Elder Bitchfest Incoming.
So, whatever happened to Machinima? No, I don’t mean the website Machinima.com, I mean the artform known as Machinima, for which that website took its name.
Okay, I suppose I should take a step back. For all you youngsters out there, what exactly is Machinima? Well, they are videos made using assets from various video games, or made inside of video games themselves. Some famous examples include “Red vs Blue“, Oxhorn’s WoW videos, and so forth.
Anyway, this sort of artform used to be really popular. But over the last 15 years or so, apparently this has dropped into complete obscurity, as far as I can tell. But, why?
Video games are bigger than they have ever been. Youtube and Twitch are massive, with people consuming literally billions of hours of content a month, much of that video game related. So, with that in mind, what happened to Machinima-style content?
Apparently, it just… died.
Look, I know there are folks still making videos of this sort, but I also know this is rather rare. So what the hell happened? It almost appears that the art form started dying off when “World of Warcraft” started their decline with the Cataclysm expansion. Unfortunately, when WoW made occasional resurgences in popularity, Machinima did not.
Well, this really bothers me, if you can’t tell. I used to dabble in Machinima myself, back around 2010-2011 or so, but fell away from it in favor of audio podcasting. Is that perhaps what happened with other such content creators? Not that they all chose to be podcasters, but that perhaps they moved into other art forms that were easier to create, or the next “New Big Thing”?
I really couldn’t say, but it does bother me a lot. Especially when you look at the growth of short-form video content over the last few years, you would think this would be a great format for Machinima style videos. Unfortunately, it is mostly filled with comedy skits and kids dancing.
We need more Oxhorn. Just saying.
