Machinima

Machinima, most people would ask, "What is it?" and then when told those people may respond, "What's in it for the people doing it?" the next question is, "Why are people watching it?" Well, all of those have rather simple, but some what long, answers.
For the first question, what is it, it is videos and movies made using a video game for the stage. the characters and special effects. Although, sometimes people will put in special effects so they can do more than the game allows. Infact many people have watched machinima without even knowing it. An example of this is the popular Red vs. Blue at www.redvsblue.com. In this series, the group Rooster Teeth takes the game Halo and Halo 2 and have created a total of one hundred red vs blue episodes and five sub-episodes. Many people have seen atleast part of this series without even realizing that what they are watching is infact machinima. I personally didn't find out that it was machinima until about three years after I watched it.
Another example of a place people have seen machinima but don't know it is the South Park episode "Make Love not Warcraft", season ten episode eight In this episode the kids of South Park play the game World of Warcraft. A hacker in the game is running around killing every World of Warcraft character he comes accross. Now heres the episode spoiler if you do not want to read this skip to the next paragraph. The boys; Stan, Kyle, Eric and Kenny, take it upon themselves to stop the hacker and spend a long amount of time training there World of Warcraft characters to be strong enough to defeat the hacker. After training their characters high enough to take on the hacker they go to fight him, unfortunatly they are not quite strong enough to defeat him. A few of the Blizzard emplyees, Blizzard is the company that makes the game World of Warcraft, brought an item to the boys to help them defeat the hacker. This item is called the sword of one thousand truths and thanks this item the boys defeat the hacker and bring peace back to the world of warcraft.
Now onto the second question, What's in it for the people doing it, which there are a few different answers. One reason is that the people doing this make money. Another reason people do this is for just straight up fun and you do something amazing in a video game and something is compelling you to show everyone in the world what you did and post it on youtube or any other online video stream. For the third and final reason, that I will talk about, is for contests.
For the first reason I gave, making money, people make money off of this by selling merchandise of their machinima series. Usually this only happens with popular machinima series such as red vs blue. Another way they make money is by becoming popular enough to the point where people hire them to make commercials or advertisements. Red vs. blue has done this with a series of commercials for Madden Football 2007. A third way these groups make money is with subscriptions and donations. People want to see these videos so they will pay the creator so that the creator can make it. Also with red vs. blue, if someone subscribes then they have access to the videos a week before non-subscribers and they get the high resolution version rather than the low resolution that non-subscribers get. Another group that is making money is Myndflame, website is www.myndflame.com. They sell merchandise, have been hired for advertisements and have subscribers as well, so this isn't strictly a red vs. blue thing.
For the second reason, its fun, many, many people that make machinima are doing it for this reason. I myself have made machinima videos, did I get any money? No I did it for kicks and giggles, because it was fun to do. This is the same for many people that make machinima, they had a recording program rolling and they just started messing around. Something that comes from making machinima for kicks and giggles is for fame. People will put their videos up to say "Hey! Look at what I did, I am awsome." This is mostly what anyone will find when looking for machinima. On the website www.warcraftmovies.com, there are about five PvP (player versus player) to any other kind of machinima posted on this site. In this people essentially say, "Hey look, my warcraft character rocks face. Just look at him tear through that rogue." Another way people get their fame is by doing insane stuff like this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wuqk-fHxDaw&feature=related which essentially someone spent days making it and filmed it in action (yes a normal person made that in a video game. They don't make any money for saying, "Look at what I did isn't it cool?", although someone might see what they did and think, "We should hire them."
Onto my third and final reason, contests. There are many contests in the machinima world. The most recent one is the blackbird contest. People entered machinima they made, all they had to do was put the blackbird computer somewhere in it and talk about their opinion of it. The winner got a free blackbird computer. For those interested videos can be seen on youtube, just search blackbird machinima. Another yearly machinima contest is hosted at blizzcon, the convention blizzard holds sometime in june or july.
Now then, lets talk about why people watch it. Many people watch it for the same reason people watch random stuff on youtube. It is entertaining, it's as simple as that. Most of the time someone will watch machinima related to a game they play. And typically if it is a popular video, other people who play that game will talk about it as well. In world of warcraft, the jokes from myndflame are known through all the servers. For many people it is as entertaining or more than television. When your watching reruns all the time tv shows can get rather old. But with all the people out there making machinima, there is bound to be something you find entertaining.
So what is it? Why do people do it? And why are people watching it? Well it uses video games to make videos, sometimes even full length movies. And people do it so for money, fun and contests. People watch it because it is entertaining, sometimes more so than television. So next time your playing a video game, start recording. Next time your watching a rerun, turn it off and hop on the internet.