Machinima Production Tools:
A Vernacular History of a Creative Medium
Shad Gross Tyler Pace
Indiana University, Indiana University,
Bloomington Bloomington
Address Address
shagross@indiana.edu tympace@indiana.edu
ABSTRACT
In recent years, HCI has shown a rising interest in the crea-
tive practices associated with massive online communities,
including crafters, hackers, DIY, and other expert amateurs.
One strategy for researching creativity at this scale is
through an analysis of a community’s outputs, including its
creative works, custom created tools, and emergent practic-
es. In this paper, we offer one such case study, a historical
account of World of Warcraft (WoW) machinima (i.e., vid-
eos produced inside of video games), which shows how the
aesthetic needs and requirements of video making commu-
nity coevolved with the community-made creativity support
tools in use at the time. We view this process as inhabiting
different layers and practices of appropriation, and through
an analysis of them, we trace the ways that support for
emerging stylistic conventions become built into creativity
support tools over time.
Author Keywords
HCI; creativity; machinima; medium
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI):
Miscellaneous.
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, creativity researchers in HCI have turned
their focus to non-professional forms of creativity, includ-
ing DIY [3,14], craft [25], and amateurs [1, 16]. We believe
that research on machinima videos can contribute to this
agenda. Machinima refers to digital videos that are primari-
ly produced (i.e., set, acted out, and recorded) in video
games and video recorded with screen capture software. For
Davis et al., machinima can be understood as a creative
medium because it entails “digital crafting” involving
“playful creative exploration” of its source materials [8].
The amateur nature of machinima communities emphasizes
emergent creativity as opposed to professionalized and
formal structures of creative practice. Another defining
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise,
or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior
specific permission and/or a fee.
CHI’13, April 27 – May 2, 2013, Paris, France.
Copyright 2013 ACM 978-1-XXXX-XXXX-X/XX/XX...$10.00.
-1-
Jeffrey Bardzell Shaowen Bardzell
Indiana University, Indiana University,
Bloomington Bloomington
Address Address
jbardzel@indiana.edu selu@indiana.edu
aspect of machinima is appropriation—taking assets from
video games and using it for new purposes. Lowood de-
scribes machinima as “found technology,” alluding to found
art, e.g., in Duchamp and Picasso; Lowood describes the
ways that players make videos by “turning the found tech-
nology of the game engine into an animation engine, that is,
by finding a new purpose and context for it” [17]. Nonethe-
less, machinima can also be seen as a rich and distinct me-
dium in its own right. As Harwood suggests, machinimators
“are not necessarily fan-producers with a commercial lean-
ing, but artistic directors seeking to orchestrate and express
their individual vision whilst encapsulating their creative
inspiration and situating their work within the machinima
tradition” [13]. Over time, machinima has developed a
community that incorporates individual contributions but
equally maintains a sense of stylistic conventions that are
unique to machinima. In this sense, it is a good example of
a massive scale, network-based creative community, the
study of which can contribute to HCI’s research agendas in
creativity support and community support tools.
The present study focuses on machinima made with World
of Warcraft assets. WoW is a massively multiplayer online
game, with an estimated 10 million active subscribers. As
with other games, WoW has supported amateur creative
practices beyond machinima. Another creative WoW sub-
community is the add-on (or “mods”) developer communi-
ty, whose members use the WoW API to make custom user
interface panels and widgets. Kow and Nardi say of this
group that they “are not burdened by bureaucracies or em-
ployment restrictions or corporate obligations” [15]. These
mods allow players to change the experience of playing the
game. Nardi and Kallinikos describe this as an exploration
of “the degree to which humans are able to bend technolog-
ical systems or use them in creative and expressive ways”
through WoW mods [22]. One reason, we believe, for the
success of the WoW machinima community is the fact that
the WoW modding community moved beyond developing
game UIs and started developing custom tools for machin-
ima-making.
WoW machinima is supported by an amateur community
held together by the common goal of appropriating assets
from WoW for the purposes of making videos. Machinima
researchers have underscored the significance of machinima
in terms of both audience and intrinsic aesthetics. [19]
writes that “player-created game movies have provided the scaffolds, and artifacts as key to the amateur creative pro-
largest player community ever assembled for a massively cess [1]. This conception of the amateur creative process
multiplayer game with a popular and important outlet for points to an area for potential understanding for HCI with
creative expression and performance.” [18] write that ma- regards to creativity support tools.
chinima is “on the way to a history, an aesthetic, and forms
Most previous studies of creative phenomena have a com-
of reception and marketability that it can call its own.” This
mon thread of placing particular emphasis on the agents of
evolving art form is made possible in part by the ever-
creativity (i.e., creative professionals, artists, etc.) and sup-
greater means of manipulating the graphics and animations
ports and scaffolds (i.e., creativity support tools, organiza-
in the game. “WoW machinima producers manifest their
tional and institutional supports, critical and evaluative
creative practices in often novel ways by leveraging… pro-
norms, etc.). Prominent creativity researchers in psychology
duction tools” [24], and where existing production tools are
have critiqued the emphasis of creativity research on the
insufficient, they develop new ones to replace them.
socio-institutional contexts of creativity and creative pro-
For this paper, we take the position that understanding the cesses, and the comparative lack of research on creative
creative practices of amateur creative communities benefits mediums [21, 26]. This focus has led to a wealth of under-
from not just an empirical understanding of creative behav- standing of the ways that people express themselves crea-
iors and attitudes, but also a critical and empirical under- tively, but has also paid comparatively less attention to the
standing of creative outputs. Another way to say this is that artifacts of creativity.
