312 Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age saving is only allowed at certain points as the game progresses. Some games allow sharing saved games. Nevertheless, with most of today’s games often being extremely complex and time-consuming, saving the games is a necessity. In this respect, saved games are a valuable form of personal content – many hours of playing may be lost in cases where a saved game is corrupted or lost. Game movies are recorded live gaming sessions. There are two options for creating game movies: either an external screen capture application is used, or the game has built-in functionality to record events, effectively providing an accurate reproduction of the played game. Furthermore, some games, such as Sims, provide only a still image capturing capability for recording. There are many uses for game movies. Obviously, they act as proof of achievement. Another application for game movies is ghosting, often exploited in car racing games. In ghosting, a previous game session of a player is displayed on the screen as a ghost car, allowing guiding or competing against oneself. Closely related to saved games and game movies are walkthroughs. They are accurate textual documents, often accompanied with screen- shots, explaining the actions and tricks needed to complete a section of a game, or the whole game. Game movies are one form of providing these guides. An interesting phenomenon related to game movies is machinima, 29 which refers to using the game engine for making movies. In other words, it is about shooting fi lms in virtual reality. Machinima has become immensely popular during the past few years. The movies vary from short clips to nearly full-length movies, from science fi ction and horror titles to funny stories about the games the fi lm was developed with. Somewhere in between implicit and explicit content, lie in-game messages, messages sent to other players from within the game, while playing the game. In-game messages are obviously explicitly created, yet their relation to the game varies. Nevertheless, messages add to the social aspect of multi-player games. Many games allow the user to defi ne their play character, that is, its personality, strengths, and weaknesses. A game character is a step towards explicitly created game content. Similarly to characters, other game items can be created. A recent example of crafting game char- acters and game items can be found in World of Warcraft. However, user-created content has played an important role in much earlier 29 http://www.machinima.com