Machinima License Machinations

First published here.

My first experience with machinima was watching some films made in the game Myth: The Fallen Lords. The game's "Save Film" feature had been used to record some short vids of dwarves blowing themselves up with Molotov cocktails.

Not usually riveting viewing, you'd think, but the film-makers had been hacking the game's hex code and were able to get the dwarves heads' to morph onto half a dozen flapping chickens at the moment of detonation.

From then on, I spend many hours on a crappy dial-up connection searching for and downloading other short clips made inside computer games. As the art of machinima is based on games, the look and feel is as technologically up-to-date as the games are, which nowadays is pretty spectacular: water shimmers, clouds drift slowly across the sky and blood spatters are so good that you feel queasy just looking at some very well arranged pixels.

The biggest problem with machinima now, though, is the legally gray area it falls under.

Game companies own the intellectual property behind the game and most of the artwork too, so just about any film made using computer games infringes on the game developers' copyright in some way.

Watching the machinima community from a distance, I see a lot of frustration. There are film makers out there just dying to push the envelope and explore the limits of the technology at their disposal, but anything they do that might bring them any kind of publicity (and popularity) will probably get them in a lot of legal trouble as well.

I imagine it would be like some bastard owning the rights to any music made by a guitar: you only play for your mates at parties and occasionally someone makes a "live" bootleg recording of it, but anything you do that might make you a rich and famous guitar playing hero will result in the aforementioned bastard being awarded the shirt off your back by way of statutory damages.

This is something that has stumped me for a while: Why aren't the game developers licensing their games to machinima film makers? As it stands, the game companies get no money from fan-made machinima, but plenty of free advertising ("Wow! Look at the graphics in that!") Value-adding is a well-known and often-used business practice - just take an existing product and get it to do something that will make more people buy it. It's not like the game developers have any extra work to do anyway, as there are people making films using their stuff right now.

It would however, be easy to increase a game's attractiveness to film makers by putting in some extra functionality, like releasing the level editors the game designers themselves use - virtual set designing tools in fact.

How does this sound? You buy a game with the regular $69.95 price tag. For $10 extra, you get a non-commercial Machinima License too. Using your (legitimate) product key, you go to the game developers' site and purchase an additional license for, say, $200 that allows you to get commercial sponsors for your machinima film, so you can make a small profit if your project comes in under budget. $600 buys you the right to ask for donations if people like your work. Five grand gets you the ability to stamp 10,000 DVDs and sell them in K-mart.

It might sound silly, but in comparison to the tens of millions of dollars it (apparently) costs production companies like Pixar to make their films, I wonder how many people would jump at the chance to put their creative efforts behind a legally sound machinima project? Perhaps not many, but again, how much work is involved on the game developer's part?

It's also worth thinking about how many people will start off on a cheap license and then purchase upgrades as their skill and confidence increases. Mmm...residual sales! Yum!

Perhaps game companies could even offer basic e-commerce facilities for machinima makers to sell their work. Even being legally able to stick a Revver tag in your film would benefit a lot of people. Games like The Movies and productions like Red Vs Blue (who got a special deal with Microsoft, whereby the makers didn't get massive fines and MS got free publicity) are already pushing this exciting new art form into the public consciousness.

With the game industry already a-twitter over wonderful new "episodic gaming" (or smaller games being released more often in PR-free speak) it seems remiss of this enormous industry to be ignoring the shift towards consumer generated content which, by the way, is an oxymoron if ever I heard one 'cause nobody works in complete isolation, especially script writers or directors. Perhaps the PR-free translation of "consumer generated content" is "content we don't make any money from".

Well, if that's the perceived problem, try opening up the technology to people who want to use it and will pay for the privilege.

Or sue them. That goes down really well.