if we want to understand the creative practices of non-
In HCI, the study of artifacts as a means to understand the
professionals, we need to understand the production tech-
design process is not new. Carroll and Kellogg for example
nologies, visual languages, and intertextual meanings that
examine how “HCI artifacts embody psychological claims”
compose the very “stuff” out of which their creative outputs
[5]. We extend this thinking by looking at massively-
are made. Moreover, this understanding needs to be dia-
amateur creative communities where such claims not only
chronic, that is, unfolding over time rather than a snapshot,
become embodied in artifacts, but also in the tools created
like the communities and their creative practices them-
by the community. Because the artifacts in question are
selves. It also needs a certain degree of medium-specificity,
digital videos, we will adopt perspectives taken from new
that is to say, an awareness of what modes of creative ex-
media theory, visual culture, and art as a means of under-
pression and what experiential effects that the medium—in
standing what meanings lie inside the medium of WoW
our case, WoW machinima—is especially capable of
machinima. Particularly, we will focus on how the appro-
providing. We contribute an analysis of the co-emergence
priation of game assets plays an important role. Rosner [25]
of community-created machinima production tools and the
has previously investigated appropriation in the context of
visual language of machinima itself to provide the HCI re-
DIY Ikea furniture, using Ron Eglash’s [10] framing of
search community with a detailed case study exposing the
appropriation. We too will use this framing, given Rosner’s
relationships between creativity support tools and emergent
success applying it to physical appropriation. Applying it to
expressive languages.
a digital medium, we examine how such a process of ap-
propriation changes when the material is not physical. We
LITERATURE REVIEW
Research on digital creativity support tools has a considera- then explore in a concrete way specific two-way linkages
ble history in HCI. Shneiderman describes such tools, em- between the tools that facilitate this appropriation and the
phasizing how “software support seems most realizable and emerging visual language of WoW machinima.
beneficial for innovative scientists, doctors, lawyers, musi-
WOW MACHINIMA AS A MEDIUM
cians, artists, teachers, or other knowledge workers who
We view machinima as an emerging medium, and WoW
struggle with problems in recognized domains of work”
machinima as a specific instantiation of it. Other instantia-
[27]. Such conceptions of digital technologies place a focus
tions also exist, e.g., machinima from the game universes of
on the user as a professional individual working within spe-
Halo and Half-Life. We are scoping these out of our analy-
cific, well-defined creative spaces. Extending this notion of
sis for two reasons: their production environments and his-
the creative individual, other studies have focused on crea-
tories are distinct from WoW’s (and each other’s), and the
tive groups. Such investigations have focused on how indi-
intertextual linkages are much stronger within a game
viduals with different perspectives work together to form
community than they are across it (i.e., few WoW videos
communities or practice and how to design to bring creative
reference the Halo universe or its machinima and vice-
ability out in these groups [11]. As the number of people
versa). Instead, we will seek to understand diachronically
involved in a creative process increases, the communication
the most distinctive qualities of WoW machinima.
and barriers to that communication become an additional
aspect of the creative process [12]. In addition to extending In doing so, we will partly make use of a fundamental con-
the concept of creativity to include groups, insights have cept in media studies and the ontology of art in philosophi-
been drawn from the ways that non-professionals employ cal aesthetics: the medium-specificity hypothesis. Philoso-
creativity. One such insight identifies agents, supports and pher of art and film Noël Carroll [6] defines it as follows:

-2-
 The medium-specificity hypothesis holds that each art the artifact [i.e., the source material] has not been creat-
form has its own domain of expression and exploration. ed for or by the artist, nor generally for the purpose of
That domain is determined by the nature of the medium display or artistic statement. The artist selects unexcep-
through which the objects of a given art form are com- tional objects and gives them a new context or purpose.
posed. Often the idea of ‘the nature of the medium’ is
Appropriation is thus aesthetically interesting because of its
thought of in terms of the physical structure of the me-
decontextualizations and creative conceptual re-cycling,
dium. The medium-specificity thesis can be construed as
notions that we will refine throughout the paper.
saying that each art form should pursue those effects
that, in virtue of its medium it alone—i.e., of all the Let us apply all of this to machinima. The physical aspects
arts—can achieve. Or the thesis might be interpreted as of WoW machinima as a medium comprises the assets of
claiming that each art form should pursue ends that, in the WoW game: characters, animations, environments,
virtue of its medium, it achieves most effectively or best sounds, physics, camera, user interface, etc., and, somewhat
of all those effects at its disposal. recursively, WoW’s own visual style, which can be de-
scribed as cartoony high fantasy. The artistic aspect of
Beyond suggesting that each medium is uniquely capable of
WoW machinima as a medium, then, is how machinimators
supporting certain expressive modes and/or achieving cer-
stylistically appropriate those assets to create new mean-
tain experiential effects, this hypothesis also suggests that
ings.
doing so is a normative criterion for evaluating creative
works, i.e., that they are good inasmuch as they leverage the Our analysis reveals diachronically the ways that communi-
unique capabilities of the medium. ty-created tools alter the physical appropriation of WoW
game assets, which in turn alters the artistic aspects of the
The second point—the normative criterion—has been criti-
medium by facilitating the emergence of new styles. In do-
cized for its failure to accommodate stylistic innovation and
ing so, we are contributing to what creativity theorist Bur-
medium reinvigoration over time, because such a view
gess [4] calls a “vernacular history,” that is, a history com-
seems to fix a medium’s purpose in its physical nature [6,
parable to those of art history, but focusing on popular cul-
9]. Yet the means by which artists work with their materials
ture, with the benefit of contributing to a scholarly under-
is inevitably stylized. By style, we refer to “the constancy,
standing of amateur creativity.
