Well, clearly, I have not been blogging more. Warcraft is still consuming most of my free time at home. So let’s put that to good use. There are several videos on YouTube and Google video of Warcraft game play and strategy videos. These hold interest for players like me but not the general public and certainly not educators. However, there is also Machinima (In an expanded definition, it is the convergence of filmmaking, animation and game development. Machinima is real-world film making techniques applied within an interactive virtual space where characters and events can be either controlled by humans, scripts or artificial intelligence.). What would such a thing look like? Here is an example.
One can also look at Machinima.com and the Machinima FAQ.
For me the above video is an excellent example of Machinima. There are a number of filmmaking techniques visible in this music video and for someone familiar with Warcraft it shows a tremendous amount of understanding of the game world.
Warcraft has over 8 million players and a large number of those players are sitting in our college classrooms. Some of those players are even in film studies courses. In the past we might have asked these students to create a short film by developing and filming a script or adapting an existing scene. Why not move the filming into one of these game worlds? Why not combine something we know students love with something we want them to love and understand? I hope to help some of our faculty to develop projects in this direction which will give some validity to the amount of time I’ve spent playing, at that point it will count as research 🙂
Sometimes I'm an Instructional Technologist and sometimes I'm a Mathematician, but I'm crazy all the time.
