Fan Art and Machinima

Fan Art of Sonic from the Sonic the Hedgehog series.

One of the ways fans create cultural activities creating fan art. This fan art is interesting in that it allows fans to use the visual images from existing video games but add their own creative touches around them, which are often times very different in mood, genre, or detail than the games that inspired them. We can see from this that understanding of fan art of games contributes to an understanding of the relationships we make to, and find mediated by, global flows of images. (Carlson) Artists create new meanings in the images that they create, and when other people see these images the pick up those meanings and bring them to the game with them as they play. If we look to our left we'll see some fan art of Sonic from the Sonicthe Hedgehog series. By looking closely ath the image we can see that background is of the first level from the first Sonic gams, so the artist is probably a fan of the old Sonic games. We can see the emotion he gives the character that the games really couldn't convey, by taking that meaning we are given a new outlook on the character we will bring with us the next time we play a classic Sonic game.

Machinima are animated short films created in the 3D virtual environment of a video game by manipulating the game’s engine, its architectural code, and talking control of the characters to make them actors in the movie. These short films are usually distributed via the internet. (Busse, 261) Although they are somewhat unique to video games to their nature of coming from the game itself, they are not completely different than fan videos from other media. Machinimas are usually based around humor rather that drama and often put characters in silly situations or ones that the character is unfamiliar with or point out absurdities inherent in the game world itself in order to draw humor from the situation. By altering and context around the visuals they are able to create new meanings for the game’s visuals. To the right we have a screenshot from the Machinima series Red vs. Blue. Taken from the Halo series, the series takes a humorous look at the behind the scenes antics of two teams of soliders locked in constant warfare. Looking at the image it's easy to see why the group that made this chose the two easy to tell apart bright primary colors of red and blue to make to otherwise identical characters easier to tell apart. This image shows a oppositional reading to the idea that those on the two teams must fight because although the two opposing characters are near each other, they are clearly not shooting at each other.

A screenshot from the Machinima series Red vs. Blue.

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