Machinima

Miyamoto Musashi was a 16th century Japanese swordsman who was famous for two things - being able to kick anyone's ass at any time with a sword (or scabbard, stick, pole, etc.), and writing the Book of Five Rings. The Book of Five Rings is Musashi's way of conveying his philosophy of swordfighting, and each rings builds on the one before it - discipline, technique, timing, style, and spirit.

The fifth ring of his book is kind of taken on faith. It's more or less interpreted as "once you get really good at something, there are times when everything you do is completely automatic and you sort of watch yourself go through the motions." Musashi uses the terms available to him to describe it, and the chapter is filled with good and evil, but I'm not going to argue with a guy who can kill an entire army naked with only a frozen fish.

There's a level of mastery to every art. When you get incredibly good at something to the point where it happens at the point of decision and requires no further effort, you have mastered it. You might not be the best, but you can perform your practice without question or effort, and that is mastery. Yes, there can be more than one master. It's fun to watch them compete.

I happen to be a master at leveling Horde alts. I know where every quest is, I know what the rewards are, what the best zones are for different levels, what quests are possible to solo at different levels with different classes, and how long all of the stages take. There are a lot of players who complain about slogging through the 'early levels' of a new character, but I find it effortless. I don't even bother to think about what my character is doing until level 20.

Combat rotations can be the same way. Players will practice their ideal rotations against target dummies in major cities, lining up their abilities for easy access with the right keybinds, and measuring when abilities can be fired off based on their haste value. They chart their optimal DPS (damage per second) and practice it. After enough raids it becomes an unconscious cycle. You hear people saying "raids are so boring, I just hit 1, 2, 3, 2, 3," etc.

There are PvP masters also. The arena system in warcraft is a broken, imbalanced ponzi scheme, but at the highest end it does occasionally allow for the very best PvPers to compete against each other. Every player who competes at that highest level knows all of the abilities of their class and how best to use them, and all of the abilities of their opponent and how best to counter them. After thousands of battles the strongest strategies emerge until very little is left aside from the RNG (random number generator) that doles out damage values and decides critical hits.

And after mastery, art is born. Art celebrates things that are; and things really aren't proven to exist until they are known quantities, and measured, tested, refined, and mastered. There is an art in everything that has mastery, and there is a potential for celebration for anything done with excellence. Not everything that is mastered is recognized long enough to be celebrated in art, and when it is it is celebrated with the same media - paint and clay, pencil and stone. But the latest generation of video games has found its own media to celebrate its mastery with.

Machinima is the use of graphics engines used by the games themselves to create movies that celebrate these games. The most simple machinima are the fraps movies of people actually playing the game and recording the action, usually with their favorite song pasted in the background. These are the "lol look at me pwn nubs in ab on my leet rouge lol" movies, mostly. Occasionally there will be a demonstration, or more commonly a boss fight showing a strategy on how to defeat it, but the majority of all the fraps films are lame variations of "I did this thing, here watch."

But machinima has evolved rapidly. Almost as soon as the games were in their hands, people with spare time have wanted to take the pieces apart and make them do things they weren't intended to. The series Red vs. Blue, constructed using Halo had an original run of 100 episodes beginning in 2003, and ran for four years. Episodes were constructed around simple comedic themes and used characters from the game to complete the theater. World of Warcraft has a number of regular machinima artists who contribute works to the public domain for enjoyment, and mix game animation with a number of different sources.

Anyway, Friday's deep thought is this - once upon a time we all played Pac Man and Space Invaders, and we may have even been the best at these games that anyone had ever seen. We could play them with one hand, unconsciously, at a level of mastery so proficient that we were almost felt like we were floating outside our own bodies, watching ourselves play the game. No one plays Pac Man anymore, but that doesn't mean it didn't have its own celebratory art at the time, and even its own breakfast cereal.

Warcraft's time is now, and before you forget that feeling of knowing exactly how to execute your warlock's spell rotation on a Patchwerk fight, or how to level 11-25 in the Barrens, or forget where all of the essential vendors are in the Undercity, celebrate your mastery. Relax for a second in your drive towards epic renown, and enjoy a good piece of Warcraft machinima, while your craft is still relevant.

• The Craft of War: BLIND