or consistency, in the way an individual, or a group, treats
the formal elements of art, or visual culture” [2]. But it is
METHODS
difficult to argue that any given style is inherently more true
Our methodology was designed to support the construction
to the physical materials than another. To provide a more
of a vernacular history by placing focus on stylistic consid-
useful formulation, Margolis [cited in 7] distinguishes be-
erations built into the historical unfolding of the machinima
tween two aspects of a medium: the physical medium,
production tools themselves. There are a number of differ-
which is defined by what the work is physically composed
ent tools that WoW machinimators employ, but our interest
of, and the artistic medium, which encompasses the stylistic
lay specifically in those that were created and maintained
decisions regarding how to use those physical properties.
by members of the community, because they most directly
Margolis’ view, which we adopt in this paper, sees the
represent the specific stylistic concerns of the medium;
specificity of a medium as a negotiation between its physi-
thus, we are not incorporating into our analysis the histories
cal and stylistic aspects.
of Adobe Premier or Windows Movie Maker, though we
The physical constitution of digital video may not be obvi- know that they were used.
ous. Media theorist Lev Manovich suggests that the materi-
Our choice of which tools to focus on was informed by our
als of digital media include “graphics, moving images,
parallel analysis of a large corpus of WoW machinima, in
sounds, shapes, spaces and text become computable, i.e.
which we noticed that machinima producers acknowledged
simply another set of computer data” [20]. In other words,
two particular tools in the video credits and in descriptions
for Manovich, the “physical” substrate of digital media
attached to the videos in their online portals. The two tools
comprises computational forms of traditional elements—
that we saw referenced repeatedly are the WoW Model
images, melodies, etc. This definition accommodates both
Viewer and the WoW Machinima Tool. These tools served
continuity and change. It accommodates continuity because
as the focal points to guide our data collection efforts. They
traditional media—including their visual languages, repre-
also had the intellectual benefit of reflecting three key val-
sentational conventions, etc.—are still inscribed in digital
ues: they were free and commonly used; they were devel-
media. It accommodates change because these visual lan-
oped to support WoW machinima as an emerging medium,
guages and conventions are now subject to algorithmic ma-
and the WoW player community generated them.
nipulation. The tension between continuity and change be-
comes the locus for much aesthetic possibility in digital We applied a systematic and explorative process of gather-
media. Reencoding traditional media elements and digitally ing data, first casting a large net with sequential searches on
manipulating them is a form of appropriation. Google, bracketed by year from the release of WoW to the
present (2004-2012), of the names of the two tools along
Lowood [17] describes appropriation art as follows:

-3-
with related words/phrases such as “change log,” “release,”
and “download.” Combined, these searches returned ap-
proximately 7,200 hits, which were then reviewed and fil-
tered for relevance (some hits were from links on unrelated
sites). The pages were categorically organized into sources
that were focused on application versions, change logs, and
tutorials. This was distilled down to the most salient 14
different versions of the two tools, 16 change logs, and 6
video tutorials.
The change logs and machinima tutorials were used to de-
termine when specific tool releases and features occurred
within the period of observation. For the remaining catego-
ries, we identified frequently mentioned sites, blogs, and
forums, such as the tools’ websites, machinima hosting
sites, and prominent machinimators’ blogs. These sites
were subsequently used as sources to build a more focused
timeline, with emphasis given to the machinima tools’ sites.
Since the Internet is not a static document, and we wanted
to gather information that was as close as possible to the
original context, the Internet Archive WayBack Machine
(web.archive.org) was used to view archived news updates
from the tool websites, allowing access to content that had
been removed over time. This resulted in a total of 91 news
updates from WoW Model Viewer and WoW Machinima
Tool’s respective websites.
Significant events and videos that were identified through
our searches were chronologically organized, and further
searches were employed to fill in any gaps with respect to
specific events in the timeline. This synthesis of events
serves as the core of the data used to reconstruct meaning in
the history of WoW machinima tools and their relationship
to the community and medium of WoW machinima. It is
supplemented with a handful of “close readings” [23] of
popular films that are representative of some aspect of the
history of the tools.
FINDINGS
We noted earlier that a key aesthetic quality of machinima
is the appropriation of game assets. Eglash [10] identifies
three distinct modes of appropriation, which get at different
degrees of appropriation. We use these distinctions to struc-
ture our description of our findings. Eglash’s distinctions
can be summarized as follows:
• Reinterpretation: This mode of appropriation changes
just semantic association. Graffiti placed on a building
doesn’t change the building’s use, but provides a new
relationship of meaning about the buildings possible res-
idents, location, etc.
• Adaptation: This mode of appropriation changes se-
mantic association and use. Cassette players had a main
function of playback, but they were adapted for the dif-
ferent purpose of making mix-tapes.
• Reinvention: This mode of appropriation changes se-
mantic association, use, and structure. Converting a car
-4-
into a “low-rider” fundamentally alters the structure,
use, and association of a vehicle.
These different levels of appropriation reference both the
physical (e.g., a wall and spray paint) and artistic (e.g., the
specific stylistic identity of a graffiti artist) aspects of a
medium that we introduced earlier in the paper.
Reinterpretation
Early definitions of the medium of WoW Machinima fo-
cused on capturing and sharing the actions and environ-
ments found in the game. The defining component of WoW
machinima, World of Warcraft, was released in November
2004. However, some of the earliest machinima date back
to September of that year, showing off aspects of the beta
version of the game [i].1 Shortly after the game’s release,
warcraftmovies.com debuted, dividing machinima into cat-
egories of Player vs. Player (“PVP”), which is players
fighting other players, and Player vs. Environment
(“PVE”), which is players fighting AI-controlled monsters
within the game, and “Other”—a catch-all for anything that
did not fall into the other categories [ii]. Oxhorn, who
would later emerge as one of the medium’s superstars,
posted “A PVP Laugh,” a machinima video about PVP [iii].
While this video uses mostly unaltered assets of the game,
its meta-PVP commentary challenged Warcraft Movies’
categorization. Even at this early point, when the medium
of WoW Machinima was very tightly tied to what happened
in the game, the seeds of its later explosive development
were being sown.
