Machinima: the Metamorphosis of Mapping

Born on the threshold between game and cinema, “machinima”—films made within the world of video games—is a rapidly expanding genre. As Henry Lowood and Michael Nitsche described it, “Machinima is less an enigma than a moving target. It is continuously evolving and morphing—changing shape, makers, markets, and technology.”

Dmitry Frolov and Vladimir Nadein have been co-curating machinima for over four years. At the 69th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen in 2023, they presented “Against Gravity. The Art of Machinima”, the first extensive retrospective on the genre with over 40 films. Smaller iterations of that presentation, such as double-bill features, have since then been presented across the globe.

Machinima often holds subversive political power. Your programme in particular talks about the aftermath of colonisation, capitalism, and wars such as the Korean War and the Cold War. How does geopolitics show up in the gaming world?

Geopolitics is certainly one of the common threads running through the selected films. In this programme, we wanted to build a political framework that challenges Western white supremacy. Reflecting on our earlier programmes and in discussion with machinima filmmakers, we realised that machinima is still very Western and white male-dominated. Videogames, especially the big-budget ones, are mainly made in the USA, Western Europe, and Japan—the latter of which can also be considered a developed capitalist country with an imperialist past. Games made in these places export certain pictures of the world—but from what point of view? It’s important to step outside that loop and seek out diverse machinima to look for new perspectives.

Many filmmakers try to tackle geopolitical power structures. Machinima offers a great opportunity to create counternarratives using the game itself. Hijacking a game and producing a film within the game engine is much cheaper than making a live-action film with a real camera and cast. You can criticise the game from within, but also address other issues, such as oppression in the real world, through the virtual, cheaper and accessible means of art production.

I really like the idea of “hijacking a game”. In Like An Event In A Dream Dreamt By Another – Rehearsal, filmmaker Firas Shehade responds to the idea of “metafiction”, a fiction about fiction. How, in your opinion, is “metafiction” composed here in relation to the reality of Palestine?

We can’t speak for the filmmakers’ artistic choices; we can only respond with what we value about them. In a sense, any machinima film is a misuse of a video game: you don’t follow the rules of the game but use it for the sake of something else. Role-play is an important feature through which these gamers reimagine their reality. In this film, the Palestinian and Arab players reconstruct the gaming space by building Mosques, while re-enacting real-life events, such as the Israeli invasion of the Jenin refugee camp. Their modification of Grand Theft Auto offers a certain response to the digital natives’ real living circumstances and creates a community for Palestinians under occupation.

The film is even more layered in its audiovisual presentation. The game’s sound overlaps with the narrator’s voiceover, which introduces a series of theoretical references such as Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, Clint Hocking’s “ludonarrative dissonance”, and Augusto Boal’s “theatre of the oppressed”. Visually, the film, as a split-screen video, displays both the fictionalised reality of GTA V and the alterations introduced by the modders. The two images comment on each other. What fascinates us is the unequal proportion of the two screens, presenting us only a small glimpse into this role-played world. In our opinion, the filmmaker refuses to transform the modified (gaming) reality into a spectacle, allowing this multilayered work to interrogate what we can see and what is not shown to us.

How, then, does a gamer engage with this reveal of “truth” and critique of the real world?

Taking Firas’s film as an example, its powerful impact stems from two major elements. The first is the documentary element, which has been an essential quality since the emergence of machinima. Henry Lowood argues that future historians of virtual worlds will want to understand what people—players, residents, users—actually did in early virtual worlds.2 By reconstructing a virtual world that mirrors Palestinian reality, the film becomes an archive.

Activism is the second crucial factor in Firas’s work. Games like Grand Theft Auto replicate the real world, transferring social problems and issues into the virtual environment and inviting critical scrutiny. It renders machinima timely and necessary and even gives voices to the oppressed.