[DIY Media] DIY and new ways to play

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.