Our focus on the appropriation of game content as-it-was
presents one of the earliest, wide-spread stylistic considera-
tions in WoW machinima. PVP and PVE videos would take
visuals from the game and present them as they happened,
only in video rather than interactive format. This wholesale
taking of game visuals constitutes only a semantic associa-
tive change – a move from the interactive experience of
playing the game to the viewing / narrative experience of a
video. The game remains the same, but presentation and
association with how it should be consumed changed.
While a large quantity of videos just showed gameplay,
there were nonetheless videos that incorporated narrative
elements as well. A particularly famous and early example
of this is “Leeroy Jenkins” [iv] (Figure 1). “Leeroy Jenkins”
was released in 2005 [v] and tells the story of a group of
players about to tackle a particularly difficult battle. The
video has no special effects or alterations to the visual
presentation of the game; even the game UI (e.g., buttons,
chat window, and player nameplates) is conspicuously visi-
ble in the video. In fact, the video seems like it is depicting
1
Our research is documented with dozens of non-academic
resources, which we indicate with Roman numerals and list
online at http://crit.soic.indiana.edu/publications/wow-
machinima-urls/.
events of actual gameplay. It was eventually revealed that
this video was staged [19], but a large part of its appeal was
the fact that it seemed to be actual recorded gameplay of a
reckless player and the consequences of his play. In this
way, it relies entirely on its reference to the actual game.
Figure 1. “Leeroy Jenkins” captured all of the elements of
WoW gameplay including interface elements.
During this period, a user-created software program, WoW
Model Viewer (hereafter Model Viewer), was introduced,
although not initially for machinima-making. Model View-
er was introduced as a means to access and alter game con-
tent; it is a tool that allows access to WoW’s data files,
which contain all of 3-dimensional models that comprise
the avatars, non-player characters (NPCs), and objects in
the game. This tool was originally created by programmers
named Ufo_Z and Darjk [vi]. The program’s initial descrip-
tion from wowmodelviewer.org provides suggests its in-
tended uses: “You can dress up and customise the character
models or just view NPC models” [vii]. A frequent example
of this type of use was to look through the game’s data files
as a means of finding out which different models existed
[viii]. Since Model Viewer provided access to all of the
different character models and armor, clothing, and weap-
ons from the game, players could recreate their character or
any other in-game character that they wanted.
One application of this personalization technique was to
make images using the models from the game [ix, x, xi].
These images allow the users to reconstruct and then show
off their avatars as well as their ability to creatively ma-
nipulate the contents of the game. This also meant that
players could easily explore options regarding outfits and
combinations of different gear to see what looked best, for a
new form of recreation within the game [xii, xiii].
Early WoW machinima, and the initial purpose of one of its
tools, was focused on the reinterpretation of WoW as a
game and as a library of 3D models. In this way, it was ex-
amining the properties of the game as a part of the physical
medium. There is little evidence of the corresponding de-
velopment of machinima as an artistic medium beyond the
most rudimentary forms. Likewise for the Model Viewer:
though it would later contribute to an explosion of an ex-
-5-
pressive vocabulary of machinima, including genres and
styles, at this stage it was merely used for changing seman-
tic relationships of game assets, e.g., taking graphical ele-
ments from the game to make pictures celebrating a play-
er’s avatar and personalizing those avatars through greater
options with regard to clothing or mount.
Adaptation
The greater selection options presented by Model Viewer
show the beginnings of what would become adaptation in
WoW machinima. Once these were more seriously ex-
plored, assets taken from WoW not only were presented in
a new format, but they were also changed in the process.
Eglash, citing Hess, describes flexibility as an important
facet of appropriation through adaptation [10]. Flexibility
can be understood as the number of different ways that the
appropriated content can be used. The adaptation phase
began in earnest when machinimators began to exploit it for
constructing machinimatic images, because the game’s
original assets could now be used more flexibly than ever.
WoW machinimators realized that the Model Viewer al-
lowed them to abstract character models from the game.
The initial version of the Model Viewer made no mention
of machinima. However, about a month after the launch of
the site, a new, lengthier “About WoW Model Viewer”
section was added with a note about the addition of custom-
izable lighting “to allow the users, notably machinima mak-
ers, to improve the lighting conditions to help blend the
models with background scenes” [xiv].
Meanwhile, an unrelated event was about to shine new light
on this emerging medium: On October 4th, 2006, a South
Park episode about World of Warcraft, titled “Make Love,
Not Warcraft,” aired [xv]. Beyond the exposure this episode
created for the game itself, the episode included a consider-
able amount of machinima video, some of it used in highly
original and innovative ways. Now, much of this content
was filmed on a private server and so could not have been
easily accomplished by regular machinimators. But this
information was reported in a Machinima.com interview
with members of the South Park, and then linked through
the widely read web site WoW Insider [xvi]. All of this had
the effect of simultaneously raising demand for WoW ma-
chinima throughout the community and also showcasing
new creative possibilities for WoW machinimators.
Model Viewer’s features provided the means to achieve
many of the effects achieved in the South Park episode.
Along with the lighting effects mentioned earlier, Model
Viewer allowed models from the game to be “green
screened” onto new backgrounds. Taken from television
and film, this process involves capturing video with a sin-
gle-color background and digitally replacing the color with
a new image. While Model Viewer made the process of
removing a background substantially easier then cutting
characters out, using this as a method of making videos was
not without its difficulties. Mike “Spiff” Booth explains the
process: “Every element in every shot had to be captured
from the Model Viewer or the Map Viewer or from the
game itself, and then had to be composited together by
hand. I averaged about an hour of work for every three se-
conds of footage, but in the end, I was really excited by the
result, and judging from people’s reactions, it seems like
they are too” [xvii]. Motivated by audience appreciation,
Booth cultivated his own technical skills and contributed to
demand for, and ability to produce, machinima videos that
featured 2.5D compositing (i.e., the stacking of layers of
content along the z-axis).
