Machinima as a Form of Resistance

Mar. 2021 Poyuan

Machinima

This article attempts to extend and expand the theme of resistance through personal creation and related research topics, using Machinima as the primary form of resistance and creation. By exploring its characteristics of modification based on games or existing internet resources, the article considers what new resistance strategies might exist in a post-internet world controlled by new media.
The term Machinima is a portmanteau of "machine" and "cinema," and it refers to a media form that uses games and existing game engines for creation, characterized by low cost and high efficiency.
Machinima can be seen as an intermediary between virtual experience and human consciousness. How do we perceive virtual experiences? Do we know when we are readers, viewers, or products of culture? Are virtual space websites places where we have important experiences? Or is there a new hybrid of existence, reading, creation, and consumption happening? From an aesthetic perspective, Machinima reveals the operational trajectories of the culture that influences us.
As Frances Yates describes the operation of the memory theater, Machinima resembles a virtual memory theater, where films replace architecture to provide a corresponding framework. Machinima encapsulates our existence in the virtual world, organizing memories through scripts. It includes where we went, what we did, resembling a travelogue more than a diary, coordinating the body, organizing actions, displaying, experiencing, and creating Machinima. The unique form of Machinima, interwoven with multiple media and characterized by the realistic recording of game footage captured by players through screen recording, often carries game culture, gaming worldviews, and the shared language of players. Machinima offers a fulcrum that borrows the framework of games (culture) and provides a narrative perspective outside the official, non-mainstream, grand narratives, coming from the comparative viewpoint of players (the public). This extends the consideration of how Machinima serves as a medium of resistance in the digital world and a tool for producing external narratives, exploring how Machinima can act as a form of resistance in the post-internet era.
From the media nature of Machinima—Machinima, through its combination of film, documentary footage, digital animation, and digital games, embodies a media form centered around events.

"I believe that cinema does not reveal truth in a transparent moment, but rather that cinema is composed of a set of discourses that generate a certain reality (in the permissible positions of subject and object)" —Bazin

From the media nature of Machinima—Machinima, through its combination of film, documentary footage, digital animation, and digital games, embodies a media form centered around events.
From the recording nature of Machinima—In its early development, Machinima evolved from the retrospective game recording functions built into real-time strategy games and the screen-recorded footage of FPS (first-person shooter) games. Early game recordings based on programs—such as Quake (NoSkill replay from Doom)—captured footage by recording the actions on the screen directly into the camera rather than the camcorder. From the perspective of realistic documentary filmmaking, the realist film is an observer-recorder, merely documenting our world to present it. Therefore, game recordings, game demonstration videos, and event recordings captured through screen recording can be seen as a mutated form of realist cinema. However, unlike traditional realist films that depict reality, for Machinima, reality is a hybrid, as if it is a narrative world existing as an independent entity, and also a hybrid of our world—cultural, physical, and social—that constitutes the virtual world.

The Highest Score

"The Highest Score" is a Machinima created by Dave Beck based on the game "The Warriors" (an action game developed by Rockstar, where the gameplay revolves around large-scale brawls in the game environment, interspersed with other activities such as chase scenes. Note: Rockstar also developed the famous game series "GTA - Grand Theft Auto," which is also filled with violence and adult content). The Machinima depicts a game character continuously stomping on the corpse of a woman who has fallen and may already be dead. Beck recycles and edits the aforementioned clip, playing it continuously and randomly, and then adds a counter in the upper right corner of the web video to introduce a scoring element. Thus, "The Highest Score" is an ironically titled work to some extent.
"The Highest Score" constructs its content and visuals by deconstructing the game's program content and capturing game footage. Through this, it narrates and analyzes the author's, Dave Beck's, perception of the game's content. Dave Beck believes that video games, as a medium, may represent one of the ultimate frontiers where gender discrimination and graphic violence exist. They present endless violence and indiscriminate, immoral murder, even encouraging such violence and slaughter within the game by awarding extra points. Essentially, "The Highest Score" is an experiment to see if people will begin to lose attention to the brutality of the images and start obsessing over the numerical growth. Through the modification of game content, Dave Beck issues a statement as a player contemplating the game, and more importantly, offers a critique of our current cultural condition.

The War of Internet Addiction

"The War of Internet Addiction," a Machinima produced by an individual organization from mainland China, primarily reflects players' dissatisfaction with the official game approval system in China and the unjust reporting of online games by mainstream media. It also satirizes the rise of game time control measures and the establishment of internet addiction treatment centers that used electric shocks to "cure" young people addicted to the internet, led by the national expert on internet addiction, Yang Yongxin.
The content of "The War of Internet Addiction" mainly uses the then-popular Chinese multiplayer online game "World of Warcraft" as its background and creative tool. It employs virtual cameras in third-person and first-person perspectives within the game and uses in-game character performances. The narrative mixes the factional conflicts from the World of Warcraft game world with the real-world phenomena in Chinese society, such as the persecution and demonization of video game players and game addiction, and the profit-driven chaos among game agents. It uses the names of real individuals to metaphorically represent characters, reflecting the situation of society and the gaming community. At the end of the film, a leader character who initiates a rebellion against the internet addiction expert Dr. Yang delivers a monologue. He gives a speech that expresses the players' voices under the oppression of various social forces at the time, addressing the entire society of internet users. This serves as a declaration and a wake-up call to the gaming community, players, Chinese society, and individuals.

