Games and Machinima in Adolescents' Classrooms

Key insights

7 takeaways

01
The study ran during the 2008–2009 school year with roughly 300 students aged 11 to 16 and 17 teachers in Spanish secondary classrooms, using commercial video games and machinima (films produced inside game engines).
02
The authors report no measured learning outcomes; their claim that the approach is effective rests mainly on their own experiential observations as practitioners rather than quantitative evidence.
03
The methodology alternates dialogue, play, and reflection in workshops, culminating in student-made machinima, with the stated aim of generating knowledge for designing game-based learning scenarios.
04
The most developed empirical analysis examines three student-produced machinima videos about the game Spore, interpreted through Sholle and Denski's re-reading, re-mapping, and re-writing framework.
05
Across the three Spore productions, students progressed from recognizing the game's content with little agency, to reflecting on personal choices within the game's rules, and finally to rebuilding the game's content using real-world objects and people.
06
Machinima lets students combine game footage, moving images, text, music, and sound into multimodal communication, which the authors argue heightens awareness of game discourses and builds the capacity to control multiple discourses at once.
07
The authors themselves acknowledge that their claims would benefit from systematic outcome measures to complement their qualitative and experiential grounding.

Summary

This study examines how commercial video games and machinima, films produced inside game engines, can be used in Spanish secondary classrooms to develop new literacies within the curriculum. Conducted during the 2008–2009 school year, the project involved roughly 300 students aged 11 to 16 and 17 teachers. Its theoretical framing draws on participatory culture, synergy-based media education, Gee's concept of powerful literacy, and multimodality, and its central aim is to generate knowledge about designing game-based scenarios for learning. The authors present a methodology of workshops that alternate dialogue, play, and reflection, culminating in student-made machinima, and they argue that it is an effective educational approach.

The evidence offered for this claim is primarily experiential rather than quantitative. The authors report no measured learning outcomes; their conclusion rests on their own observations as practitioners. Their most developed empirical analysis concerns three student-produced machinima videos about the game Spore, interpreted through Sholle and Denski's framework of re-reading, re-mapping, and re-writing. The authors find a progression across the three productions, moving from recognition of the game's content with little sense of agency, to reflection on personal choices within the game's rules, and finally to rebuilding the game's content through real-world objects and people.

Across the study, the authors maintain that combining commercial games with other media can cultivate new literacy skills and a participatory culture that extends learning beyond the classroom. Machinima, in their account, allows students to blend game footage, moving images, text, music, and sound into multimodal communication, which in turn heightens awareness of game discourses and builds the capacity to control multiple discourses at once. The conclusions are supported largely by multimodal literacy and game studies scholarship, and the study's claims would benefit from systematic outcome measures to complement its qualitative and experiential grounding.