Videogames and Art, pt. 1

I've enjoyed reading this book, so far. There are plenty of important and interesting concepts on whether or not videogames themselves are art. This, however, does not interest me. What interests me most, especially with regards to the art of videogames, is the art that the player makes using the game as his medium, as a sculptor shapes clay. My primary research interest at this time is in machinima, which recieves a little attention in this book but very little anywhere else.

Lowood's chapter on the history of machinima, as well as Cannon's chapter "Meltdown," both address the act of creating machinima. Lowood explains how machinima came into being, and how the availability of tools, such as Quake's dynamic floating camera, made machinima possible. These procedural choices (rhetorical choices, really) allow gamers the technical freedom to remediate the game technology into their own designs. Cannon suggests that the films that arise from machinima projects fit into the communicative niche of "narrative" or "temporal wallpaper." I think that this is a bit short-sighted, especially given the variety of commercially and independently produced machinima which address a number of topics for a variety of reasons. I would argue that Cannon's genres of machinima are much too general, while a different, more specific classification system would work better to help legitimize the machinima production itself. Perhaps its merely a matter of semantics, but by addressing the many uses of machinima, narrative and abstract, this artistic style would draw more attention from the academic public at large. For example, I delineate three basic genres of "narrative" machinima: industrial-produced instructional videos, commercial entertainment, and user-generated entertainment. Of course there are many other genres out there one could delineate, but these are the three that interest me most and are mentioned most thoroughly in my research.

Questions:
1) Is there a distinction between creating artistic videogame mods and creating machinima? What is that distinction?