Another example of positive audience reception can be seen
in the contests that awarded prizes to vote-winning machin-
ima videos. A contest in 2006 gave the grand prize to the
machinima “Edge of Remorse,” by Jason Choi [xviii]. The
video employed the Model Viewer extensively as a means
of decontextualizing game assets, and impressed many ma-
chinima fans, leaving more than one comment poster “try-
ing to figure out how they did some of these things” [xviii].
With Model Viewer increasingly recognized for its machin-
ima potential and “Make Love, Not Warcraft” having
reached millions of players with its new approaches to ma-
chinimatic production, WoW machinima began to see con-
siderable changes not only in semantic associations but also
use. Assets no longer were confined to the rules of the
game. Videos that employed techniques supported by Mod-
el Viewer were receiving positive feedback and the contin-
ued practice of using it, in spite of difficulties it presented,
point to a stylistic technique that was increasingly valued
by the community. A prime example of the kind of video
made with the Model Viewer that exploited its ability to
increase flexibility with regards to adaptation is Oxhorn’s
2007 video “ROFLMAO” [xix] (Figure 2).
Figure 2. “ROFLMAO” with Oxhorn (left) employing the
point emote built into the character’s model
“ROFLMAO” presents an early version of what would
become his regular use of the Model Viewer. The video
relies on Model Viewer to toy not only with the semantic
association of the characters, but also how they are used. A
remake of a Muppets skit, ROFLMAO replaces the mup-
pets with virtual avatar puppets taken from WoW, a change
in semantic association. Standard character “emotes,” i.e.,
simple animations that are built into the models such as
pointing and waving, are used to create conversational in-
teractions among the video’s three characters Oxhorn,
-6-
Staghorn, and Mortuus. While these “emotes” were de-
signed to enhance text chat in the game, their appropriation
to create a sustained musical dialogue constitutes a substan-
tial change in use. Additionally, the characters are compo-
sited onto a solid white background, completely decontex-
tualized from the game world. Oxhorn’s adoption of this
kind of technique shows an emphasis on this it as a medi-
um-specific style, and it shows the artistic aspect of the
medium coming into its own.
In addition to flexibility, Eglash [10] also introduces the
concept of latent functions as a driving force behind appro-
priation through adaptation. Latent functions are capabili-
ties that are not focal and are therefore not considered as
part of regular use. An example is using a cassette player to
record mix tapes, which leverages the “record” function as
a latent function. In WoW machinima, the game’s camera
would emerge as a latent function for machinima through a
new tool, and the second major tool we will discuss: the
WoW Machinima Tool (hereafter, Machinima Tool).
Machinima Tool introduces the means to reorient the “use”
of the game’s camera for WoW machinima. The native
game camera in WoW has two modes: a third-person view
that can be zoomed in and out, and a first-person view. The
default, third-person view, uses an approximately ¾ over-
head view. Beyond the ability to control level of zoom, the
normal in-game camera also provides some ability to rotate
the camera around one’s character, which automatically
snaps back to a straight behind view when the player’s ava-
tar begins to move. This camera had several key limitations
that affected machinima making. The player’s character
always appears in the exact center of the screen in third-
person view; the camera has infinite depth of field, meaning
that objects in the foreground and background are always in
perfect focus; and the only way to create pans and other
moving shots is to go into first-person view, so that the
camera moves along with the character, which moves at
constant rates of speed that are much faster than traditional
camera pans, tilts, and zooms in film and television.
As described by its developer, Malu05, Machinima Tool
made it so “you no longer need a super smooth hand to
make impressive ‘flyby’ shots, and you can finally make
camera movements like the in game cutsequences” [xx].
Saying that players can “finally” make movies similar to
WoW cut scenes, which were not bound by the limitations
of the game camera, implies a demand for such stylistic
techniques.
Because these tools were created within the WoW machin-
ima community, specific features could be constructed
around that’s community’s own stylistic demands and that
updates to the tools could cater to emergent stylistic desires.
Machinima Tool v2, a substantial update to the capabilities
of the previous Machinima Tool, was released in July 2009,
with “new custom environment controls that let you control
how things look down to every little detail such as
sky/cloud color, light color, water color, fog color, fog den-
sity, fog near and farclip etc” [xxi]. At this point, machini-
mators’ abilities extended far beyond what is afforded by
the game. This allowed for videos that are a far cry from
those that simply presented game play events, although
even those could now incorporate a more dynamic camera.
There was a high level of experimentation with narrative
vids, feature length films, and music videos that are original
or pull in elements from other media. This positioned ma-
chinima’s medium-specificity stylistically between the ear-
lier focus on WoW as an unadulterated source for appropri-
ation and the conventions of television and film.
Figure 3. Gigi, close up and using a talk emote, composited in
front of a stylized background
An example of this stylistic position is the video “Pwnage
Like Us” (Figure 3). A 2009 production by machinimators
Nyhm, Gigi, and Druidboyz, this video appropriates WoW
assets in new ways. A pastiche of the hip-hop song “Swag-
ga Like Us,” the video adopts many stylistic conventions
from hip-hop music videos. Close up views of front facing
avatars are composited over highly stylized backdrops.
Emotes are used in a manner similar to “ROFLMAO,” but
now finger wags are in the face of the viewer, and Gigi’s
pet leopard attacks the viewer by virtue of its proximity to
the camera. Sweeping pans move through the game’s land-
scapes smoothly. These effects are achieved by a combina-
tion of camera manipulations and compositing, showing
how the use of Model Viewer and Machinima Tool had not
only grown in sophistication independent of each other, but
also the techniques that they supported were being com-
bined to great effect. This shows movement towards the
third of Eglash’s modes of appropriation, reinvention. Now
the level of appropriation has evolved beyond the structural
constraints of the physical medium and individual tool use.
