YouTube has made sharing video footage incredibly easy and accessible for a huge amount of people who previously had no platform to share their creations. The advancements of screen recording software took away one of the absolute fundamentals of filmmaking; the camera. Instead of filming real life, many users took to recording their screens and recording commentary audio as they played video games. This style of video is now commonly referred to as a ‘Let’s Play’. The Let’s Play as a format has received a lot of criticism from consumers of traditional media. A common criticism is the pointlessness of the format, after all, why watch someone play a video game when you could just play it yourself? As a result video game content on YouTube has a reputation for being incredibly low-effort and lazy content. However, this is not the case for everyone. The purpose of this essay is to explore how YouTubers have brought back traditional filmmaking techniques to create short films entirely with video game footage and editing software. These videos are known as ‘machinimas’, and are an incredibly unique area of media that use interesting methods of narration and aesthetics through remediation. Throughout this essay I will be analysing a variety of machinima films, as well as the popular Let’s Play series Shadow of Israphel (2010-2012). While machinimas recycle old forms of filmmaking, some YouTubers have created something entirely new.

A machinima is a film made using animated graphics from a video game, captured using screen recording software. Machinima content has been on YouTube since its very early days, but hit a peak in popularity around 2010 to 2013, in what some refer to as YouTube’s ‘Golden Age’. The reason that machinimas hit their stride in this period is due to a single video game, Minecraft, which was released in February of 2009. It is an open-world game based around the placement and removal of blocks. Minecraft is a game that follows the philosophy of Lego. You create simply for the joy of creating.

Minecraft added a fun new element to Let’s Plays, as it was no longer simply just a case of watching a person play a game, it was watching what a person could create. This made it incredibly popular on YouTube, and changed Minecraft from a small game made by a single person to a hugely popular franchise that Microsoft purchased for $2.5 billion (USD) in 2014. Minecraft also allowed for machinima filmmakers to create their own background environments, something that other popular machinima games couldn’t allow for without installing modifications into the game’s files. Players can also create their own texture to apply to their character, which will be shown to other players when playing together. This allows for a perfect in-game set in which any movie may be shot, and any character may be portrayed.

Minecraft provided these filmmakers with a set, a camera, and a wardrobe. The issue is that any footage shot inside of Minecraft is completely restricted to the aesthetic of Minecraft’s in-game style. Minecraft characters all have the same model; a humanoid shape made of six blocks This model is simply four long limbs, a rectangular torso, and a cube for a head. As a result, there is extremely limited acting available. Players, or actors in this case, are restricted to moving their avatar and performing the few available animations. Portraying emotion is almost entirely restricted to audio, making it hard for any of these machinimas to be seen as a serious piece of media.

However, machinimas do use traditional film techniques. The best way to demonstrate this is to analysis a Minecraft machinima, and list the techniques used. For this exercise I have chosen a video titled Siege on Castle Steve – Minecraft video by J!NX (2011), as it is the most viewed Minecraft machinima on YouTube. In the way of cinematography Siege on Castle Steve features zooms, tilts, tracking shots, point of view shots, both low and high angles, steady cam shots, close-ups, and establishing shots. The shots are all framed appropriately, following the rule of thirds to be aesthetically pleasing. In its editing, Siege on Castle Steve uses continuity editing, custom made 3D animations, custom sound that is used on both diegetic and non-diegetic contexts, artificial blur (to emulate the qualities of a real camera), and end credits. The short film plays out a comical three-act narrative featuring characters from the game defending their home base from monsters, similar to what players would do in their actual gameplay.

If you told any traditional consumer that there was a subculture of content creators making legitimate short films inside of video games, they would most likely be confused and see it as childish. That is a completely valid perspective, as any viewer not familiar with Minecraft would most likely struggle to understand the point or the humour of the film. But what I have not yet mentioned is that Siege on Castle Steve currently has 59 million views. That alone makes it a piece of media worth studying. Siege on Castle Steve is by no means alone in this either. By searching YouTube for ‘Minecraft machinima’ you will find countless pages of these short films. Some YouTubers are still making them to this day, albeit to significantly lower view counts than in the past.

