. We set up our laptops near each other so that we could see from both characters’ vantage points and began capturing video, each from our own POV. Technical difficulties abounded; the program slows down dramatically when an avatar is moving, or if more than three moving characters are visible on the screen at any one time, leading us to limit the avatars’ movements. Also, at several points, avatars attempted to interact with us–trying to stand on the table we were sitting around, or to ask us questions about what we were discussing. With no camera-objects near us to signal our roles as performers, our actions were never clearly marked to passersby as performance, even though the game itself acts as a panoptic camera, which could be recording at any time. We found a relatively quiet café to use as a setting, which helped improve the quality of the image. However, we now see the strange movements, random messages and lost frames that inevitably accompanied our recording as valuable artifacts of a reality we tried diligently to manage but could never master, as well as the lasting visual trace of our actual pressing of buttons and moving of limbs.

Before moving toward a conclusion, we would like briefly to account for the inclusion of lines from Beckett’s Waiting For Godot in the machinima dialogue. The juxtaposition of a scripted text with improvised lines from reality television, and similarly the absurd alongside the purportedly “real,” throws many of the topics that have concerned our class into relief. We have been concerned this quarter (not solely, of course, but meaningfully) with navigating the virtual, with classifying it and defining its borders; with how to categorize its antithesis (does it most sensibly oppose reality? “real reality”? actuality?) in order to better conceive of virtuality itself, its strengths and deficiencies. The struggle to know what is real—or, perhaps, to give up on the question and formulate a more meaningful and productive one—indelibly marks the virtual, and with it much of new media. Waiting For Godot is an actual play, usually performed by human actors in a theatre (end note 2) that has historically provided virtual space long before the advent of VR , and its characters are fictional but warranted by actual bodies. Godot not only introduces the absurd into the equation in a way that exposes the realism of reality television as somewhat laughable, but also brings to the mix a prior conception of virtuality—as well as echoes of prior debates about the comparative values and dangers of the real and of dissembling, as centuries of anti-actor prejudice will attest. It also bears mentioning that in Godot, famously, “nothing happens;” the characters end the play as they began it, in the same state, not having achieved anything like catharsis or resolution—or even progress. As The Hills follows its protagonists’ daily activities, ostensibly “nothing happens” except their regular lives, which tend to be full of small-stakes micro-dramas, leaving the characters at the end of each episode more or less as they began it, ready to begin afresh.

So far, we have spoken more or less generally about our project’s relation to the course’s content. The fit we imagine between the project and the course is less the close mapping of a specific concept to a functional undertaking than an expressive, even entertaining exploration of a constellation of key ideas, discussed above. Before closing, however, we would like briefly to cite Robert Nideffer’s essay from the Vesna anthology, in which he remarks,

We might think of the game engine as a database interface, a mechanism through which a predetermined, relatively constrained collection of procedures and protocols are used to render a world and make it navigable in context. If we wish to look at the game engine as a cultural artifact . . . we must extend the boundaries of what strictly constitutes the game engine and posit the game player as not only a functional requirement of the engine, but also its key constitutive element. . . . We also need to ask, and this is critical, what constitutes the database of the player, where does it begin and end? (219-220)

If the game engine and the player combine to form the total database available from which to construct play, then we might consider even the machinima most removed from the content and context of its parent game to be a new type or form of gameplay, rather than a separate concern—a method of animation that merely harnesses functionality originally intended for the use of gamers. Rather, contemporary machinima is new new media, new game play; a use for in-game functionality that developers quite likely did not originally intend or envision, just as our mash-up is a use of the found texts that their authors certainly never foresaw. We have constructed, out of the information and functionality available to us—including, in Nideffer’s sense, our own idiosyncratic databases—an unexpected, unorthodox product.

(1) Jones, Robert. “From Shooting Monsters to Shooting Movies: Machinima and the Transformative Play of Video Game Fan Culture.” Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. Jefferson, MO: Macfarland, 2006. p. 261.
(2) A notable exception is Adriene Jenik and Lisa Brenneis’ waitingforgodot.com, in which “roundhead” avatars enact the dramatic text within a chat room. Waitingforgodot.com served as partial inspiration for the inclusion of Beckett’s text in our project.
(3) Nideffer, Robert. “Game Engines as Embedded Systems.” Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow. Ed. Victoria Vesna. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2007. 211-230.