Scholar, critic, and curator Henry Lowood has been studying the genesis and evolution of machinima for a quarter of a century. In his key contributions on machinima studies — including The Machinima Reader (with Michael Nitsche, MIT Press, 2011) and a special issue of The Journal of Visual Culture, which was subsequently translated in Italian as Machinima! Teorie, pratiche, dialoghi (2013) — Lowood has been championing machinima as a vernacular practice, a democratic form of film-making. In this short interview, Lowood argues however that today machinima has almost dissolved into the broader milieu of game videos and live streaming culture.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Henry Lowood is Curator for Germanic Collections and Harold C. Hohbach Curator, History of Science & Technology Collections in the Stanford University Libraries. As a curator, he is part of the Humanities Research Group in Green Library, the Department best known for the Lane Reading Room and a wonderful group of colleagues. Henry Lowood has written several essays on such topics as game studies, game preservation, and machinima. Among his most recent books are The Machinima Reader (2012) with Michael Nitsche and Debugging Game History (2016) with Raiford Guins, both published by MIT Press and Machinima! Teorie, pratiche, dialoghi with Matteo Bittanti in 2013, published by Edizioni Unicopli. Along with Guins, Lowood is now editing a new series for MIT Press about the history and culture of gaming. Since 2000, Lowood has headed a project first funded by the Stanford Humanities Laboratory and, since the demise of SHL, continued in the Libraries. Among other projects, Lowood curated the Machinima Archive for the Internet Archive, which is dedicated to the academic investigation and historical preservation of the emerging art form known as machinima. From 2008 to 2013, Lowood led the HTGG Stanford group in a project first funded by the U.S. Library of Congress called Preserving Virtual Worlds.
