Understanding Machinima: Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds :: Call for Papers

Call for submissions to an edited book.
Deadline: August 30, 2010.
This book sounds very interesting. I will submit a paper and encourage others to move on this! /Lisbeth

Here is an excerpt of the call:
Machinima – referring to “filmmaking within a real-time, 3D virtual environment, often using 3D video-game technologies” as well as works which use this animation technique, including videos recorded in computer games or virtual worlds – is challenging the notion of the moving image in numerous media contexts, such as video games, animation, digital cinema and virtual worlds. Machinima’s increasingly dynamic use and construction of images from virtual worlds – appropriated, imported, worked over, re-negotiated, re-configured, re composed – not only confronts the conception and ontology of the recorded moving image, but also blurs the boundaries between contemporary media forms, definitions and aesthetics, converging filmmaking, animation, virtual world and game development.

Even as it poses these theoretical challenges, machinima is expanding as a practice via internet networks and fan-based communities as well as in pedagogical and marketing contexts. In these ways, machinima is also transformative, presenting alternative ways and modes of teaching and commercial promotion, in-game events and, perhaps most significantly, networking cultures and community-building within game, virtual and filmmaking worlds, among others.

Divided into these two sections – machinima (i) in theoretical analysis; and (ii) as practice – this first collection of essays seeks to explore how we can understand machinima in terms of the theoretical challenges it poses as well as its manifestations as a practice. We are primarily concerned with offering critical discussions of its history, theory, aesthetics, media form and social implications, as well as insights into its development and the promise of what it can become.

More info on the book themes and the deadlines for submission.