Remediation is an essential tool in classifying just what this new form of media is. In their book Remediation: Understanding New Media Bolter and Grusin have chapters dedicated to computer games, digital art, and film, among many other topics. But Remediation was written in the year 2000, and while it is possible to trace the history of machinimas back that far, the form was far too small and out of the range of their study. But machinimas are simply a combination of gaming, digital art, and film, making their insights absolutely relevant to this discussion. Remediation is effectively reusing media to achieve a purpose unoriginally intended. Video games are a perfect example of this, as they “are played on a repurposed television, one which an attached control unit transforms the screen into a different medium” (Bolter & Grusin 91).

The remediated nature of machinimas is not unlike other unconventional styles of film. For example, surveillance cinema remediates surveillance footage to introduce new narrative and aesthetic modes into film. However, surveillance cinema is often used as a self-reflexive critique of surveillance, focusing on “cinematic narration of surveillance” (Zimmer 2). This narration is putting the attention towards the implications of surveillance, machinimas do not have this style of self-aware subtext. Surveillance cinema asks the audience to question the form, whereas machinimas are made with pride. Any reflexive moments in machinima are designed to acknowledge the restrictions of the form, such as the lack of emotional acting or laws of the game mechanics.

In referring to the create of digital art in relation to traditional art, Bolter and Grusin say “There is nothing in this fantastic image to suggest that it is meant to be read ironically” (136). This same philosophy applies to machinimas. While it may seem ridiculous to some, machinimas as a form are meant to be enjoyed seriously. All one has to do is look at some of the more extreme machinimas to see this. Take Minecraftian (A Minecraft Movie) (2011) for example. This machinima has a runtime of 41 minutes, and is made to be enjoyed as a serious film. If we branch out of Minecraft we can see even more extreme examples. Take for instance a far more recent machinima titled Grand Theft Auto Black Phantom | GTA V Machinima | Full Movie HD | (2018). Black Phantom has a runtime of just under three hours, and is the eighth feature length machinima film made by KnightHunter Studios. The channel releases trailers and information about the films in the build up to their release. There is absolutely nothing ironic about the production of these films.

There is also a small community that sees these films as serious. Throughout the years a small number of festivals have had categories dedicated to machinima, such as the Bitfilm Festival and the Wats:On? Festival. Alongside these, computer hardware manufacturer Nvidia sponsored the Machinima Film Festival, which ran annually from 2002 to 2008. Although it is an incredibly niche form of film, it is intended to be taken seriously.

Bolter and Grusin mention that now digital art is becoming mainstream and traditional artists are being put into a ‘special interest group’ (140). However, this is the opposite of what machinimas achieve. This is because of accessibility. Because of the nature of machinimas having an audience restricted to those interested in the game, machinima filmmakers fall into this type of special interest group. Bolter and Grusin say that “it is easy for a digital artist to mix styles from one stylistic register to another” (140). Machinimas cannot do this. They are restricted to the game that is being used for graphics. In comparison, traditional film is far more lenient. Films such as Space Jam (1996) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) have proven that even the most jarring contrasting styles of live film and animation can be used alongside each other in a successful manner. This puts machinimas into a weird category. They have far more restrictions that traditional media, yet they are also the remediation of traditional media. A machinima could use live-action footage in its editing, but that would remove the purpose of making a machinima altogether. If the novelty of watching a film made inside your favourite game is removed, then so is most of the value that machinimas can offer.

Machinimas have made an impact on the video game industry. Grand Theft Auto V (2013) was released on PC with a special recording tool called the Rockstar Editor. This feature allowed users to press a key when they wanted to record while playing the game, and the game would save the information of everything that happened in the world. Once recorded, players could then revisit their actions in the Rockstar Editor and change where they wanted the camera to be positioned, and what speed they wanted the scene to play out at. Previously users had made third party modifications that added extra filmmaking functionality to games. This is especially common for Minecraft, as it was the most popular machinima game for several years. There was even a third-party program called Mine-imator released in 2012 that worked as a stand-alone 3D animation software, but only for Minecraft characters and environments. However, the Rockstar Editor is the first time that any company has added an in-game feature as powerful and versatile as it is solely for the purpose of machinima.