"I know,
When they killed YouTube, you didn’t speak up.
When they blocked Twitter, you didn’t speak up.
When they killed Fanfou, you didn’t speak up either.
Now, we might even lose World of Warcraft.
I also know, we are all just common people.
In the face of old ladies faking accidents, corpse fishing for money, hit-and-run incidents, and entrapment by law enforcement,
There is nothing we can do to save our beloved game.
…….
Retreat to the freest no-router network in the world.

Communicate with each other at low cost.
Relieve the pain of life through games.
Just like this,
They still find every way to pluck a feather from every passing goose for profit.
We have already become accustomed to
Silence...
But this silence does not mean servility.
This bell will pass on our strength to you."

—Excerpt from "The War of Internet Addiction" speech by Kan Ni Mei

"The War of Internet Addiction" narrates the reality of persecution and regulation of internet usage in Chinese society and the means of using game production Machinima to voice resistance. It employs a considerable amount of internet culture in-jokes, historical quotes about war persecution and revolutionary resistance (e.g., Martin Niemöller's quote about Nazi atrocities), and visual intertextual connections to culture and society. Through its narrative, it constructs an independent entity that blends reality and the digital world, forming a unique format that mixes cinematic techniques, game programming, and digital animation into a declaration film with a rebellious attitude.
From its inception, Machinima, with the "Quake" movie using FPS (first-person shooter games) and real-time strategy games to capture player actions and perspective shifts through screen recording, has perfectly captured game records and replays (Perfect Capture: Demo Recording and Replay). This reconnected the audience's perspective with any player-actor, making the recorded footage preserved and revived as infinitely replayable perfect captures. Capturing images as possible historical materials of the digital, virtual world, it contemplates how the meta-history of the internet will be constructed in the future. It records a past that cannot be recovered even with all the virtual world data (server data, models, player behaviors).
Events occurring in these worlds become part of mixed reality—both material and virtual—where players reside and determine who they are. Without including the history of these places and events, it is impossible to tell the history of our era.

Looking at "The War of Internet Addiction" and other Western World of Warcraft Machinima films (e.g., "Yesterday’s News"), they construct narratives based on events and the cultural background framework of the game (culture). These narratives, produced outside the official game and from the players' (the masses') perspective, open up new possibilities for producing historical states in the digital age. Machinima, as a form of game film on the internet, connects to the ideal of realism in cinema. Although it cannot be directly applied to Machinima in the usual sense, from a phenomenological perspective, the computer screen presents a world to the player, a world that is constant and interactive in perception, just like the outside world. Thus, a simple Machinima can be equated to a home movie (private footage). Therefore, in World of Warcraft Machinima, a constructed version of a real film can appear in every aspect.
Examples like "The Highest Score" and "Velvet-Strike" can help us think about the potential of Machinima as a medium of resistance, a counter-declaration deconstructed and reconstructed from itself, much like the Jewish poet Paul Celan, who insisted on writing poetry in his mother tongue, German, to tell the Germans about the crimes of war. Machinima stands on its game program, game engine, and scene space, using performances beyond conventional gameplay, screen captures, and material composition. Through the mixture of players and authors, the game actions themselves constitute the "presence" or virtual avatars in the game scenes, enabling players to activate, produce, and transform a new narrative—a narrative with a rebellious attitude.

Wolf’s-Bean, By Paul Celan

Mother, whose

hand did I clasp

when with your words I went to

Germany?

Machinima records a performance process, which is both the performance of creation and the performance of viewing when the work is realized as the final product. However, it differs from the performance space in interactive games, where different combinations of actions and different trajectories can be developed each time. Countless possibilities open to production choices are included in the final decisions made to establish the finished product. Machinima is more like a film than a game, questioning the current creation of machinima images through constantly updated new technologies such as game engines, AI, new presentation strategies, and the experimental aesthetics of online communities. It is also a reflection on the relationship between real and virtual spaces, creating the possibility of challenging specific and fixed viewing spaces, allowing specific and non-fixed performances to be watched. These spatial practices will change with the emergence of new concepts of Machinima possibilities. Machinima practices originate from and exist within the disseminated game culture and fandom circles. The forms of expression in internet culture need to be constituted by another kind of connection between the audience and the fandom circle. Through the overlap of player and author identities, the game behavior itself constitutes the "presence" or digital body in the game scenes, enabling players to activate, produce, and transform "narratives." Therefore, we can use Machinima to think about what new resistance strategies there might be in a post-internet world controlled by new media. As Enzensberger called for a revolution, "everyone must become a manipulator of filming, editing, synchronizing, dubbing, and even distributing" (Enzensberger, 1974). Through Machinima, we can change the ways of producing, disseminating, and actively participating in dynamic images, breaking the defensive posture towards unidirectional media (film, television) by new media.