what is

' MACHINIMA '

?

this term is almost as bad as 'visual culture' as far as defining it concisely
btw i'm not joking what does this mean?

it a movie of a scene in SL.

Actually, the term refers to movies made with games, more or less. They can be funny or seroius, but most of them are silly joke movies made with the game engine, sometimes being satiric and sarcastic in nature. The "Meet the" movies done for Team Fortress 2 are MACHINIMA movies.

See the Wikipost here for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima

Machinima ist the name for movies made in video games.
The name is composed of "machine", "cinema" and "animation"

As the idea has spread, the term has also loosened up somewhat, to include movies made with the same graphics engines as a game, but with entirely redrawn content, sometimes cutting together footage from several different engines, and to allow a fair bit of post-processing, in particular of facial detail and animation.
Fundamentally, it's movies where the (bulk of the) animation is done using a real-time (game)engine, rather than being pre-rendered frame-by-frame in a 3D animation program like, say, Maya.
Some machinima use scripts (in the programming sense) to control the characters, camera and movement, while others use actors controlling the characters in real-time while recording the footage.

SL is well-suited to it because of the ease of building sets and finding suitable animations, straddling the line between using a "pure" game engine and generating new content specifically for one machinima.

Search for Machinima on Youtube. There are thousands of vids and some of them are actually quite good.

it's actually loosened even more in the last year or so, some people even including things like any game trailers (some of which are pre-rendered). thought so far I haven't seen it used for CGI movies/anime, Like FFW... the implication seems more towards shorter content