Machinimas are a clearly defined form on YouTube. Most will include the term in the title so that viewers are completely aware of what they are going to be watching. The term is also a mark of quality, as generally a machinima will have far more effort put into it than a simple Let’s Play. Although I have briefly defined the concept of a Let’s Play, it is important to understand the format before moving to the next example. A Let’s Play is effectively a documentation of a YouTuber’s playthrough of a game. Content creators will record themselves narrating a game, before editing the footage into small, easily digestible videos. Some YouTubers will add extra editing or a webcam recording of their face to make their content stand out from the rest, but at its core a Let’s Play is watching someone, or a group of people, play through a video game. This appeals greatly to the desire for para-social relationships. A para-social relationship is the illusion of a “face-to-face relationship with the performer” (Horton & Wohl 215). The performer, in this case the YouTuber, is creating a false sense of friendship between themselves and the audience. The performer is inviting you to join them as they play this game, hence the name ‘Let’s Play’. Let’s Play creators use this to create relaxing content that requires very little attention and investment from the viewer.

There is little to say about Let’s Plays in the way of narration and aesthetics in their pure form. While there are insights that could be made on their effect on YouTube as a platform, overall they have contributed very little to film as an art. However, one channel titled BlueXephos (Which has since been renamed to Yogscast Lewis & Simon) blurred machinima and the Let’s Play format together to create a completely new form of media. This new blend of forms was titled Shadow of Israphel. Shadow of Israphel, tricked its audience into believing they were watching a simple Let’s Play series, which slowly evolved into a complex machinima-Let’s Play hybrid that featured two friends playing through a complex plot in a world build by hired teams of professional Minecraft players.

BlueXephos at the time mainly consisted of two men, Lewis Brindley and Simon Lane. In 2010 Lewis and Simon started a multiplayer Let’s Play of Minecraft together, with the first episode titled Minecraft – Part 1: How to Survive the First Night. The dynamic here was that Simon knew how to play the game, and Lewis did not. This appealed to both new and old Minecraft players. However, as the series progressed Lewis and Simon began to see a third player on their world with the username Israphel. Throughout the series more strange things started to happen, and viewers were curious to find out more about Israphel. Israphel was an actor following a script, and that is easy to see in hindsight. But at the time many viewers had no idea what was going on, as this had never happened in a Let’s Play before. Some viewers believed that Israphel was someone who had somehow accessed the server and was messing with the pair.

After their initial Minecraft series, Lewis and Simon released a follow-up called Survival Island. This series is distinctly different from its predecessor, as here Lewis and Simon act as if they are their avatars in the game. In this series they meet and discuss with other characters that come to their island in the game. These characters discuss Israphel in the context of the narrative, not as a player. This short season is a setup for the main series, Shadow of Israphel.

Minecraft – “Shadow of Israphel” Part 1: Crash and Burn is the first episode in a series drastically different from their original Minecraft Let’s Play. This episode features special effects, multiple actors, and a fully developed fantasy world. Throughout the series lore is established and characters die, but Lewis and Simon are still just playing Minecraft. It is both an epic fantasy series made in machinima style, and two friends playing a video game together. Lewis and Simon used the same filmmaking techniques that machinimas use. For example, when the pair enter a new area, the camera will cut away from their footage to an extreme longshot of the landscape.

