Ken Thain blogged early last year, tracking mention of the word "machinima" in blog posts via Technorati. I thought I'd take the liberty of following up to see if things are any different this year.
At first, I thought, "Oh, hmm, that doesn't look much different from last year's graph. But then I took a closer look at the Y-axis scale of this year's chart versus last year. Whoa! Similar shape, much different scale. Things started ramping up in July of last year, and have stayed up since then. This while discussions are going on about a great machinima decline? Interesting.
If you think about what was happening at the time of that increase last July, you might come to the same conclusion / theory that I have: unless I'm missing something, I can think of only one person who was likely the major and deliberate catalyst for this increased exposure and discussion.
And no, silly, it wasn't me...
Comments
I've silently observed that things have always been quiet in the year until the festivals start looming closer (Bitfilm is usually the first big event), and things slowly ramp up until it climaxes at the MFF. And then everyone's tired and machinima starts to "die off" again. =P
Yessiree, and let me say, it's been a COOOOOLLLD freakin' winter this year, in that regard. Good to see some signs of life popping up again. It is Spring, after all.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=machinima
That Google trend, is that tracking the frequency of the search term? Very interesting, thanks for that.
Well, it has to grow.
The idea that machinima is dead is crazy talk.
Life is tough on the tip of the spear.
And thanks for the link to the Rooster Teeth Forum, Coyote's comments there is worth reading through some otherwise meandering pap.
Increasing number of Machinima seekers doesn't make it alive. This is like saying some animal species in zoo is live and kicking because they have many visitors. What will make this Machiminus domesticus alive is life outside of closed area of cage, somewhere in live woods where it can be natural part of food chain.
I believe google trends tracks search requests (searches for 'machinima' over time) and also compares to new volume (news items with 'machinima' over time).
Interesting that news volume spiked in 2005.
You can also do silly things like comparisons:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=second+life%2C+world+of+warcraft%2C+machi...
The animal in a zoo analogy does not work, Tom. Machinima confines itself. And while it is not an animal, it IS food. As such, people looking for machinima to eat is a relevant trend and a positive one; without people searching for it (demand), there is no need to maintain supply, and this grandiose democratic distribution vehicle called The Internet ceases to be any kind of advantage to machinima if demand is not present. What people are searching for is what they want.
Hey, Phil, there is one thing (one more thing, he he) I don't understand in all our conversation lately: what really mean "to be alive"? I keep talking about "life" of Machinima as life of animation form, not life of ...let say...extended gaming experience - what is one possible interpretation of increasing numbers on statistic charts. Machinima must grow among movie audience, not game audience to be alive. Maybe I am completely wrong but I cant see this on statistic chart. I want to see, but I don't.
May I ask you something different?
This can sound blasphemous and rude but it isn't, believe me, I am really interesting. You are in Machinima from beginning, excellent theorist and remarkable author, you know the answer: how it is possible that after decent decade of growing, developing, presence in general, Machinima is still term unknown to large movie audience, form not present on larger number of festivals and movie places? Decade?! I know parts of answer; copyrights, some technical disadvantages, but I am still missing some mayor part of answer. You know what decade is in term of popular culture - very, very huge amount of time. Please, share the answer
because then I will be closer to answer to question of all question in Machinima: do we really want to grow up? (my definition of growing up is presence willing to compete and compare with anything anywhere.)
As for stats... those stats represent people, people looking for machinima, by name. That has significance, and testifies to the growing acceptance of the term as a real thing. Your assertion that Google's statistic represents just gamers is wholly unsupported, and makes an even bigger underlying assumption that there is no overlap between gaming audience and movie audience.
As to why it hasn't exploded in popularity, firstly the term "machinima" hasn't been around for a decade, more like seven years since it was first coined, in a community which had - at best - numbers in the low hundreds of people. Compare this to the term "blog", which was indeed coined ten years ago and is only rising to a larger popular awareness in the past two or three years. Or the term "demoscene"... a movement which has been around for twenty years, and you'll find no one uninitiated who knows what it is.
But back to machinima. During that seven years since the term was first coined, awareness HAS been growing. Especially in the past year or so, we've seen more press mention of the term than ever before, in major publications. And while not all of this coverage does it justice, it's coverage. People's awareness IS growing, now more than ever before. In my opinion, it is impossible to be credibly pessimistic about the state of the world's awareness of machinima if one has been paying attention to what has been happening in the past 12 months in particular.
As for why more machinima isn't in major festivals, television, cinemas... it has NOTHING to do with technical limitations, and everything to do with filmmakers not owning their movies. ANY venue which can be considered commercial is off the table if you don't own 100% of your film. That rules out movie theaters and television. I've been approached by two movie theater organizations and seven television stations in the past year, wanting badly to show my material and other films like it... and I can't let them because of the EULA. This is the situation that 99.9% of machinima makers would be in were they approached with similar offers. EVEN IF I STAND TO MAKE NO MONEY MYSELF, the venue is commercial and therefore it is out, or at the least very VERY difficult to get permission. Many have tried, few have succeeded.
It's not a matter of wanting to grow up or not. It's a matter of the fact that if we tear machinima from its roots in order to gain freedom, machinima loses MANY of its advantages regarding production pipeline. If 100% custom content is required, then some are eliminated due to lack of skillset, others due to lack of time. And if one is only doing this for fun anyway (applies to vast majority of machinima makers), then what is one's incentive to make one's job much much harder?
There is no mystery. Machinima has the cement shoes of others' intellectual property rights, and she won't fly as long as she wears them. And many find those shoes comfortable enough to live with, so the number of people working with their pickaxes is a very small number.
Your patience with me is wonderful, Phil. I learned more about Machinima from couple of your answers then from two years of my awareness of Machinima existence.
I admit that I wasn't paying much attention to what has been happening all this time, so consider this my late learning for what I cant thank you enough. I do have serious doubts about couple of things in Machinima world but my ability to articulate this concerns properly is close to non.
Thanks again.
I suspect that open source will be the answer. Linux is getting adopted by Dell. It's only a matter of time before open source machinima platforms allow anyone, anywhere, to put their ideas into motion.
In fact I predict it will lead to such a deluge of machinima that it will become difficult to find the true 'gems' out there.
Case in point - MovieStorm, a new machinima production tool (all the fun of a 'gamey' look but intentionally built for movie making) will be launching later this year. It still remains to be seen for sure, but the production crew has indicated that users will actually own the rights to the movies they create.
With new ability to create (possibly) more professional and polished looking films (that is, no game quirks to deal with as in TS2), there's no telling what kind of doors will be opened for really talented creators. Perhaps most importantly, this new game will potentially bring a whole new level of exposure to machinima. ...Unfortunately, it will likely also, as you suggest bllius, lead to an absolute avalanche of less than stellar productions.
I'm anxious to see how well the game actually comes out (still has some kinks and limits), as well as what happens to the industry in the future. I've often longed for EA to release a similarly dedicated movies-only version of The Sims, so we'll see if this inspires them any...