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Online Gameplay Evolution - Machinima

Over ten years ago a ragtag revolutionary army began to congeal in conceivably one of the most darkest and deadliest places on Earth. These video gamers meet up day after day walking endless metal blood strewn corridors. Amidst the ricocheting gunfire, they began exploring outside the boundaries of the game Quake. Released in 1996, Quake was played over local area networks - a precursor to today's Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games.

These revolutionary "rangers" went by mysterious names, like the "Overman". For many what started as just an online game, eventually evolved into a larger guerrilla cultural war. The exact nature of what happened during that period, prior to around the time of 9/11, is hard to piece together as most of the info comes from ghost sightings - those ghost web sites long forgotten by their Quake player makers. Among the text and broken links there is mention of a "veridian manifesto" and a war on the "concept of property" - everything from the Linux operating system, Netscape Navigator and the birth of the open source movement to Napster (Quake servers inspired music file "sharing").

At the center of many of these Quake ghost sites, are short films, called "Quake Movies". These were movies made by gamers screen capturing their in-game characters acting out stories inside the copyrighted game world of Quake, many used gamer developed skins to dress up their "film sets", and early digital video editing software. The first web distributed hit was Diary of a Camper, a short silent film, lasting less than two minutes, about rangers rooting out an embedded gamer (the camper) within DM6, a popular Quake deathmatch map.

Filmmaking inside popular 3D online game engines eventually evolved beyond Quake, and thus gamers needed something better than Quake Movies to describe this new form of gameplay. A gamer, Anthony Bailey, suggested combining the words "machine" and "cinema" into "machinema" (pronounced ma-SHEEN-uh-ma), on the "q2demos" mailing list on 1998.01.05. Machinima pioneer Hugh Hancock dropped the 'e' and added the 'i' when he registered machinima.com, today a central hub for gamer filmmaking and the evolution of online games.

The Evolution Will Not Be Televised

The machinima series Red vs Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles made in 2003 inside Halo on the Xbox was the first to break out of the underground. Even though its story features the constant questioning of a pointless never-ending war between

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