Being a former RWBY fan and hearing Red vs. Blue mentioned during the machinima screening immediately made me perk up (for those who don’t know, Rooster Teeth, the creators of RWBY, created Red vs. Blue). While listening to the informational panel before the actual screening, the concept of using video game environments and mechanics to create cinematic pieces intrigued me. Thinking about that, I slowly realized that some of the works we had seen during the screening could be connected to a common fandom phenomenon: fanworks and OCs. Could these works be considered fanfiction?
While the creators of these machinima works aren’t exactly going to AO3 and writing fanfiction about the characters within the game they used, I think there are definite parallels between some of the videos and fanfiction. Red vs. Blue, to me, seemed to be a clear example of fanwork. The characters are assets directly pulled from the game of Halo, and the creators use the framework of Halo’s environment and game mechanics to create a story. I’d also argue that the Red vs. Blue characters are Halo OCs (original characters), since they’ve created new characters that exist within the framework of Halo. These are very standard components of a fanfiction.
Another example I would place under the fanwork category is Super Mario Movie by Cory Arcangel. While the story is less coherent than Red vs. Blue, there is still a story nonetheless, imposed onto the pre-existing world of Mario. Arcangel also hacked into the original Mario game to create this movie.
But some of these pieces don’t feel like fanworks. So, when do fanworks become original works? While all of the films we watched were created within games, some of them distinctly felt like original pieces. The two that stood out to me as works that graduated beyond fanwork status were Rehearsals for Retirement and She Puppet. Rather than impose a story onto a pre-existing piece of media, these two pieces only use the games as vessels for commentary or some other artistic purpose. Red vs. Blue and Super Mario Movie can’t be separated from their respective games, but Rehearsals for Retirement and She Puppet feel so divorced from their original game that I think any other game with similar visuals or environments could have worked for these pieces. For example, Rehearsals for Retirement completely strips the environment of any other characters besides the main avatar. which completely changes the atmosphere of the game into something else entirely.
Of course, these are all arbitrary categories, and my opinion is probably wrong. Also keep in mind that I haven’t actually watched Red vs. Blue, so I could be completely wrong.
Why do we as fans like to create fanworks in the first place? I think a lot of it comes from the desire to take unique elements within existing worlds in media and extrapolate them, or exploring concepts that the original media failed to explore. This is abundantly clear in She Puppet, which uses the Tomb Raider games to comment on misogyny and the puppeteering of women, which the original game failed to explore given its focus on making Lara Croft more a sexy avatar rather than a fleshed out character.
All this rambling comes back to this question of why these creators used a cinematic lens to interact with video games in the first place. For me, the answer connects back to the ability to manipulate the unique stories and mechanics already present in the game to explore something new. Furthermore, as the presentation before the screening mentioned, the video game camera is much different from a real camera. With cheats, the player can manipulate the camera however they want, even defying gravity (!) or capturing crazy continuous shots that wouldn’t be as feasible with a physical camera. I also think that role-playing and play-centrism also factor in. Red vs. Blue clearly highlights the role-playing aspect. The manipulation of the camera for cinematic rather than in-game purposes, especially by using cheats, highlights the play-centric nature of creating machinima pieces. These filmmakers subverted the expected usage of the game mechanics to create their own unique experiences and stories.
To me, the intersection of machinima pieces and fanfiction/fanworks exists in The Sims. The Sims is a game that allows for player directed virtual life. Players create and customize Sims, manage their daily needs, develop their aspirations, and determine their relationships among various other tasks. Because The Sims allows for high degrees of customization and adaptation, many people used The Sims as ways to recreate other pieces of works. Specifically, many people took other works and created alternate universes — Hunger Games characters going to school, comedy skits about the Kardashians, etc.
I wonder if the Sims is ever not a machinima piece. I was not at the machinima screening so maybe I am missing crucial elements here, but it seems that machinima pieces use characters and scenes from some media to tell a story. This is something that I feel is inherent to The Sims. When people create characters, they are often inspired by other characters/medias. And, through play, people create stories (particularly if free-will is disabled). The main difference I can tell would be that a person is not recording and editing gameplay. However, within The Sims, a player can essentially edit the world as they go along (quite literally edit the world or their character, determine certain actions / cancel others, and even enable cheats if they want). There is a difference in retroactively changing gameplay through editing and editing as you play, but it seems to me that The Sims comes closest to being a Machinima game.
This is a really cool analysis of machinima and the ‘frame of mind’ that machinima creators occupy when creating their works. How much of the original medium leaks into the work?
I also used to be part of fan culture in another life. I think it’s really interesting to look at Super Mario Movie as something that could be interpreted as a fanfic, exploring Mario’s psychological decline after being in a closet for 20 years. However, I don’t think I would argue that parkour civilization is a fanwork of Minecraft; I think it is a fanwork of Minecraft’s community and the forms of emergent play the game allows for.