Last semester I wrote a paper titled "One Fish, Two Fish, Red versus Blue Fish" for a new media class. The paper aimed at contextualizing the burgeoning new art form machinima within game studies and new media scholarship. Machinima, as defined in the paper, is: "film-making within the real time 3-D virtual environment of a video game. It's the use of video game graphics technology to create animated films. Machinima combines aspects of film making, animation and game design to transform an interactive medium (a video game) into a production studio complete with sets, props, special effects and virtual actors; and all you need is a video game and desktop computer."
So why write about it here? I contend that machinima can be used as an effective pedagogical tool. More entertaining than a PowerPoint (PPT), more effective than a lecture, an educational machinima video would harness students' passion for pop culture and technology. And, like PPT, machinima is reusable. Once you've created it for a certain lesson, section, or educational enterprise, you don't need to do anything with it unless information changes or you decide a new video game platform may be more fun to deliver the information through. A lot of effort and time goes into creating good machinima -- and thats the key, the video needs to be good -- but the process of production involves playing video games, not hunting google for pictures that fit your PPT theme; besides, a good PPT takes a lot of effort too.
This blog will focus on new media pedagogy, with a focus on machinima as a supplementary and auxilary teaching tool.
I am interested in this tool for teaching. One of the premises is that the instructor is well-versed in their subject matter. I do not think one can take information from a handbook or literature book and transform it into a good machinima. The producer/instructor must "own" the material. He or she needs to have read or worked with several sources of the material and have developed his or her own approach to the material. This may seem obvious to graduate students, but I have seen many teachers just regurgitate what the book says and put it into a PowerPoint or transparency. I hope this tool will not allow teachers to fall into that same trap. SHJ
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