Machinima

Beginning in the late 1990s, the rapidly increasing popularity and graphic sophistication of computer games created a spin-off industry of open-source and commercial game-creation engines. With the game engine, savvy gamers could make their own monsters, levels and even entire games in the style of the favorite shooter, such as half life and unreal tournament.
The game engines themselves also when through a rapid evolution to make them more user-friendly for non-programmers; their simplifeid production interfaces tapped into the intricate underlying code of the game without requiring a great deal of technical know-how.
it did not take long for 3D animators, many of whom are also devoted gamers, to realise that game engines also could be used to create animation cinema
This new animation process, dubbed Machinima by its practitioners, employed existing game-creation tools but substituted a predetermined linear story line for a game's typical interactivity and branching action.
The technological adavantages of Machinima are also its artistic dangers. Over-dependence on built-in game scenarios makes for too many Machinima dramas in which moody characters roam dark corridors. But high- quality work is not hard to find for example:
www.strangecompany.org