Reinvention
Beyond the substantial changes in semantic association and
use presented by a video such as “Pwnage Like Us,” [xxii]
reinvention entails stylistic changes that substantially re-
structure the source of appropriation. Videos began to dis-
play even greater flexibility and more novel applications of
latent functions, to the point of dramatically changing the
fundamental structure of what could actually be derived
from WoW. One such change came in the form of a stylistic
desire to change avatar’s animations.
-7-
Prior to this point, the majority of animations came from
emotes that Model Viewer allowed to be appropriated. This
proved to be insufficient for the demands of WoW machin-
ima. As 3D models, acquiring WoW’s assets through Mod-
el Viewer allowed for editing in 3D modeling programs
such as Maya or Blender. Such work is highly technical,
specialized, and painstaking—it more or less requires pro-
fessional-level animation skills to achieve. Nonetheless, this
technique was employed to create the highly popular ma-
chinima, “Blind” (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Two avatars clash in a way not afforded by WoW’s
animation in Blind
A drastic departure from what can be done in standard
WoW, “Blind” employs custom 3D animation to make ava-
tars move and interact in ways that simply do not exist in
WoW. Created by Percula in 2008 [xxiii], this video ma-
nipulates WoW models as if they are taking part in an ac-
tion movie. Just as “Pwnage Like Us” appropriated WoW
to make a parody of a hip-hop video, this presents a WoW
story in a stylistically dramatic narrative. The level of ap-
propriation required meet the stylistic demands of a movie
such as “Blind” far exceeded the contemporary capacities
of just Model Viewer or Machinima Tool.
Custom animation seemed impractical for most WoW ma-
chinimators and no WoW machinima since “Blind” has
replicated its stylistic achievements. That may soon change:
in a recent development, the Model Viewer developers an-
nounced the “Model Viewer Kinect” project [xxiv]. This is
an attempt to use an X-Box Kinect to control and move the
models in Model Viewer without requiring the more diffi-
cult task of manually editing the 3D models with a 3D
modeling program [xxiv]. When the stylistic medium of
WoW machinima made a medium-specific change in the
direction of reinventing the structural element of animation,
Model Viewer responded by trying to radically change it’s
feature set.
Not to be excluded from this reinvention, Machinima Tools
has also updated its capabilities to incorporate more stylistic
aspects of real world cameras. Just as “Blind” appropriated
features of the visual style of an action film, so conventions
from television and film suggested the need for control over
focal depth. An example of artistic medium outside of
WoW machinima, depth-of-field uses the physics of a cam-
era’s lens to make elements in or out of focus relative to
their distance from the camera. This is used in cinema and
TV to draw attention to certain elements of a scene; for
example, a close-up of an actor reacting to something might
have a blurry background to draw the viewer’s eye to the
actor’s face. A more recent version of Machinima Tool
incorporated features that, when used in conjunction with
other video editing programs, could produce depth-of-field
effects [xxv]. The instructional video that describes apply-
ing this technique, however, shows that is still not an easy
process [xxvi]. That machinimators use it anyway suggest
that the extra effort is worth it—that it is an important ele-
ment of machinima’s visual language.
These changes produce videos where the source material is
neither necessarily in the context of WoW nor behaving
like it does in the game. This reinvents WoW through ap-
propriation by giving it new associations with video, uses
that are more like older media, and changes to the funda-
mental elements of camera behavior and animation. An
example of this level of appropriation is “The Hills Have
Eggs.”
Figure 5. A character in the foreground is out of focus while
one in the background is in in “The Hills Have Eggs”
Released by another prolific machinimator, Obilith, in 2012
[xxvii], the video “The Hills Have Eggs” reinvents WoW to
tell its story. It employs a number of different effects from
different tools. Depth-of-field is used to draw attention to
characters in the background of shots. Avatars shake, move
their eyes, and are split in half in ways that do not occur in
WoW emotes. One avatar even appears naked, something
that is not at all possible in WoW, which has a Teen rating
from the ESRB. The results stylistically look more like the
movies (e.g., “The Hills Have Eyes”) and television pro-
grams (e.g., “Game of Thrones”) that it parodies than pre-
vious machinima ever did.
Having described a partial history of WoW machinima as it
pertains to appropriation and medium-specific stylistic as-
pects, we now address the ways that this shaped Model
Viewer and Machinima Tool and suggest some implications
for creativity support tools.
-8-
DISCUSSION
Leveraging the lenses of appropriation and vernacular crea-
tivity allowed us to construct a medium-specific history of
WoW machinima. In constructing this history, we identified
a number of mechanisms by which the machinima medium
supported the creative appropriation of game assets. WoW
machinima presents a case study of a medium wherein the
development of the medium-specific stylistic conventions
and creativity support tools used to make that medium are
tightly connected. These connections were discussed with
respect to the concept of appropriation. However, these
connections are further related through one overarching
theme: elements of the game are decontextualized through
appropriation in creative and open-ended ways. Whereas
the constraints of physical material limited decontextualiza-
tion in [25], it takes on a new importance in WoW Machin-
ima where the ability to manipulate appropriated assets is
more closely tied to the tools created by the community.
Early machinima videos such as “Leeroy Jenkins” were
limited in their ability to take game assets outside of the
contexts the game placed them in. The video adds a new
layer to the context of a raid in WoW by adding a story of a
bumbling oaf who ruins the intricately laid plans of his
guild mates. This narrative builds off of the context of the
game, situating it in what appears to be actual game play.
