I think you're looking for machinima. The Wikipedia entry is good.
Red Versus Blue is the most famous one.

I think you're talking about machinama. I don't teach comp any more, but we've touched on them a little in my mass media and new media classes (we usually discuss Red vs. Blue (http://redvsblue.com/) since it combines use the technology for creating more cinematic texts. And one of the animation classes here occasionally has students use the technology for their projects.

Machinima is what these particular FILMS are called, but machinima falls under a more general heading of fan fiction (translated loosely), which falls under the umbrella of particpatory fan cultures (see Henry Jenkins' work at http://web.mit.edu/21fms/www/faculty/henry3/ or his book, Textual Poachers).

I've seen folks use it in comp classes as multimodal textual production, and I've theorized it in my own work as part of what the New London Group (specifically, Gunther Kress) has referred to as DESIGN as opposed to CRITIQUE, the idea being that design is a bit more privileged because it's generally considered to be more cognitively advanced than critique. Critique looks on past production, design produces something new, etc.

I'd also categorize this under digital literacies. See too Constance Steinkuehler's dissertation on MMOGs at https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/web/thesis.html for references on fan culture in videogames.

-Alice

Alice J. Robison
PhD Candidate, Rhetoric & Composition Studies
Founding Member and Researcher, Room 130 and GAPPS
http://labweb.education.wisc.edu/room130
http://www.academiccolab.org/initiatives/gapps.html
University of Wisconsin-Madison

is here.
CultureCat

There's a really interesting variation on machnima coming out soon that looks like it has all sorts of interesting possibilities for making movies, scripting, remixing, and more. Will Wright (of Sims fame) is the architect behind it, and (as before) there's complexity and emergence driving the interaction and development. I've been most interested in seeing how customizable the movies are so that we could make some (for example) on "How to develop your thesis statement" or, better yet, "using the pentad to elaborate ambiguity in complex acts." :-)

The Movies
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http://www.themoviesgame.com/

I'm going to have some students working on these (and some Comic Life and more traditional machinima) in a multimedia writing course next spring. I'm looking forward to learning a lot more about it myself first!

Dave

I'd heard about the movies game a few times. I'm really hoping it'll be one of those games that manages to combine creativity with strategy. You may be familiar with an earlier game that tried to put players in charge of managing a rockband--A Rockstar Ate My Hamster. It was lots of fun, but you couldn't create your own music (only your own titles). There was some options controlling your videos, but I'm not sure if they really affected anything (more or less "reality effects," I assume). Then again, I never managed to beat it...

Actually, The Movies is a Peter Molyneux creation (Syndicate, Black & White, Fable), who Gamespot once called the Orsen Welles of game design.

The game itself is similiar to Will Wright's The Sims series of games in that it is object based, which is to say that the game consists of pre-rendered objects that are placed in scenes/settings, and the characters are directed how to use those objects.

The game might be interesting in a comp class for teaching audience -- creating movies to appeal to certain audience, and discussing what choices are made within certain constraints.

But so you know, for all those anti-Microsoft people out there, the movies are rendered in-game in WMV9 format.