The first critical overview of an emerging field, with contributions from both scholars and artist-practitioners. Over the last decade, machinima—the use of computer game engines to create movies—has emerged as a vibrant area in digital culture. Machinima as a filmmaking tool grew from the bottom up, driven by enthusiasts who taught themselves to deploy technologies from computer games to create animated films quickly and cheaply. The Machinima Reader is the first critical overview of this rapidly developing field. The contributors include both academics and artist-practitioners. They explore machinima from multiple perspectives, ranging from technical aspects of machinima, from real-time production to machinima as a performative and cinematic medium, while paying close attention to the legal, cultural, and pedagogical contexts for machinima. The Machinima Reader extends critical debates originating within the machinima community to a wider audience and provides a foundation for scholarly work from a variety of disciplines. This is the first book to chart the emergence of machinima as a game-based cultural production that spans technologies and media, forming new communities of practice on its way to a history, an aesthetic, and a market.

"Videogames are a powerful storytelling medium-but what are the stories we tell about videogames, with videogames, around videogames? What can we learn from novels that describe the struggles of young people trapped in virtual reality, from fanfiction that explores the private life of a popular Nintendo character, or from a poem that compares Pac-Man to Saint Augustine? An extensive body of scholarship explores the ways videogames create worlds, construct characters, and tell emotionally compelling narratives. But very little research has focused on representation of videogames, videogame players, and videogame culture in literary texts, whether traditional genres like novels, short stories, memoirs, and poems, or non-traditional and emergent forms like fanfiction, how-to-guides, hip-hop lyrics, or young-adult fiction. Ready Reader One is designed to fill that gap. The texts that this book's contributors engage are interesting in their own right. Thomas Pynchon's deployment of the tropes of retrogaming in Bleeding Edge evinces a fascinating inflection of his "paranoid style." Hanna Faith Notess's integration of videogame mechanics into her poetry enables a fascinating and poignant relationship of melancholy, memory objects, and the lyric form. The exploration of videogame addiction in memoirs challenges stereotypes and suggests different ways to understand the entanglement of desire and pleasure in the twenty-first century. The stories of virtual reality in the novels of Ernest Cline, Lauren Beuke, and Liu Cixin map the ways videogames are transforming our bodies, families, and friendships. Beyond their intrinsic value as works of literature, videogame literature provides meaningful perspectives on what videogames are and what they might be. Contributors to this collection demonstrate that videogame literature sheds light on how space, time, and identity are being reshaped by videogames; helps us detect emergent forms of play, media, algorithmic systems, surveillance culture, and social media; and increases our understanding of the larger stories that surround videogames and those who play them"--

In this groundbreaking collection, Dr. Jenna Ng brings together academics and award-winning artists and machinima makers to explore the fascinating combination of cinema, animation and games in machinima (the use of computer game engines to produce animated films in cost- and time-efficient ways). Book-ended by a preface by Henry Lowood (curator for history of science and technology collections at Stanford University) and an interview with Isabelle Arvers (machinima artist, trainer, critic, and curator), the collection features wide-ranging discussions addressing machinima not only from diverse theoretical perspectives, but also in its many dimensions as game art, First Nations media art, documentary, and pedagogical tool. Making use of interactive multimedia to enhance the text, each chapter features a QR code which leads to a mobile website cross-referencing with its print text, integrating digital and print content while also taking into account the portability of digital devices in resonance with machinima's mobile digital forms. Exploring the many dimensions of machinima production and reception, Understanding Machinima extends machinima's critical scholarship and debate, underscoring the exciting potential of this emerging media form.

This important new work focuses on the pioneers in machinima, considered to be the grassroots and beginnings of virtual production. Machinima’s impacts are identified by the community, supplemented by Harwood and Grussi’s research and experience over a period of 25 years – from game, film and filmmaking to digital arts practice, creative technologies developments and related research and theory. Machinima is the first digital cultural practice to have emerged from the internet into a mainstream creative genre. Its latest transformation is evident through the increasing convergence of games and film where real-time virtual production as a professional creative practice is resulting in new forms of machine-generated interactive experiences. Using the most culturally significant machinima works (machine-cinema) as lenses to trace its history and impacts, ‘Pioneers in Machinima: The Grassroots of Virtual Production’ provides in-depth testimony by filmmakers and others involved in its emergence. The extensive reference to source materials and interviews bring the story of its impacts up to date through the critical reflections of the early pioneers. This book will be of interest to machinima researchers and practitioners, including game culture, media theorists, students of film studies and game studies, digital artists and those interested in how creative technologies have influenced communities of practice over time.

Although virtual worlds continue to grow in popularity, a substantial amount of research is needed to determine best practices in virtual spaces. The artistic community is one field where virtual worlds can be utilized to the greatest effect. New Opportunities for Artistic Practice in Virtual Worlds provides a coherent account of artistic practices in virtual worlds and considers the contribution the Second Life platform has made in a historical, theoretical, and critical context within the fields of art and technology. This volume is intended for both artists and scholars in the areas of digital art, art and technology, media arts history, virtual worlds, and games studies, as well as a broader academic audience who are interested in the philosophical implications of virtual spaces.

Machinima movies are created using the 3D graphics engines behind such computer games as 'Halo' and 'Half-Life'. This book offers an in-depth look at where machinima has come from, where and how it is used, and how anyone can use it to create a new generation of 21st-century animated home movies.

This book explains how designing, playing and modifying computer games, and understanding the theory behind them, can strengthen the area of digital humanities. This book aims to help digital humanities scholars understand both the issues and also advantages of game design, as well as encouraging them to extend the field of computer game studies, particularly in their teaching and research in the field of virtual heritage. By looking at re-occurring issues in the design, playtesting and interface of serious games and game-based learning for cultural heritage and interactive history, this book highlights the importance of visualisation and self-learning in game studies and how this can intersect with digital humanities. It also asks whether such theoretical concepts can be applied to practical learning situations. It will be of particular interest to those who wish to investigate how games and virtual environments can be used in teaching and research to critique issues and topics in the humanities, particularly in virtual heritage and interactive history.