However, this is actually a ruse [19]. At this early stage,
many machinima just showed gameplay, but “Leeroy Jen-
kins” appropriated the apparent simplicity of captured
gameplay and staged an event that, though fictional, in-
sightfully and humorously captured something authentic of
the gameplay experience.
Machinimators were not content to make videos that had to
appropriate the game as a whole. As noted earlier, one of
the facets of the adaptation phase of appropriation is what
Eglash [10], citing Hess, describes as “flexibility.” For
Hess, flexibility refers to capabilities that are built into the
source medium, such as using the record function of a tape
player. However, it is also possible to interpret flexibility as
built into the tools used to appropriate a source medium.
Model Viewer introduced the possibility of taking charac-
ters out of the game and putting them into new contexts, as
we saw with “ROFLMAO.” Its blank nowhere decontextu-
alizes the characters, whose interactions are still based off
of the standard WoW emotes, but now do so in a way that
refers to WoW, but is not in it. The tool thus changed the
machinimators’ relationship to their own materials, but the
materials themselves did not change. Nonetheless, the en-
hanced flexibility translated into a heightened expressive
vocabulary.
In game, avatars are constrained to areas that can be ac-
cessed by the player and equipment that they actually own
in the game. The WoW Model Viewer made these re-
strictions more flexible, allowing player’s to choose combi-
nations that would otherwise be prohibitively difficult to
obtain (such as particularly hostile environments or ex-
tremely rare epic weapons). Machinima Tool further in-
creased flexibility by allowing the camera, a latent function
of gameplay, to be moved in new ways. In “Pwnage Like
Us” these two elements are combined to create a video that
takes players’ avatars and decontextualizes them from the
game, and into a hip-hop styled video, but which also fea-
tures flythrough shots of landscapes that are decontextual-
ized from the players. Now aspects of the game are being
handled discretely, combined only when necessary to the
style of the video, such as one of the stars, Gigi, showing
her prowess at fighting enemies in game.
The characters in “Blind” and “The Hills Have Eggs” are
not taken out of the context of the game as much, both tak-
ing place in more WoW-like environments, but the actions
of the characters are removed from their video game source.
“Blind” reverses the situation in “Leeroy Jenkins,” taking a
story from WoW’s lore and changing the ways that charac-
ters in that story move and interact as a means to stylistical-
ly present that story in a way that is styled after an action
movie. “The Hills Have Eggs,” on the other hand, plays off
the humor of characters from WoW decontextualized into a
pastiche of a horror movie.
Throughout the history of WoW machinima, game assets
are decontextualized in increasingly formal and granular
ways. While at first the game is taken as a whole to func-
tion as a decontextualized narrative, videos that followed
would take the characters as a decontextualized unit. Then,
the animations of those characters are removed to, leaving
the avatars’ appearances as the element that remains un-
changed. However, the application of these tools is not uni-
form across all elements or videos. Machinimators pick and
choose elements to decontextualize. Even a video that is far
from its source material, such as “The Hills Have Eggs”
still relies upon the recognizable characters from WoW as
part of its narrative effect. Changing the appearance of the-
se characters is possible, and arguably easier than a more
elaborate effect such as narrow depth-of-field, but a major
part of the video is still using the characters from WoW as
they are in the game. Thus, although the potential exists for
the appropriated elements from WoW to be just the arma-
tures that exist in the game, part of the medium-specific
style of WoW Machinima is WoW itself. The ways that
machinimators pick and choose elements to be contextual-
ized is tied into the flexibility afforded by tools, but there is
always a process of choosing elements that are core to the
game to become major components of these videos.
In addition to the selective decontextualizing of game as-
sets, the tools themselves become decontextualized over
time. Because the tools used to create WoW machinima are
created by part of the community, they are iterated upon in
response to the specific desires of that community. Some-
times this means taking a tool out of its context of use and
applying it to an entirely new set of goals and requirements.
Model Viewer itself was appropriated from its initial use as
a UI tool or a tool for making pictures to a program that
-9-
facilitates machinimatic video compositing by adding a few
features to the general extraction feature. The flexibility of
the tool allowed for this. By presenting a single, general yet
powerful, feature of taking models from the context of the
game, the tool could be taken from the context of just view-
ing models to making them part of a video-making process.
Machinima Tool also was appropriated, although in a more
subtle way. By incorporating additional latent functions in
the games camera, background elements could be changed
to the same green-screen color that allowed compositing
with Model Viewer. This allowed Machinima Tool to be
used as tool for compositing in the same way as Model
Viewer. Yet, this did not mean that Oxhorn, who used the
Model Viewer frequently to make machinima videos,
switched over to the Machinima Tool. Just as machinima-
tors selectively decontextualize aspects of the game, so too
do machinimators selectively decide which tools to use, and
how that tool use becomes part of their own styles.
This selective decontextualizing is part of the vernacular of
the WoW machinima community. Although the tools have
demonstrated greater capability for increasing the flexibil-
ity, extending beyond Eglash and Rosner’s descriptions of
appropriation, machinimators select different levels of the
game’s content in a way that allows for greater change, in
terms of context, than physical media. However, conceptual
continuity with respect to the source material, remains. As
later videos like “Blind” have shown, this can even be a
major point in the plot of WoW. Alternately, though “The
Hills have Eggs” changes a great number of aspects of the
assets taken from the game, part of its humor is rooted in
the character types following certain roles that are ascribed
to them by the game, such as the oft loathed gnomes falling
victim. The appropriation of WoW content, as a source for
machinima, goes beyond just using the game as a matter of
convenience and source of a physics engine. It provides the
medium-specific style of employing characters and situa-
tions faithful to the game world. The tools, then, need to be
general enough to accommodate changing nuanced aspects
of the game, or even aspects of their own use, but at the
same time capable of incorporating salient aspects of the
game as per the machinimator’s desires. This picking and
choosing, then, becomes the way that the medium-specific
aspects of the characters, environments, and plot of WoW
are stylistically appropriated outside of other elements.