This combination succeeded greatly, as the series gained Lewis and Simon over 7 million subscribers, and millions of views on each episode of their series. For a Let’s Play series these are incredible numbers, with most never reaching above one million. The reason that they were so successful is that nobody had ever attempted a form of narrative like this. Viewers start watching the series believing it is one form of media, and then are essentially tricked into watching a fantasy epic. It is difficult to find any media that compares to the extremely specific nature of this series. A worthy comparison is the concept of a mock-documentary. Roscoe and Hight define mock-documentaries as “fictional texts which in some form ‘look’ like documentaries” (49). These texts “Appropriate certain documentary modes, as well as the full range of documentary codes and conventions” (Roscoe and Hight 49). On some level we can consider Shadow of Israphel to be a form that recycles the mock-documentary. Afterall, the Let’s Play is a documentation of a performer’s gameplay. But this doesn’t quite fit either, as a mock-documentary assumes that it is entirely fictious. It is important to keep in mind that Shadow of Israphel, despite the gameplay having scripted events and a world full of actors, is still a Let’s Play. At its core, the appeal of the series is the dynamic between Lewis and Simon, and the playful banter they exchange. While the story and setting is important, the main purpose it serves is to give Lewis and Simon a world to react to.

Another perspective to take is that Shadow of Israphel is not a new form, but instead a post-modern take on the Let’s Play that takes advantage of genre-subversion. We can look at the Let’s Play as a genre of video, instead of a form. A genre is defined by repetition, specifically (but not limited to) “narrative types, characters, situations, environments appearing again and again” (Beard 7). In terms of narrative, the Let’s Play follows a simple one. The performer (who also applies as the character) reacts to the game through commentary. The situations that occur are all similar. If something funny happens, or if something sad happens, then the performer will react accordingly to that situation. The environment is the video game itself. Almost all Let’s Plays fall within these categories. If we approach Shadow of Israphel through this perspective, we can see how Lewis and Simon perform genre subversion perfectly, as they use “unexpected variation that disrupts the reassuring familiarity of generic repetition” (Beard 7).

However, Shadow of Israphel uses machinima. Although it might be possible to stretch the definition of a genre to fit machinimas, I do not believe that accurately represents what they are. As proven before, machinima recycles old forms of filmmaking to create a new type of film through remediation. Although machinimas often stay within the same general genres (comedy and action), it is entirely possible to create a machinima that would fall into the romance, western, or horror genre. It is far more accurate to describe machinimas as a type of animation. This is incredibly fitting as animation itself is a remediated form of film. Animation also goes beyond the possibilities of film, yet mimics its forms (Bolder and Grusin 147). As a result, Shadow of Israphel seems impossible to define according to existing categories. It is by no means the only machinima-Let’s Play blend. Another example is the Minecraft series created by the YouTuber Rythian, which ran from 2012-2013. Rythian also created a narrative alongside his friend Zoey inside a Minecraft Let’s Play, which he titled The Blackrock Chronicles.

Shadow of Israphel is far too specific to fit into current classifications. As a result, we must acknowledge that the machinima-Let’s Play blend is a new form of media. It has inspired others like Rythian to introduce fictional narratives and machinima techniques into their videos, and helped boost Minecraft and machinima as a form to the peak of its popularity. It has undeniably had an effect on media, and as a result it would be unjust to ignore the new form it has created.

Machinimas and Let’s Plays are a strange form of media. They rely on heavily remediated practises that make little sense to the large majority of media consumers, but within the gaming industry and the YouTube community they have influenced undeniable change. Machinima as a form is a very specific form of film that only appeals to an incredibly niche audience, but as I have proven it follows and remediates film form through the use of cinematography, sound, and editing. They have also influenced the development of Grand Theft Auto V, one of the highest grossing games of all time. Shadow of Israphel blended the machinima and the Let’s Play together, creating the first of an entirely new form of media. This form fails to meet the specifications of any older forms, proving that it is a completely new a form with unique narratives and aesthetics.



Bibliography

Beard, William. “Durham County Season 1: Genre and Genre Subversion”. Revue Canadienne d’Études cinématographiques / Canadian Journal of Film Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, 2014. pp. 2-25. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24411719.

Bolter, J. David. & Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. 1st ed, MIT Press, 2000.

Horton, Donald. & R. Richard Wohl. “Mass Communication and Para-social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance”. Psychiatry, vol. 19, no. 3, 1956, pp. 215-29.

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