Machinima - TV Tropes

Machinima (mah-SHEE-ne-mah or mah-SHIN-nuh-mah) are movies made with video game assets. The word is supposed to be a portmanteau of "Machine" and "Cinema", but the guy who coined the term, Hugh Hancock, misspelled it. Since Hancock misspelled it while coding machinima.com, the term stuck.

Since machinima is a form of scripted video narrative, it could employ any of the Tropes from the main list, and there are also tropes specific to the medium. From a scriptwriting perspective, the technological limitations on the action are the only difference from other media.

Some common plots include:

• "OMG, we're actually characters in a video game": Characters become self-aware and start assaulting the Fourth Wall with a big hammer.
• "But these are FUNNY Marines!": Red vs. Blue spawned a thousand wise-cracking faceless troopers.
• "Evil hackers are infiltrating the server!": Smashtasm spawned a thousand Super Smash Bros. players fighting against the forces of digital evil.
• "You know those quiet guys you play as in various games? Let's give all of them mics!": Freeman's Mind spawned a thousand personalities for formerly generic characters.
• Affectionate Parody of the game being used.

Machinima are almost always Web Originals, but they have even appeared on television in some form. For example, several scenes from the Make Love, Not Warcraft episode of South Park were filmed in World of Warcraft. In the past, there were hubs like Gorilla Gong that made it easy to find quality machinima to watch. Machinima.com was the original go-to place for machinima, but it eventually became a more standard YouTube entertainment network, even branching out their focus to include comic books and fandom at one point. A complete history of the medium can be found at The Other Wiki.

When Machinimators cannot muster enough horsepower (or bandwidth) to make video, and decide to turn their Machinima works into webcomics instead, see Machinomics.

See also RPG Episode, when this is done for the sake of a Formula-Breaking Episode.

---

Examples:

open/close all folders 

Halo Machinima 

Minecraft Machinima 

The Sims Machinima 

Super Smash Bros. Machinima 

---

Non-Web Video Examples:

---