

Virtual acting is less expensive, dangerous, and physically restricted than live action.

Its real-time nature favors speed, cost saving, and flexibility over the higher quality of pre-rendered computer animation. Its relative simplicity over traditional frame-based animation limits control and range of expression. Machinima has advantages and disadvantages when compared to other styles of filmmaking. After this generalization, machinima appeared in mainstream media, including television series and advertisements. The more general term machinima, a blend of machine and cinema, arose when the concept spread beyond the Quake series to other games and software.

The addition of storylines to these films created " Quake movies". Originally, these recordings documented speedruns-attempts to complete a level as quickly as possible-and multiplayer matches. The practice of using graphics engines from video games arose from the animated software introductions of the 1980s demoscene, Disney Interactive Studios' 1992 video game Stunt Island, and 1990s recordings of gameplay in first-person shooter (FPS) video games, such as id Software's Doom and Quake. For game studies, "Machinima’s gestures grant access to gaming's historical conditions of possibility and how machinima offers links to a comparative horizon that informs, changes, and fully participates in videogame culture." Machinima offers to provide an archive of gaming performance and access to the look and feel of software and hardware that may already have become obsolete or even unavailable.

Machinima-based artists, sometimes called machinimists or machinimators, are often fan laborers, by virtue of their re-use of copyrighted materials (see below). Most often, video games are used to generate the computer animation. Machinima, originally machinema ( / m ə ˈ ʃ iː n ɪ m ə, - ˈ ʃ ɪ n-/) is the use of real-time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production.
