Machinimas as a Political or Artistic “Detournement” of Video Games

by Isabelle Arvers@zabarvers

WebVisions / Barcelona28th June 2013

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taT3gjX8xPM

My work as a curator is based on the relationship between artand video games & how artists or indie game developers canoffer an alternative to commercial games through installations,video art, and experimental cinema.

Why? Because Video and computer games are the majorentertainment industry and because nowadays 99% ofTeenagers are playing games. That’s why I think it is more thanimportant to interest ourselves to games in a critical manner.

Background : from games to Machinima, from hack to hack…

MIT computer scientists hacked the computer code to conceive the first digital creation: Spacewar! And Spacewar!was a computer game. So, if computer game history is relatedto the roots of digital creation and to digital code hacking,Machinima can be understood to follow this tradition. Why?

Because the ancestor of machinima is the demoscene.

The demoscene was part of the hacker scene. It began in the80s when developers hacked games and created some creditstitles, putting their signatures on the cracked game. Then the game hacking culture grew up by developing audiovisuals toimprove their skills in computer code development.

Behind the gamer performance that produces character actions, dialogs create the sense and the drama of the movie. Voices, through dialogs, songs, voice-overs, become game modifications, as they transform the original game function and offer a new set of meaning to the virtual realities.

Furthermore, the voice works to bring about a reverse engineering of a mass consumerist object into a tool of narrative and artistic expression. With machinima, we can talk about an emerging game play: an unsuspected use of a game for an artistic objective.

Machinima, the merger of ‘machine’ and ‘cinema.’ It is the encounter between a film and a game, in which gamers become film directors. As a technique to produce films, machinima is a new cinematographic genre.

Bill & JohnKBS Productions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVZqFWk0JDI

Bill & John reminds us of Beckett’s absurdtheater, where clownish characters holddiscussions in strange spaces—cold andmostly empty.

This confrontation between humorously edgedand warmly human dialogs and “cold” digitalspaces is also prominent in the voiceperformances of the famous machinima seriesRed vs Blue.

Red vs Blueby Rooster Teeth

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMICpGBK5dI

Interviewed about the link between the dialogswritten for the serial Red vs Blue and theTheater of the absurd, Burnie Burns agrees:

“Yes, especially the early episodes. We wanted to know what would happen to videogame characters after the games were turned off. It’s funny to think that these guys would have a life where they wait for someone to come along and play their game.

In the art world, works making games,Modifying games, and using games formachinima can be seen as following in thefootsteps of Dadaism and Surrealism,

Dadaism and surrealism saw play andentertainment as the most subversive andAlso as the ultimate forms of art.

Machinima as an artistic detournement

Machinima represents the particular moment whengamers begin to produce content and where gamesbecome tools of expression.

These movies are mostly narrative, but they can also be

experimental, artistic, or related to music, Documentaries, ads, and feature films. They can beseen as a new way of representation in the digital age,along with 3D animation, digital cinema, or video.

Machinima as a mean of expression

The french democracyby Alex Chan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CnXqxrkqWg

The french democracy is the first political machinima. Itexplains how and why the riots began in 2005 in thesuburb of Paris.

Alex Chan had never made a movie before, but facedwith the media coverage of the riots, which wasmassively biased against the youngsters, he decided togive them a voice by the means of a game

Machinima : a Situationist Détournement of computer games?

By using virtual spaces and changing the perspective as an artistic strategy, machinima allow a distanced critique of a simulated world.

They tend to erase the boundaries between reality and fiction and redefine the transgressive power of the game.

They reactualize the Situationist conception ofcinema, in which images, voices in dialogs orinterviews or voice over, act as different

layersof content.

Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, in a joint textwritten in 1956, added to the Situationisttheory of détournement the point that cinemais the most efficient method of détournementwhere détournement tends to pure beauty.

Can dialectic break bricksby René Vienet

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wPCiyjtBfo

A situationist detournement in cinema. Radical,

self reflexive critique of social hierarchicalstructures and worker exploitation.

Humorously conveyed via the mise en scene of

a martial arts film, which in itself becomes a

nuanced revision of the genre.

Some machinima, like This Spartan Life (TSL) byChris Burke, could be compared to Situationistmovies.

For instance, while Damian Lacaedemion defends Malcolm McLaren against futuristicmonsters, we follow McLaren walking through thedigital landscape, in the shape of a strangepurple animal, talking about “magnificent failuresbetter than little successes. “

This Spartan LifeMalcolm Mc Laren interviewby Chris Burke

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilMwGBepKxw

Why do I compare these machinimas toSituationist movies? Because, thanks to thevoices, they add an artistic or a theoreticalcontent to the images of violent games,

The Situationists had the idea of using a movieas the most efficient détournement because ofcinema’s capacity to reach a popular audience,new kinds of audience encounters are nowpossible with the extensive games audiences.

Voice as a sound image

Because video games are a medium they know and master, it is interesting to get young generations to use 3D real time engines to write and direct movies. The workshops aim to transform an object of mass consumption and entertainment into a means of film production and expression.

Educating young people in technical writing, reading, production and editing.

Working on a playful reappropriation of the first cultural object: the video game.

Machinima workshops

Voice is a sound image of themselves, they put partof their personality in their avatar which takesanother dimension

By recording dialogs and creating their avatars/ theyput their personality inside a 3D image which will bethen shared on Online video platform

They have a sensation of freedom : Freedom ofexpression, freedom with the traditional rules.

They have a big fun to record and then listen thesound of their voices

.

Molotov Alva and his search of the creator

https://vimeo.com/2089408

In machinima WE are the creators

Like in many other User Generated Content, inMachinima we are the creators but we don’t get any IPon our productions, so my last message is that wehave to fight for the freedom of Internet and forthe free sharing of knowledge and culture on theweb!That’s the minimum we should get in return onall the things we create and make other people benefitfrom!

Machinima move our mind to another range of perception,diverting us to immerse totally in digital images and allowing us to keep a critical distance while getting closer to caracters invideo and computer games.Thank you!

www.isabellearvers.comia@isabellearvers.com

Youtube.com/zabarvers@zabarvers