Cardozo Law Professor Susan Crawford gives me an excuse to talk about one of my favorite topics - machinima (Susan Crawford Blog :: Machinima). For those who are unaware, machinima is a media form in which creators use pre-existing 3D engines (typically game engines, such as Unreal) to create new video works. Basically, machinima is a cheap and easy way to make animated movies.
Apparently, Crawford is planning something called "Property Law: The Video Game" and had the whole machinima concept introduced to a bunch of law professors. "Property Law: The Video Game" actually is an intriguing concept. I don't know what Crawford has planned but it will be interesting to see, as we already have property law videogames out there, in a sense, such as EverQuest. Certainly there are both implicit and explicit (not to mention intriguing) notions of property law in games like There and Second Life. Interested in more examples? Check out Virtual Worlds Review. Property Law: The Video Game is worth keeping an eye on, I think.
Back to machinima, however. Honestly, I'm not quite sure how useful this video form will be in law schools. Law is primarily and will, hopefully, remain textual for quite some time. Who wants to watch a video of a document? Sure, you could make machinima reenactments of accidents or crime scenes, but that is fairly trivial. Although ... I do think back to the final exam for one of my torts classes and remember the horrible accident involving Macy's Parade Balloons that was the hypothetical to be analyzed. It would have been very cool to have a machinima version of the accident instead of the paragraphs. Of course, professors will seldom have the desire, time or resources to create such things (many barely have the time to write the traditional page-long hypothetical).