CONCLUSION
As we have shown, the artifacts created by a massive scale
online creative community, when examined systematically,
contribute to an understanding of the nature and history of
creative innovation within the medium. With WoW, the
elements that are built into the game not only supply the
formal qualities that make up machinima, but they also
bring larger concepts of character types and even plotlines
of WoW. While there is a demand to increase the flexibility
of the tools over time, it never reduces the desire to incor-
porate the game.
We argue that research on creativity support tools can bene-
fit by supplementing methods focused on creative users and
processes of creativity with an awareness of how decontex-
tualzed content is appropriated into concrete styles, enabled
by and driving demand for medium-specific creativity sup-
port tools. In broader terms, we are arguing that the medium
and materiality of works is key to understanding the crea-
tivity of massive-scale amateur communities, and that tools
contribute in specific ways to their expressive vocabularies.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was funded in part by the NSF IIS Crea-
tive IT (#1002772) and the Intel Science and Technology
Center for Social Computing programs. We appreciate the
thoughtful feedback from the reviewers.
REFERENCES
1. Bardzell, J. (2007) Creativity in Amateur Multimedia:
Popular Culture, Critical Theory, and HCI. Human
Technology 3(1), 12-33.
2. Barnard, M. (2001) Approaches to understanding visual
culture. PALGRAVE, New York.
3. Buechley, L., Rosner, D. K., Paulos, E., and Williams,
A. (2009). DIY for CHI: methods, communities, and
values of reuse and customization. Proc CHI EA ‘09.
ACM, 4823-4826.
4. Burgess, J. (2007) Vernacular Creativity and New Me-
dia. Doctoral Dissertation. Queensland University of
Technology, Queensland.
5. Carroll, J. M. and Kellogg, W. A. (1989) Artifact as
theory-nexus: Hermeneutics meets theory-based design.
Proc. CHI ‘89. ACM, 7-14.
6. Carroll N. (1985) Specificity of media in the arts. Jrnl.
of Aesthetic Education 19(4), 5-20.
7. Davies, D. (2005) Medium in art. In Levinson J (Ed.)
The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, Oxford University
Press.
8. Davis, N., Li, B., O'Neill, B., Riedl, M. and Nitsche, M.
(2011) Distributed creative cognition in digital filmmak-
ing. Proc. C&C '11. ACM, 207-216.
9. Doane M A (2007) The indexical and the concept of
medium specificity. Differences 18(1) (2007), 397-408.
10. Eglash, R. (2004) Appropriating Technology: An Intro-
duction In: Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Sci-
ence and Social. U of Minnesota Press.
11. Fischer, G. (2011) Beyond Interaction: Meta-Design and
Cultures of Participation. Proc. of OzCHI ‘11. ACM,
112-121.
12. Fischer, G. (2000) “Social Creativity, Symmetry of Ig-
norance and Meta-Design,” Knowledge Based Systems
Jrnl 13(7–8), 527–537.
- 10 -
13. Harwood, T. (2011) Towards a Manifesto for Machini-
ma. Jrnl of Visual Culture 10(6), 7-12.
14. Kaye, J., Williams, A., Oehlberg, L. (2011) Tinkering,
Crafts and Inventive Leisure Practices. Proc. CSCW'11.
ACM.
15. Kow, Y. M. and Nardi, B. (2010) Culture and Creativi-
ty: World of Warcraft Modding in China and the US. In
Bainbridge, W.S. (Ed.), Online Worlds: Convergence of
the Real and the Virtual. Springer, London.
16. Kuznetsov, S. and Paulos, E. (2010) Rise of the Expert
Amateur: DIY Projects, Communities, and Cultures. In
Proc. NordiCHI ‘10. ACM Press, 295-304
17. Lowood, H. (2008) Found Technology: Players as Inno-
vators in the Making of Machinima. In McPherson, T.
(Ed.) Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected.
MIT Press.
18. Lowood, H. and Nitsche, M. (2011) Introduction. In
Lowood, H. and Nitsche, M. (Ed.), The Machinima
Reader. MIT Press, Cambridge.
19. Lowood, H. (2006) Storyline, Dance/Music, or PvP?
Game Movies and Community Players in World of
Warcraft. Games and Culture 1(4), 362-382.
20. Manovich, L. (2002) The Language of New Media. MIT
Press.
21. Martindale, C. (1990) The Clockwork Muse: The Pre-
dictability of Artistic Change. Basic Books.
22. Nardi, B. and Kallinikos, J. (2010) Technology, Agency
and Community: The Case of Modding in World of
Warcraft, in Holmstrøm, J., Wiberg, M. and Lund, A.
(eds) Industrial Informatics Design, Use and Innova-
tion: Perspectives and Services. New York: Information
Science Reference (IGI Global).
23. Ogden, C., Richards, I.A. (1923) The Meaning of Mean-
ing. Mariner Books, New York.
24. Pace, T., Bardzell, J. and Bardzell, S. (2011) Collective
Creativity: The Emergence of World of Warcraft Ma-
chinima. Proc. BCS-HCI '11. ACM Press 378-384.
25. Rosner, D. K., Ryokai, K. (2009). Reflections on Craft:
Probing the Creative Process of Everyday Knitters. In
Proc. C & C ‘09. ACM, 195-204.
26.Sawyer, R.K. (2000) Improvisation and the Creative
Process: Dewey, Collingwood, and the Aesthetics of
Spontaneity. Jrnl. of Aesthetics & Art Criticism, 58,
149-161.
27. Schneiderman, B. (2002) Creating creativity: User inter-
faces for supporting innovation. In Carroll, J. M. (Ed.)
Human-computer interaction in the new millennium.
Addison-Wesley, Boston, 235–258.