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Quake III Arena is a first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and released in 1999. The game became popular for its fast-paced multiplayer action and its modding community, which produced a variety of custom levels, game modes, and other modifications. One may argue that one of the most successful types of mod was machinima, which is generally described as the use of real-time 3D engines to create animated films.
Machinima made with Quake III Arena allowed players to create their own characters and use in-game tools to record and edit gameplay footage into video. These “movies” could be used to tell stories, create music videos, or recreate scenes from popular movies and TV shows. The ability to create and share machinima was an important part of the Quake III Arena community, and many players became skilled at using the game’s versatile tools to create high-quality videos. They competed with each other outside of the game, in a sense. Machinima can be understood as an example of the kind of unexpected, unplanned gameplay known as emergent gameplay, in Katie Salen’s definition or “High-performance play” to borrow Henry Lowood’s definition. For a more in-depth analysis of machinima’s roots, I recommend the Stanford historian’s insightful essay “Video capture: Machinima, documentation, and the history of virtual worlds”, included in essential The Machinima Reader (MIT Press, 2011).
Matteo Bittanti
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