Machinima discussion

There are questions that have been brought up in the forums a few times before, so I think it'd be a good time to address them. This is a compilation regarding some loopholes I've seen mentioned over a year.

• Does something count as Machinima if it's...
  • Adlibbing over game cutscenes with player's own scenarios.
  • A roleplay in Sandbox / Survival Sandbox with no by-design objectives, especially multiplayer one. (ex. Minecraft)
  • User-created levels in a game that allows custom DLC. (ex. Amnesia: The Dark Descent)
  • A Game Mod that change's game's intended behavior to make own scenarios.
  • Using Game Maker or 3D editing software (MikuMikuDance, Source Filmmaker, Blender) and extracted models to animate them for own scenarios.
  • Using Game Maker or 3D editing software to make original animations.
• Are all Machinima works effectively Fan Works (Fan Videos, Fan Animation)?
• Are all Machinima works effectively WebAnimation? (Especially noteworthy as a few tropers including Fighteer believe Machinima/ could be merged with Web Animation/ or Web Video/).

Edited by Amonimus on Aug 17th 2022 at 2:41:21 PM

I would be in favor of moving Machinima works to Web Video. Web Animation is a bit of a stretch for them because, aside from clip editing on movie software, the footage is taken in real-time from the games these actors are roleplaying in.

EDIT: That proposal might work better actually.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Aug 9th 2022 at 5:15:38 AM

1) Machinima is currently categorized as a subset of Web Animation.

2) Red Vs Blue uses a mix of machinima and CGI animation, so if it's decided to merge Machinima/ into other namespace(s), and if it's decided that Machinima generally falls under WebVideo/, Red vs. Blue would likely be an exception to the latter.

Last I checked, RVB is still mostly Machinima even if a good chunk of it is animated normally.

Why would the style or source of animation matter in any way to the namespace?

How others feel about Machinima/? I think it's just a genre of Web Animation and not really own Media.

I'd say it's a specific type of animation. We don't have puppet shows separate from live-action shows, for example.

True. I'm not entirely clear on where the line is, all I know is I made one page in the namespace since people told me it belonged there. Web Animation/ would probably work just as well.

It's definitely next in line for "redundant namespace to kill".

Fanfic/ the namespace is specifically for written fan works (we don't put fancomics in it, for instance), so as far as namespacing goes, they have nothing to do with each other. Now whether machinima are fan works on the other hand is a valid question, but that would be a matter of indexing rather than namespacing.

I think it is related to the question of what counts as tabletop RPG fanworks. (FanWorks.Tabletop Games includes actual campaigns presented for an audience, pretend campaigns such as Campaign Comics, stories set in D&D-based worlds, stories about characters playing D&D, and other things.)

Changed that bit because I did mean Fan Works, as in almost all Machinima use exported assets or are set in another work.

Heck, the page I made is explicitly for a series of Warrior Cats fan stories told via the use of a virtual roleplay game for the same series. (It's not an RP of course since the actual narratives are told via voiceover and follow a particular script or at least present in-game events as a thought-out narrative, rather than as a story made up by the players as they're playing.)

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 17th 2022 at 7:45:18 AM

Would it be fine to post a notice on this at Ask The Tropers? For a namespace talk, there hasn't been many people despite quite some time passing.

I don't think Machinima is a namespace many people care about. Advertising on ATT is fine.

For the record, I agree with merging, probably under WebAnimation/ if it really is animation. And advertising in ATT is fine.

to advertising on ATT

Having Machinima/ as a separate media namespace does feel like an artifact from when that genre was 1. at its height of popularity, and 2. when the term was widely used. Not helped by it becoming the namesake of an infamously bad multichannel network, whose former logo is still its current icon.

All of that is a long-winded way of saying I'm fine with the namespace getting absorbed by WebAnimation/.

We do technically need a crowner, but this seems like an easy merge.

In favor of transferring the lot to Web Animation. Whether it's dicking around with Garry's Mod/SFM or using in-game editor tools, there is some method of animation involved.

Besides, sprite animation already is normally Web Animation, so by extension the same logic would apply for machinimas.

Edited by GrafVonTirol on Aug 23rd 2022 at 11:38:58 AM

I would say that, as namespaces go, this one doesn't bother me because at least it has a clear definition — what are, and what aren't Machinimas isn't really too hard to clear up.

Though since examples already go in the "Web Animation" folder, I would understand the move, as part of cleaning up artifact namespaces. I'm just saying it isn't as redundant a namespace as previous cases were, like the Disney/ or Bollywood/ ones.

Also, it is sometimes used for very technical distinctions, for example on FanWorks.Thomas And Friends...

I'm personally in favor of the move because A) the term "Machinima" isn't really used that much nowadays, since most animations in the machinima style are referred to as... well, animations, and B) Machinima is a way to make Web Animations, so having them as separate namespaces would be like making "Western Animation" and "Stop-Motion Animation" separate namespaces - that is, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

I'd be fine with a merge. It's one of those weirder namespaces for me where I always knew it existed but never really knew the point, like if it stays fine, if it's cut, also fine.

Expanding on my previous post: this is just another medium subgenre, like the other three namespaces we've cut recently. Subgenres are fine as long as they have enough pages to justify their existence, such as Anime/ and WesternAnimation/ being separate from Animation/. This doesn't, and it should be cut.

I think a case-by-case migration of pages under the heading to Web Animation and Fan Animation would be the ideal option. Like others have said this feels like a holdover from when the genre was at the peak of its popularity; it really is just a niche animation subgenre that happened to explode in popularity for a while due to the relatively low barrier to entry for creators. I'd be against a blanket merge with Fan Animation though; a lot of machinimas were/are telling wholly original stories unrelated to the game they're animated in.

EDIT: Also, if we do wind up keeping the Machinima namespace, unlikely as that seems at this point, I 100% think we should replace the current icon for it. It's a little weird to have the entire genre represented by the logo of a specific network that happens to specialize in it. (Especially one that's so infamous and controversial. Heck, is the Machinima network even still around, or are they defunct now?)

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Aug 23rd 2022 at 12:13:48 PM