Lecture Writing 1

The first lecture I went to was by Henry Lowood from Stanford University.  He spoke mainly about the history and makings of machinima, which he defined as animated movies created using game technology that can act as a commentary on a virtual world. He started by giving three ways that machinima can be created and presented.  The first method is called demo recording, which he described as replay script based on code from the game engine.  Giving examples from the early Doom and Quake games, he explained that these videos acted as a recording of the actions of a player in which nothing new is learned.  The purpose is just to show gameplay.  The second method of creating machinina he talked about is called screen capture.  Through this method, screen capture software is used to record a viewpoint of an event as it happens in a game.  It does not involve any video files other than game data, and requires no editing with code.  Events are captured in real time through a personal perspective.  As an example, he played the Leeroy Jenkins video from World of Warcraft, in which a player's screen recording records him and his group dying as seen from his perspective.  The third method of creating machinima is called asset compositing.  This method requires people to dig through game files and explore off limits areas of games to exploit glitches and hidden game data.  One example of this he used was a video of World of Warcraft players who used a glitch to be able to walk on walls in order to reach a hidden area not meant to be seen by players.  The purpose of this is to show other players 'what is there.'   Lowood said that machinima owes it's existence to the relationship between players and games, and because of that, it can change how art is created.  In addition to machinima, Lowood also discussed the importance of preserving the history of games and their virtual worlds.  He talked about a project he is working on called 'Preserving Virtual Worlds' in which games and their components are preserved in order to be able to be viewed in the future.  He mentioned two methods for preservation.  The first called software preservation makes it possible to view game data in the future, while the second called documentation identifies that data that needs to be preserved.  He stressed that both methods are of equal importance.