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5. Machinima and the Suspensions of Animation
- University of Minnesota Press
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93 5 MACHINIMA AND THE SUSPENSIONS OF ANIMATION Semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. —Claude Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men. It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility. It subjects them to the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects. —Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life machinima, a portmanteau for machine/cinema, is the recording of ingame action. It is a thriving form of digital animation or filmmaking in real time on the ordinary PC of the creator or viewer, as virtual cameras record performances inside an off-the-shelf game engine, without the need for render farms or other expensive postproduction facilities. Machinima has attracted a lot of attention as the film and game industries work hard on various points of convergence, from cross-promotions to trying out technical and narrative innovations of one in the context of the other. While digital capture, editing, postproduction, and distribution are now common in film and television, games use established cinematic camera angles to mark certain genres and borrow voice actors and film scores for game soundtracks. If video and computer games are a response to the adaptive problem posed by technology, then the historical record of explorative and emergent play are of interest to the cultural historian of 94 MACHINIMA AND THE SUSPENSIONS OF ANIMATION media; machinima offers to provide an archive of gaming performance and access to the look and feel of software and hardware that may already have become unavailable or even obsolete. As the previous chapter elucidated, innovations at the human–machine interface grapple with numerous challenges.Although the entertainment software industry keeps pushing the limits of immersive graphics and cinema explores 3D once again, this chapter also considers the space in front of the screen, where users now have far more sophisticated input devices at their disposal than QWERTY-legacy keyboards. Aside from the runaway success of WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) as developed at XeroxPARC, it should be remembered that gaming started with keyboards on devices such as the Atari 400/800 and the Sinclair Spectrum, only to be supplemented with joysticks and controllers later; now mostly forgotten are the Nintendo PowerGlove and the Sony EyeToy. Numerous devices now harness the affordances of motion capture, whether it be touchscreens (from the Light Pen on the Vectrex in 1982 to the stylus of the Nintendo DS or a finger on the Apple iPad) or gestural interfaces (from the Pantomation in 1977 to the more recent gestural interfaces of the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect). Via networked cameras, gamers can manipulate real-time visuals using full-body gestures instead of twitchy fingers, such as moving left or right to steer a snowboard down a simulated mountain. This opens new vistas for the creation of machinima. Arguably, machinima is to computer gaming what Brechtian epic theater was to dramatic and cinematic conventions a century ago. Moments and sequences of computer game play are interrupted and time-shifted into a different context, in adjustments that allow them to be recorded as significant, interesting, or entertaining independently of the immediate context of their production. This momentary halting of fluid technical and semiotic relations can make visible, rather than merely felt, what is at stake in machinima, and in a wider sense in digital culture. After discussing questions of interface design and usability in computer-mediated communication in general and gaming in particular, this chapter proposes that there are at least two reasons to look at the emergent practice of machinima from the vantage point of gestures. On one hand, gestures and their citability mark the performative space of theater or cinema that is cited by machinima. On the other hand, precisely calibrated in-game [54.205.179.155] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:42 GMT) MACHINIMA AND THE SUSPENSIONS OF ANIMATION 95 gestures remain particularly difficult, even for highly accomplished examples of machinima such as Paul Marino’s “I’m Still Seeing Breen,” a music video using tools included with Half-Life 2, such as FacePoser, which allows the user to lip-synch new lines of dialogue.1 Many of the digital assets that come with a particular game tend not to allow certain simple character movements, such as nodding, facial expressions, turning one’s head, or pointing without a weapon in hand—as one can quickly glean from episodes of the long-running machinima sitcom series “Red vs...