Introduction and conclusion, first draft

Introduction

State Subject

Machinima, the user-centered production of video presentations using pre-rendered animated content, as generated from video games, have been used in various capacities for the past several years.

Background

Machinima has been used in various capacities since the beginning of video game communities. By taking video game content and modifying or remediating that content to serve a different purpose, members of the gaming community have been able to recount their in-game exploits or build entirely new creative projects with limited resources. Game developers also use their own game engines to build gameplay movies, often in order to develop the plot of the game’s narrative or to reward the player for progress through the game.

Video game advertising also uses in-game graphics, including both still images and video content, to advertise the various aspects of a game.

Identify purpose

Since machinima exists as a critical part of the gamer community, and has broken into larger media markets, the need to understand what decisions machinima producers make and why they make those decisions is important to understand. The purpose of this thesis proposal is to examine machinima projects as participation within a discourse community by remediating existing intellectual property for new ends.

Main point

It is my belief that machinima provides an important piece of the gamer discourse community and serves as persuasive argumentation devices for the audiences they address. This thesis proposal will build a case to support this belief.

Importance

In order to best examine evolving discourse communities, especially those of the latest generation of communicators, it is important to understand the emergence of machinima and the means by which machinima producers build their arguments.

Forecast

This proposal will briefly outline the research which has been conducted in new media, with as much of a focus on machinima and user generated content as possible. I will then lay out my plan for building my own rhetorical analysis of machinima as they participate within discourse communities. Finally, I will demonstrate the importance of machinima as a rhetorical mode of discourse by describing my plan to produce a machinima in accordance with the rhetorical theories I will be examining and applying.

Conclusion

Transition from body

In conclusion, this proposal has laid out a clear picture of what research has been done so far into machinima as participation within a discourse community. By demonstrating the gap in the current literature, I have also built the case for further research into this genre, especially using the structure of a rhetorical analysis.

Benefits

By conducting such an analysis, both the academic and gamer cultures will benefit. Academia will gain insight into the possible application of existing rhetorical theories to modern media practices, which should provide incentive to conduct further investigations into other genres of new media. Gamers will benefit from opening their community to academic investigation by earning a kind of academic legitimacy. This may also help further the study of new media by getting gamers interested in taking their work further than simply posting YouTube videos of their courageous endeavors.

Look to the Future

By proving that the examination of user-generated machinima projects is a viable avenue of rhetorical study, it is possible that further research into the genre will help further develop machinima into a viable pedagogical or expository tool. It is entirely likely that students will be able to express their creative inquiries using machinima projects due to their low cost of production and the inherent freedom to create almost anything. Additionally, by understanding the machinima project’s rhetorical structure, the potential for using machinima to describe new thoughts and ideas more effectively than with other forms of media is all but limitless. After all, through what other mode can an environmental scholar demonstrate the effects of global warming or a nuclear incident more effectively than with an animated tour through a devastated wasteland?