The discussion surrounding DIY seminar talks by Mimi Ito and Howard Rheingold last week raised some compelling questions about how to imagine a non-dichotomized architecture for media creation and circulation (as Julian Bleeker put it in his comments below). DIY is not simply an obscure hobby of media activists and enthusiast, or a phenomenon that exists exclusively in opposition to mainstream production practices. DIY, we seem to agree, is an ethos that is increasingly seeping into the mainstream. And as John Seely Brown pointed out, assumptions about leisure and entertainment might be in the process of shifting by virtue of new production practices associated with DIY.
In JSB and Douglas Thomas’s paper The Play of Imagination: Extending the Literary Mind, they describe what happens when leisure and entertainment combine with learning and imagination in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs).
Here is an excerpt:
“While a traditional “game” remains at the core of MMOGs, the rich social fabric that the game produces blurs many of the boundaries that we tend to expect such as the distinction between the physical and the virtual, the difference between player and avatar, and the distinction between work and play. Further, we argue throughout the essay that the learning that happens in MMOGs is tied to practices, but those practices are not solely the practices of game play or even skills such as resource management. They are, instead, the skills of learning how to use one’s imagination to read across boundaries and be able to find points of convergence and divergence between different worlds to understand their relationships to one another.”
This look at the power of imagination in gaming and its potential role in education offers a good model for how to begin to think about (and create) other media genres and modes of production in the context of the shifting consumer/producer relations.
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Here at Ubicomp 06 in Irvine, it’s interesting to hear the way that the DIY trope is used. DIY, for these mostly youngish (university graduate students, their professors and industry colleagues) seems to be about providing speculative, near-future tools, devices, gadgets, etc., to allow “end users” (no need to get too far into that one in this context) to create their own content. Almost all of the content forms described are media-based (pictures/photos).
What is fascinating to me are the ways you see these near-future designs _assume_ DIY practices from the get-go, with deliberate integration into existing platforms that support various forms of media sharing that could be interpreted as play, or leisure. The potential for other media genres and means of circulating creative cultural forms can often be felt at the fringe edges of artistic and academic research circuits.
For instance, one favorite today is Pileus: The Umbrella Photo Browser to Relay Experiences in Rainy Days, an umbrella that’s a camera and photo browser, integrated with Flickr, one of the more popular photo sharing sites (which started out as the basis of a MMORPG tentatively titled “Game Never Ending.”)
I really appreciate this move towards using the imagination as a construct to understand learning, and away from models of transfer. This helps clarify some of what have been muddling through in some of my own thinking on imagination and gaming. I have been looking at technologies that migrate the imagination off of the desktop and into diverse settings, rather than immersive worlds like MMOGs, but I still found much of conceptual relevance in this piece. I particularly appreciated the shift away from notions of simulation, fidelity and transfer, to notions of metaphor, divergence, and blending. I particularly applaud the critique of theories of learning based on a notion of the virtual as realistic simulation, designed to transfer transparently to real-life experience. The gaming setting I have been looking at, which focus on card games and other portable gaming formats, are very much about this sense of blending between technologically-embodied imaginaries and real life imaginaries and behaviors, not about the direct transfer of “virtual” competencies into “real” ones.
This is particularly provocative when placed in relation to theories of situated learning that have argued that learning happens as an act of participation in communities of practice. The argument that Doug and JSB put forth is that imaginative spaces enable one to be simultaneously situated in different contexts/communities of practice, and this co-habitation is itself a site of learning and conceptual and affective leaps. A more literal reading of situated learning theory would argue that the “imaginative” or conceptual content needs to be tightly integrated with embodied practice. This paper pushes us to think beyond this narrow reading of a situated approach.
Given the foundational conceptual innovations presented in the paper, I was left wondering how much of the dynamics described, such as emergent collective behavior, convergence, divergence, and triggering, was unique to MMOGs. Although there are certainly imaginative affordances that are unique to immersive multiplayer online worlds, many of these dynamics seem equality relevant to traditionally embodied forms of team sport or other group performative contexts that have an element of play or fantasy.
This brings me back to the DIY theme - the mobilization of the imagination in ongoing practice, the blending of readership and authorship, player and character seem central to the kinds of amateur cultural productions that we are trying to explore in this blog and seminar series. I would argue that these practices manifest in MMOGs are one instance of a broad shift towards people increasingly authoring their learning and identities through what Doug and JSB are describing as “blended” spaces - spaces that are deeply engrained in our “real life” identities as well as imaginative and media saturated cultural references. When teens author blogs and myspaces with a bricolage of links, images, and video and audio clips, when younger kids use their collection of Pokemon and Yugioh cards as materializations of their fantasy identities, or when fans remix products of commercial culture to give voice to their personal views on media and fandom, these are all “blended” practices of the imagination as well.
Perhaps the uniqueness of MMOGs is that they rely on a more disjunctive relationship between the “real” and “virtual” contexts, making the triggers more profound and the blending more effortful. My unwillingness to engage with MMOGs is probably tied to this blending challenge, the impossibility of my integrating the imaginaries and practices of MMOGs into the more interstitial and distracted forms of media engagement that characterize my life as a working mother of two young children. Folding laundry or riding the exercise bike while watching my currrent anime series, playing with my Nintendo DS in the few moments between boarding and take-off, helping my son play a Neopets game while cooking dinner are more my media bread and butter these days. I’ll enjoy thinking more about how these ideas of conceptual blending might apply to even my distracted forms of imagining.