This study deals with issues of control over the production and distribution of player-produced creative material in and around the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft, played by millions around the world. The particular form of creative material investigated here is known as “machinima”, which can be described as a combination of film-making techniques, animation production and game engine manipulation. The creative productions under discussion in this case study display free rather than instrumental play in its most outspoken form: players do not play the game to beat its goal-oriented content, but instead seek ways to expand or in other ways manipulate the fictional world, or try to find the edges of what is possible in the game's design in terms of the coded rules and boundaries. These productions do not always conform to what the designers – and other players – consider acceptable forms of appropriation of the virtual world and its fiction. It makes this case study as much a discussion on fan creation as one on game design exploitation, both of which can lead to creative and in some cases legal differences between players and World of Warcraft's developer, Blizzard Entertainment.

Looking the other way

As a stakeholder directly benefiting from a committed and involved gamer community (active players stick to a game longer, which means larger revenue), Blizzard is well-known for nurturing player creativity. The company has set up a fan sites programme, which brings out reports on community news and playerorganized events and hosts many examples of fan art on their official site alongside its own artwork. Throughout the years, they have also hosted fan fiction and art contests, some of which were oriented towards machinima films. The way Blizzard promotes machinima film-making has nevertheless remained somewhat vague in terms of the affordances players are allowed.

Even though many machinima and other non-fiction player-created videos (like recordings of raids, player-versus-player action or walk-throughs) have been around since and well before World of Warcraft's release in 2004, Blizzard published their first official endorsement information dedicated to making machinima only in September 2007.